Adoniram Judson in a Burmese prison
Seventeen months in a Burmese prison
Adoniram Judson has been in Burma for twelve years and has baptized eighteen converts when he is arrested in 1824 as a suspected British spy during the Anglo-Burmese War.
He is imprisoned in the death prison at Ava — a bamboo structure where prisoners are shackled at night with their feet suspended from poles, bodies on the filthy floor. He spends seventeen months there. His wife Ann makes the journey to Ava repeatedly, bribing guards, bringing food, advocating desperately for his release.
Ann dies in 1826, several months after Judson is released. Their infant daughter Maria dies six months later.
Judson goes into a period of depression and spiritual crisis so severe that he withdraws from society, digs a grave in the jungle, and sits beside it for days, contemplating death. He calls this period his dark night of the soul.
He eventually emerges. He marries again. He continues translating the Bible into Burmese. He goes back to preaching.
When he dies in 1850, there are sixty-three Burmese churches and over seven thousand Christians in Burma. The Burmese Bible he completed — twelve years of translation work — is still in use today.
The prison, the deaths, the dark grave in the jungle — all of it is in the Burma Bible.
“The future is as bright as the promises of God.”
— Adoniram Judson, attributed, c. 1830s AD
“Remember my affliction and my misery, the wormwood and the gall. My soul still remembers them, and is bowed down within me. This I recall to my mind; therefore have I hope. It is of the LORD's lovingkindnesses that we are not consumed, because his compassion doesn't fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.”
The future is as bright as the promises of God.
Judson said this from inside a life that included seventeen months in a death prison, the deaths of his wife and infant daughter, and a period of such profound depression that he dug his own grave and sat beside it.
The brightness is not the brightness of someone who has been spared the dark. It is the brightness of someone who has been through the dark and found that the promises of God were still true on the other side.
That is the only brightness worth having — not the brightness of easy faith, untested, unscathed, but the brightness of faith that has been through the night and arrived at a morning it did not manufacture.
How bright is your future? And is it bright because life is easy, or because the promises are real?