The Criminal from the Karen Hills Nobody Expected God to Use

In 1828, missionary Adoniram Judson purchased the freedom of a Burmese slave named Ko Tha Byu. The man was a former bandit from the Karen hill tribe — a people so despised in Burma that the lowland Burmese considered them barely human. Ko Tha Byu himself admitted to at least thirty murders. When Judson brought him into the mission compound, fellow workers shook their heads. Can anything good come from the Karen hills?

But Judson saw something. He spent months teaching Ko Tha Byu scripture, watching a slow and astonishing transformation take hold. The former killer began weeping over passages about grace. Something ancient stirred in him — the Karen people had long carried an oral tradition about a lost book from the Creator God, a book that would one day be returned to them by a foreign teacher. Ko Tha Byu recognized the gospel before anyone expected him to.

Within a year, he walked back into those same hills everyone had written off. He preached in villages no Western missionary could reach. By the time of his death in 1840, tens of thousands of Karen had come to faith — one of the largest people movements in Asian Christian history.

Jesus told Nathanael, "I saw you while you were still under the fig tree." The Lord does not wait for us to clean ourselves up before He calls our name. He sees us in our hidden places, knows the soil of our hearts, and speaks a future over us that no one around us would dare to imagine.