Do storms frighten you? How about students?
God has an amazing ability to use both students and storms. In Luke 8:22-25 Jesus uses a storm to teach his disciples (who were students of a sort) an important lesson about who Jesus really is.
Martin Luther (whose 95 Theses helped inspire the Protestant Reformation) was a law student on his way home for Spring Break when he was caught in a deadly thunderstorm that convinced him to commit his life to the priesthood.
Nearly three hundred years after Luther, Adoniram Judson and some of his seminary student friends were caught in a rainstorm and sought shelter in a barn. During this “Haystack Meeting” he and his friends shared their concerns for international missions and prayed to be sent overseas.
These potential missionaries faced a huge logistical problem: there was no American mission agency to send them. Judson and friends worked with the Congregational Church in New England to create the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Formed in 1810, it was the first international mission agency in the United States. Two years later, Judson and his new wife Ann were on their way to India.
During their voyage the Judsons argued. Although it is not uncommon for newly married couples to argue, the subject matter of Adoniram and Ann’s argument was unique. The couple fought over the correct method of baptism. Adoniram became convinced that the Congregational method (infant baptism) did not represent the New Testament method, and instead he, his wife, and his friend Luther Rice should become Baptists (who practiced believer’s baptism). The problem: they were sponsored by Congregationalists. By the time their ship reached India, Adoniram succeeded in convincing his traveling companions of the need for change. Upon arrival in India, Judson sent his friend Rice on a return trip to American to deliver a resignation letter to the Congregationalists and to create missions support from the Baptists. Rice was successful on both counts, and a new American mission agency was born.
The next stop for the now-Baptist Judsons was Burma. At the beginning of the 19th century Burma contained almost no Christians, with Buddhism and animism as the dominant religions. By the end of Adoniram’s life (Ann died several years earlier) both America and Burma were changed by his work. He left behind two American mission societies (that served as a model for later international mission agencies), a Burmese translation of the New Testament, 63 Burmese churches, and the pioneering of protestant mission work in Southeast Asia.
Few parents of teenage or college students would argue that students and storms are unlike. Like storms, students are highly energetic. Sometimes they are noisy. Sometimes they are chaotic. That’s not all bad. Students’ noise and chaos provide the raw material for the work of our Providential God. Both Old and New Testaments make clear that God is in the business of bringing Order from Chaos. Perhaps that is why He is so fond of using both students and storms.
