The Parlor Maid in God's Quiver

Gladys Aylward stood barely five feet tall, a parlor maid from Edmonton, London, with no university degree and no missionary board willing to send her. In 1932, the China Inland Mission rejected her application — she was too old at thirty, too uneducated, too unlikely. She might have believed her calling was a mistake, that the fire God had kindled in her heart since girlhood had been for nothing.

But Aylward scraped together her wages and bought a one-way train ticket across Europe and Siberia to reach Yangcheng, China. For years, her work seemed impossibly small — running an inn for muleteers, telling Bible stories to travelers who barely listened. She wondered if she had labored in vain.

Then war came. In 1940, with Japanese forces advancing, Aylward led one hundred orphaned children on a harrowing twelve-day trek across the mountains to safety in Sian. She arrived barefoot, feverish, and nearly dead. But those children lived. And the story of the small parlor maid who carried a nation's children through the mountains spread across the world, drawing thousands to faith.

God told His Servant in Isaiah 49 that restoring Israel alone was too small an assignment. The Almighty had something far larger in mind — salvation reaching to the ends of the earth. Aylward thought she was too small for even the smallest task. God thought the smallest task was too small for her.