The Small Woman Who Carried No Credentials

In 1930, the China Inland Mission rejected Gladys Aylward. She was a parlor maid from Edmonton, north London — no university degree, no seminary training, no impressive references. The mission board deemed her too old at twenty-seven and too academically limited to learn Mandarin. By every human measure of qualification, she had nothing to commend her.

So Gladys saved her wages, bought the cheapest rail ticket she could find, and traveled alone across Siberia to reach Yangcheng in the mountains of Shanxi Province. She arrived with almost no money, speaking not a word of Chinese, carrying little more than her Bible and an unshakable certainty that God had called her.

Within years, the local mandarin appointed her the official foot inspector — a role that gave her access to every home in the region. She told Bible stories as she unwound the binding cloths from little girls' feet. When war came, she led over a hundred orphaned children on a harrowing trek across the mountains to safety. Villagers who had initially mocked the small foreign woman came to faith by the dozens.

Paul told the Corinthians he came to them "in weakness, in fear, and in much trembling." He carried no dazzling rhetoric, no philosopher's pedigree. Yet the Spirit of God worked through that very emptiness. Gladys Aylward understood this in her bones — that God's deepest wisdom rarely arrives through the channels the world respects. It comes through surrendered vessels who know that the power was never theirs to begin with.