Gospel cyclone

After Adoniram Judson went to Burma, neither would be the same | Andrée Seu

The cyclone that hit Burma earlier this month brings to mind the story of Adoniram Judson, who around 1808 was studying at Andover seminary in Massachusetts when he read Puritan Thomas Boston and glowed hot for Christ.

If you sense a call to missions, and there's no mission board to send you, what do you do? You find friends and start one yourself. Congregationalists liked Judson. And Judson liked a girl named Ann, and asked for her hand in marriage, by a letter pretty much promising her father that he would "see her no more in this world."

Moreover, he told the old man, his daughter would know "the hardships and sufferings of missionary life, . . . exposure to the dangers of the ocean, to the fatal influence of the climate of India, to every kind of want and distress, to degradation, insult, persecution, and perhaps a violent death." The father consented, and so did Ann.