Daily Verse
Monday, June 15, 2026
Perseverance
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Monday's Reflection
Galatians 6:9 — And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.
Adoniram Judson arrived in Burma in 1813 as one of America's first foreign missionaries. He was twenty-five years old. What followed was one of the most punishing missionary lives in recorded history. He spent the first six years without a single Burmese convert. His wife Ann became gravely ill repeatedly. Their first child died. In 1824 when war broke out between Burma and Britain, Judson was arrested as a suspected British spy. He was imprisoned for seventeen months in appalling conditions — chained, deprived of sleep, held in brutal heat, his feet periodically suspended from a bamboo pole so that only his shoulders touched the ground. Ann came to the prison gates daily, bringing food and negotiating desperately for his release. She died eight months after he was freed, worn out by disease and grief. Their daughter Maria died six months after Ann.
Judson had gone to Burma to translate the Bible into Burmese. He kept working. Through the imprisonment, through the deaths, through the years when nothing seemed to grow. When he died in 1850, there were one hundred Burmese churches and thousands of believers. His translation of the Bible into Burmese still stands as the standard Burmese Bible today. In those seventeen months in prison, he had buried the manuscript translation in the dirt to keep it safe — and when he was released, he dug it up and kept working.
Paul's instruction not to grow weary in well doing is not a command for people who are comfortable. It is a command for people who have been working faithfully for a long time and have very little visible to show for it. The promise is in the phrase "in due season" — not in your season, not on your timeline, but in God's. Judson's due season came thirty years in. The harvest was real. The waiting was worth it.
Prayer: Lord, for those of us who are weary and wondering if the work matters — remind us of Judson. Remind us that the due season is coming. Help us to not faint. Amen.