Hudson Taylor and the Letter That Changed Everything

In 1869, after years of pioneering missionary work across China — founding the China Inland Mission, opening inland provinces to the gospel, watching hundreds come to faith — Hudson Taylor collapsed. Not from a single blow, but from the slow hemorrhage of carrying an impossible burden. He wrote to his mother confessing an overwhelming "sense of failure" and a spiritual thirst nothing could satisfy.

Here was the most celebrated missionary of his generation, sitting in his room in Zhenjiang, wishing he could simply stop. Not unlike Elijah slumping beneath a broom tree after his triumph on Mount Carmel, begging the Almighty to take his life.

Taylor's renewal did not arrive through a dramatic vision or a thundering revival. It came through a quiet letter from fellow missionary John McCarthy, who wrote about resting in Christ rather than striving for Him. Taylor described reading those words: "As I read, I saw it all. I looked to Jesus, and when I saw — oh, how joy flowed!"

God did not meet Taylor in the earthquake of his circumstances or the fire of his anxiety. El Shaddai came in a whisper — a few handwritten lines on a page.

When Elijah stood at the mouth of that cave, God was not in the wind, not in the earthquake, not in the fire. He spoke in the still, small voice. Sometimes our deepest renewal begins not with something spectacular, but with God quietly reaching us in the very place we have collapsed.