The Small Woman Who Carried a Hundred Children

In 1930, Gladys Aylward stood before the China Inland Mission board in London and received their verdict: rejected. She lacked the education, the language aptitude, the pedigree they required. All she had asked God for was a chance to serve Him in China. She was a parlor maid from Edmonton — nobody's idea of a missionary.

So Gladys saved her wages, coin by coin, and bought a one-way train ticket across Europe and Siberia. She arrived in Yangcheng, Shanxi Province, with almost nothing. She opened an inn for muleteers, telling Bible stories to travelers who stopped for the night. She bound the feet of no child. She adopted orphans the village couldn't feed. She earned the locals' trust so completely that the Mandarin himself appointed her the regional foot inspector, tasking her with ending the practice of foot-binding.

Then the Japanese invaded. And in 1940, Gladys Aylward led over a hundred orphaned children on a twelve-day trek across the mountains to safety in Sian — starving, sick with typhus, singing hymns over mountain passes. She had asked God for a small room in China. He gave her a hundred children's lives.

Ephesians 3:20 reminds us that God is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine. Gladys asked for a chance. God gave her a legacy. His power does not wait for our qualifications. It works through our willingness.