The Missionary Who Became Chinese

In 1855, twenty-two-year-old Hudson Taylor arrived in Shanghai wearing a black English suit and speaking not a word of Mandarin. The Chinese people regarded him as a foreign curiosity — distant, alien, unapproachable. But Taylor made a radical decision that scandalized his fellow missionaries. He shaved his head, grew the traditional queue, dyed it black, and donned the robes of a Chinese teacher. He moved out of the European settlement and into the crowded neighborhoods of Ningbo.

He ate Chinese food, slept on a hard Chinese bed, and spent years learning the dialects of fishermen, farmers, and merchants. Over time, something remarkable happened. Doors that had been bolted shut swung open. Families who had thrown stones now poured tea. Children who had scattered in fear climbed into his lap.

Taylor understood what his colleagues did not — that a message never delivered in the hearer's own language is no message at all. Love announced from a safe distance remains an abstraction.

This is precisely what John tells us the Almighty did in Christ. The Word — eternal, infinite, dwelling beyond all human comprehension — "became flesh and dwelt among us." God did not shout salvation from heaven's balcony. He learned to cry as a newborn in Bethlehem, to sweat in a Nazareth carpenter's shop, to weep beside a friend's tomb. He translated the invisible God into a language every human heart could finally understand.