The Journey Pen: In the Jungle with a Rat Eating Tribe

Heather and I went on a guided hike through the jungle and spent a night in a small tribal Karen village. Life was certainly different. Every house had their own pig, there were buffalo in the road, and the men went to hunt rats for dinner.

This village was also surprisingly Christian. One man I met saw me looking at a cross that a young Karen girl was wearing and asked if I was a Christian. I told him I was. This surprised him and he got excited and embarrassed our tour guide by asking the other foreigners if they were Christians too. Our Thai guide interestingly defined Christians as those that are not afraid of the spirits. Fear of the spirit world is so central to Thai culture that they can’t fathom life without that fear.

I would like to share with you the story of the Karen people. I hope it is as powerful for you as it has been for me. I draw the story from three books Eternity in their Hearts, To the Golden Shore: The Life of Adonirum Judson, and The Karen Apostle.

The Karen had a powerful and unifying folk religion. They believed there was only one God who was omnipotent and omniscient and who warned about the sins of idolatry. For centuries the inhabitants of Burma and Thailand attempted to convert them to Buddhism but were without success. Since they refused Buddhism the Burmese in particular abused them, exploited them, and killed them. The Karen believed the suffering was due to their transgressions but they still trusted that God would have mercy upon them. Around the campfires at night the men would share tales about the one and only God. A favourite was a prophecy that spoke of God sending a white man who would bring God’s book, a book that would set the Karen free. The Karen had no books and no written language but they spent their lives waiting for the first missionary who dared to enter the jungle with a Bible. It was like an 800,000 person welcome party.*

In 1817, the American missionary Adonirum Judson disembarked in Burma. He carefully learned the Burmese language, dressed like a monk and spoke about the Gospel, yet he received zero response from the Buddhist Burmese. He had so much time on his hands he managed to translate the entire Bible into Burmese. Then one day a Karen man named Ko Thah-byu who spoke Burmese asked Judson for a job. Judson hired him but I doubt he knew he’d hired a notorious robber with ferocious temper that had already murdered around thirty people. Not surprisingly, Ko Thah-byu turned out to be a real problem. Yet after some time the white missionary’s book caught his attention. He began to ask questions about the Bible. He then shocked Judson and the other missionaries by totally preoccupying himself with learning written Burmese so he could read Judson’s translation of the Bible. He knew he was the first Karen to learn that the ‘lost book’ had arrived and he saw it as his responsibility to tell the Karen. He was baptized and went from village to village spreading the Gospel. Many believed and went as missionaries among their own people. When missionaries first made it to a town called Bassein, 300 miles from where Ko Thah-byu was preaching, they found 5,000 Karen Christians waiting to be baptized. In roughly two decades the Karen became a primarily Christian tribe. Nearly two hundred years there are tens of thousands of Karen believers. (Operation World.com)

*The first recorded European encounter with the Karen is recorded in the An Account of an Embassy to the kingdom of Eva by Michael Smyes who calls them Carian. It was written in 1795 before the Karen heard the Gospel and on page 206, the 3^rd last page of the online pdf it describes a people that admit their knowledge of God is incomplete because they don’t have God’s book.

http://www.soas.ac.uk/sbbr/editions/file64414.pdf