The Parlor Maid Who Moved Mountains

In 1930, Gladys Aylward knelt beside her narrow bed in a London parlor maid's quarters and asked God for one thing: passage to China. The China Inland Mission had already rejected her — too old at twenty-seven, too uneducated, too unlikely to learn Mandarin. She saved every shilling from scrubbing floors and serving tea until she could buy a one-way railway ticket across Siberia.

She asked God for a door. He gave her a nation.

Within a decade, Aylward had become so embedded in the remote mountain village of Yangcheng that the local magistrate appointed her the official foot inspector, tasked with enforcing the new ban on foot-binding. She who could barely conjugate a Chinese verb was now reshaping an ancient culture. When the Japanese invaded in 1940, she led nearly one hundred orphaned children on a harrowing twelve-day trek across the mountains to safety, crossing the Yellow River with no boat until one appeared at the final hour.

Gladys Aylward asked for a ticket. God gave her a transformed region, a hundred rescued children, and a legacy that still echoes through the churches of rural China.

Paul's doxology in Ephesians 3:20 reminds us that God is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine. Aylward imagined a small room in a Chinese village. God imagined a woman who would carry His children through the mountains on her back.