The Parlor Maid Who Was Expected in Yangcheng

In 1930, Gladys Aylward was a parlor maid in London — small in stature, plain in education, with no theological degree and no mission board backing. When she applied to the China Inland Mission, they rejected her. Too old at twenty-six, they said. Not bright enough for language study. Can anything good come from a servant's quarters?

But Gladys had heard a call she could not shake. She saved every spare penny from her wages, bought a one-way rail ticket, and traveled alone across Siberia — through war zones, bitter cold, and Soviet checkpoints — to reach the remote mountain village of Yangcheng in northern China.

There, an elderly Scottish missionary named Jeannie Lawson had been praying. For months, she had asked the Almighty to send a young woman to help carry the work forward. When Gladys appeared at her door — dusty, exhausted, still clutching her battered suitcase — Lawson received her as though she had been watching for her all along.

Gladys went on to rescue over a hundred orphaned children during the Japanese invasion, leading them on foot across the mountains to safety. The mission board had not seen her potential. But God had seen her long before she arrived.

When Jesus told Nathanael, "I saw you while you were still under the fig tree," He revealed what Gladys Aylward's life would confirm: the Lord sees us in our hidden, ordinary moments and calls us into something far greater than the world imagines possible.