The first modern missionary

Carey arrives in Bengal in 1793 after a five-month voyage with his wife Dorothy and four children. Dorothy has come reluctantly — she was resistant to the whole enterprise and initially refused to go. She arrives in India in a fragile state and will spend the rest of her life deteriorating, dying mentally ill in 1807.

This is the part of Carey's story that hagiography tends to skip: the cost was not only his.

He spends seven years working without a single convert. He works as a manager of an indigo plantation to support the family. He preaches. He learns Bengali, Sanskrit, and Marathi. He begins translating the Bible into Bengali.

In 1800 the first Bengali convert is baptized. The flow begins slowly and then faster. By the time Carey dies in 1834, he and his colleagues at Serampore have translated the Bible into six languages and portions of it into twenty-nine more. They have founded schools and colleges. They have printed the first Bengali newspaper. They have campaigned successfully, with the help of William Wilberforce, for the abolition of sati — the practice of burning widows on their husbands' funeral pyres.

Carey's famous deathbed instruction to a younger missionary: When I am gone, say nothing about Dr. Carey. Speak about Dr. Carey's Savior.

Seven years without a single convert.

Carey planted, translated, preached, learned languages, raised his deteriorating family, and saw nothing for seven years. By every visible measure, the mission was failing.

He did not give up. In due season the reaping came — not immediately, not when he expected, but it came.

The missionary movement he helped launch has produced hundreds of millions of Christians across Asia, Africa, and the Pacific. The Bengali Bible he translated is still in use.

Seven years. Then a lifetime of fruit.

What seven-year season are you in? And what does faithfulness look like when the reaping is not yet visible?