Wait for It!

Last year, I met Adoniram Judson. Not, of course, the Adoniram Judson, famous missionary to Burma (which is now the nation of Myanmar) in the early 1800s who didn’t have one convert until his seventh year of service there. Not that Adoniram, but an Adoniram for my day. His story touched me profoundly. I will refer to him as Adam.

Typically, when you hear mission speakers, they tell you inspirational story after story of amazing ways they’ve seen God at work in their midst: people coming to Christ, masses being baptized, dancing on mountaintops of spiritual experiences.

Adam said when we hear those stories, we should rejoice. He also said for every mountaintop, there are usually weeks, months, or many years leading up to that mountaintop when you are stuck in the valley. Those are years of prayer, struggle, tears, rejection, and hardship that you have to pass through in order to see the grace of God.

Adam and his family worked with an unreached people group in Asia. They did two years of language study that was anything but easy. Finally, they were so excited to be on a full-time basis with their people group. They went out and met people and made new friends. They traveled by bus, motorcycle, boat, and even on horseback. They helped people plow fields and plant rice just to earn the right to share about Jesus.

At first when they were rejected, they were OK with that because they were new to the field. But after a few months of rejection, Adam got discouraged.

He said, “After years of sharing the gospel and being rejected over and over, and over and over, and over and over again, I started to lose steam more and more with each rejection. I mean, when we came out of language school, we went hard. We prayed hard. Yet there was absolutely no fruit whatsoever. And we did this for six long years. I was unraveling under my skin. I was such a mix of sad and angry that I can’t even describe it to you.

“I’m going to tell you the truth. It got hard for me to pray and to actually believe when I shared the gospel that something was going to happen. It got hard for me to go out in faith. I would switch back and forth blaming myself and then blaming God. Can God really use me? Am I even sharing the right gospel here? Because surely the real gospel would have the power to just change these people,” Adam added.

Finally, after seven painful years, Adam shared the gospel with someone from the people group he and his family were serving, and a couple came to faith. Next month, I will share how that happened.