Few people can keep working for fourteen years without seeing any visible result. James Gilmour lived through that trial in the middle of the Gobi Desert, among a people who barely knew his name, and he did not give up.
Born in 1843 near Glasgow, Scotland, he graduated from the University of Glasgow and was converted while still young. Ordained in 1870 by the London Missionary Society, he sailed out to reopen a mission among the Mongols that had been abandoned by earlier missionaries decades before.
He settled in Peking, but spent his summers traveling across the steppes and the desert, sleeping in tents beside nomadic herdsmen. He learned the Mongolian language in a little over a year and lived on a few cents a day.
Without hospitals or sophisticated medicine, he offered simple treatments to those suffering from common ailments. It was through this, more than through direct preaching, that he gradually won the trust of a people wary of foreigners.
He walked on foot to save the cost of camels and would even dress as a mendicant lama to draw closer to the Mongols. Not everyone in his own mission in Peking supported such near exclusive devotion to the nomads, and some colleagues even questioned whether such austerity was undermining his own health.
In 1874 he married Emily Prankard, and they had three sons. In 1885 she died, leaving the boys young; the two eldest were sent to be raised by their grandparents in Scotland, and the youngest, Alexander, would die as a child two years later. Gilmour carried on the work alone, facing stretches of loneliness so intense that, in letters and diaries, he recorded moments of deep despair.
Only in 1884, after fourteen years without a single convert, did a Mongol named Boyinto confess faith in Christ inside a smoky tent. Gilmour described that moment as the most beautiful of his whole life. It would, however, be the only Mongol convert he would see in his lifetime.
He died of typhus in 1891, at forty seven, in Tianjin. He left behind one book published in his lifetime and two others compiled after his death from his diaries and letters, which opened up to the West the everyday and spiritual life of Mongolia’s nomads.
His story is a reminder that faithfulness is not measured by immediate fruit. Those who serve today in difficult fields, without quick conversions, find in Gilmour an example of perseverance sustained by faith, not by results.