VOLUME I • ISSUE NO. 4

A TRIBE OF KARENS AND A MAN WHO FULFILLED THEIR PROPHECY

In 1813, a pioneering missionary named Adoniram Judson packed his bags and landed in Burma with a rock-solid, highly intellectual strategy. He had his eyes locked on the elite class. He spent his days debating brilliant monks and meticulously translating scriptures into Burmese.

His grand plan? Win the upper-class city folk, and let the faith trickle down.

Instead, he hit a painful, decades-long season of slow progress. By 1828, fifteen grueling years into his mission, Judson had endured severe illness, devastating grief from the loss of family members, and a horrific 18-month imprisonment with death all around him. For all that unimaginable sacrifice, he had won only a handful of converts. If Judson had been tracking his life through modern analytics, he would have assumed he misheard God entirely. He was fully on mission, but the immediate results looked insignificant.

What Judson didn't know was that God was preparing something far greater than he could see. While Judson was weeping over the cities, God was cultivating a harvest in the mountainous jungles through a despised tribe called the KAREN people.

Many among the Burmese majority looked down upon the Karen as uncivilized jungle-dwellers and often marginalized or exploited them. The Karen practiced forms of animism, believing the natural world was alive with spirits. They lived a fearful, exhausting existence, constantly trying to please or appease the spiritual forces they believed inhabited every tree, river, rock, and mountain.

Judson had little idea how significant the Karen people would become in God's plan. And he certainly didn't know their secret.

For generations, the Karen had preserved a legend about a single Creator-God they called Y'wa who was above the countless spirits they feared. The story told of a future day when a messenger from across the sea would bring back a lost sacred book their ancestors had once possessed.

But Judson wouldn't discover this through a grand strategic meeting. He discovered it through a messy investment in one broken soul.

Enter Ko Tha Byu.

He was an illiterate Karen slave who was brought into the orbit of Judson's ministry. To put it mildly, Ko Tha Byu was a total wreck. He had a diabolical temper and was known for his violent past, with accounts claiming he had been involved in multiple killings. He was the absolute last person anyone would choose for a global evangelism campaign. In fact, some local believers initially doubted his conversion because they didn't think a Karen man with such a notorious reputation was capable of real transformation.

But Judson chose to see him differently. He patiently poured into Ko Tha Byu, who eventually learned to read using Judson's Burmese Bible translation.

The moment Ko Tha Byu's spiritual eyes were opened, he recognized something familiar in its pages. The Creator. The truth. The message his people had been longing for.

He didn't wait for permission or a formal ordination. He ran straight into the jungle mountains to tell his people that the long-awaited message had finally arrived.

What happened next was extraordinary. The Karen people didn't need to be argued into the Kingdom; their hearts and culture had been prepared in ways no missionary could have anticipated. As the Gospel spread among the Karen, a remarkable revival began to take root.

When Judson first boarded that ship in 1813, he was hoping to translate the Bible into Burmese and see a church of 100 believers established before he died.

Instead, God used his faithfulness to help plant more than 100 churches, reach thousands of believers, and spark a movement that continues to bear fruit nearly two centuries later.

Today, the Karen remain one of the largest Christian populations in Southeast Asia with over 2 million. A people once known for limited access to education and little social influence now count among their ranks educators, physicians, pastors, authors, business leaders, and university graduates around the world because of the good news and a prophecy fulfilled, and a man who wouldn't give up.

So this week, when your prayers seem to bounce off the ceiling, your hard work goes completely unnoticed, and you feel a major urge to march up to the counter and speak to the Manager of the Universe about your lack of immediate results, take a deep breath, open your spiritual eyes and adjust your lens in this season of vision called Tammuz.

You have absolutely no idea what kind of breakthrough the Holy Spirit is setting into motion just outside your line of physical sight.

Refuse to give up on the process, and stay completely locked on the mission. Keep planting. Keep investing in the one broken soul right in front of you, and let God finish writing the rest of your story better than you ever could.

Until next Tuesday, may your blessings be double and your burdens be light.

Michelle Driscoll