“Not at all religiously inclined.”
That is how Ellen White’s son described himself in a letter to her in 1893.
James Edson White was born in 1849, the second son of James and Ellen White. He grew up in Battle Creek and learned the printing trade at the Review and Herald press. He had real gifts, but he kept expanding businesses on borrowed money, and at the church’s Pacific Press in Oakland that habit led to financial crises and to his dismissal around 1879.
For the next thirteen years Edson ran his own publishing business with little success. By 1893 he was in Chicago, in debt again, and drifting from God. He told his mother he would not change his course until his debts were paid.
His mother, then in New Zealand, wrote back ten typed pages and told him of a dream in which she saw him being swept away by an undertow. “You are no more a child,” she wrote. “I would that you were. I would cradle you in my arms.”
That letter reached him. On August 10, 1893, Edson wrote: “I have surrendered fully and completely.”
He soon read an appeal his mother had written about the church’s duty to Black Americans in the South, and he decided to answer it. In 1894 he built a steamboat, the Morning Star, on the Kalamazoo River at Allegan, Michigan. Much of the money came from The Gospel Primer, a Bible story book he wrote that doubled as a reading book.
The Morning Star tied up at Vicksburg, Mississippi, in January 1895. That year Edson and his friends organized the Southern Missionary Society. They taught Black families to read and opened schools up the Yazoo River. The work made enemies. When Edson tried to start a school partway up the river toward Yazoo City, the county superintendent ordered it stopped, and a man in the mob offered to “hold a Winchester” on Edson. He kept going. In 1898 he began printing a paper, the Gospel Herald, on the boat. By 1908 the society ran 28 mission schools with nearly 1,000 students.
If your teen is struggling, or your grown child has walked away, take heart from Edson. He was in his forties when he came back. Keep praying for your child and keep loving them. God has a mission for their life, just as he had one for Edson.
Photo: Edson and Emma White (center) with Morning Star workers aboard the boat, c. 1895. Ellen G. White Estate, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Morning_Star_Missionaries.jpg
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