Carey's Bible translations
40 years, 40 languages
The press at Serampore is running almost continuously.
Carey and his colleagues — Joshua Marshman and William Ward, known together as the Serampore Trio — have established a printing operation that is doing something never attempted in India: producing the Bible in the languages of the subcontinent.
The labor is staggering. Bengali first. Then Sanskrit. Then Marathi, then Oriya, then Hindi, then Punjabi. Each language requires learning a new script, finding compositors who can set the type, proofing against the manuscripts, correcting for theological vocabulary that does not yet exist in the target language.
In 1812 a fire destroys the printshop. Carey is in Calcutta when it happens. He returns to Serampore to find years of work in ashes — irreplaceable manuscripts, unique typefaces, months of typesetting gone.
He begins again the next morning.
The fire is a test of what the work is built on. If it is built on human achievement — the pride of accomplishment, the accumulation of results — the fire destroys it. If it is built on obedience — the daily choice to do the work because it is right regardless of the outcome — the fire only clears the ground for more.
Carey begins again. By the time he dies he has produced complete or partial translations in forty languages and dialects.
The printshop burned. The word did not.
“There is a gold mine here, and it is as deep as the center of the earth. I am not at all afraid of want of materials.”
— William Carey, after the fire, 1812 AD
“The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God shall stand forever.”
The printshop burned and Carey began again the next morning.
Not after a period of grief and recovery and reassessment. The next morning.
This is not the absence of grief. It is the presence of something that grief cannot finally stop — the conviction that the work is worth doing regardless of what happens to what has been done, because the work is obedience and obedience is not contingent on outcomes.
The word of God stands forever. The manuscripts burned. The word did not.
What has burned in your life — what loss has taken years of work, investment, building? And what would it mean to begin again the next morning, not because the loss didn't matter, but because the work is still worth doing?