Great Expectations, Costly Attempts

In the eighteenth century there lived a poor English shoemaker who could mend a boot and read a map of the world at the same time. His name was William Carey, and over his cobbler's bench he hung a homemade map of the continents, marking the peoples who had never heard the name of Christ. He had little money, little schooling, and almost no encouragement. Many Protestants of his day had grown comfortable and quiet, content to believe that if God wished to save distant nations, God would do it without them. Carey could not rest in that. He taught himself languages while pulling leather. He read voyages while the world dismissed him. And in 1792 he wrote a small book with an enormous burden, arguing that the command of Christ to make disciples of all nations still bound the church. Around that same time came the words remembered ever after: expect great things from God, attempt great things for God.

So in 1793 he sailed for Bengal. And here is where the missionary poster falls away and the real story begins. The work was slow, and it was bitter. Years passed before he saw a single convert. Money ran short, and to survive he laboured in an indigo factory by day and bent over grammars by night. His son died. And his wife, Dorothy, who had never wanted to leave England, sank into deep mental distress in a strange land far from home. Picture the man. A father grieving, a husband watching his wife suffer in ways he could not heal, a preacher with no fruit, hunched over a printing press, learning words letter by letter so that Scripture might speak Bengali, then Sanskrit, then Marathi. There were no crowds. No triumph. Only grief, and grammar, and the slow, patient handling of words.

He did not do it alone, and he never claimed to. At Serampore he joined Joshua Marshman and William Ward, and around them worked Indian scholars, teachers, printers, and translators whose names the West too often forgot. Together they translated and printed Scripture into language after language. They founded schools. They confronted practices that crushed the vulnerable, the burning of widows and the killing of infants, standing with Indian reformers who longed for the same change. When fire swept through the Serampore printing house one terrible night and years of manuscripts turned to ash, Carey did not give up. He began again. He set the type once more, word by patient word.

And he must never be remembered as the man who carried God to India. India was ancient long before any European ship appeared, rich in language and faith, and Christians had worshipped there for centuries among the communities that traced themselves to the apostle Thomas. God's love for that land did not begin with William Carey. What Carey gave was something smaller and truer. He gave the years. He gave debt and bereavement and disagreement and the unglamorous labour of learning words accurately enough to hold Scripture with care.

William Carey died in 1834, after more than forty years in India, having buried family and friends in its soil. He left behind translations, schools, a vast movement of mission that followed in his steps, and a public conscience for the forgotten and the harmed. His was not the clean life of a hero on a poster. It was the worn life of a servant who confused vision with fantasy in no one's telling but his own. He had once asked the church to expect great things and attempt great things. He had learned, in tents and altars and graves like Abraham before him, that those words only ring true when they are joined to love for the actual people in front of you. The cobbler who hung a map above his bench never stopped believing that God had not forgotten the nations. And the nations have not forgotten him.