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The Story and Testimony of Gladys Aylward This article is from Issue 4, Called to Trust Gladys Aylward, missionary to China Gladys was born into a working-class family in London, and on leaving school entered into working life as a parlour maid and lived very much for her own pleasure. In her early twenties, her self-indulgent life changed when she was saved one night in a church meeting she’d found herself in, and her interest was shifted from herself to the souls of others. After hearing of the great need in China, the burden became hers to find someone to go there with the glorious Gospel that brings people out of darkness into light, but she found no one. After being challenged, she saw that she was the one to go, and applied to the China Inland Mission where she was taken in to be trained. But after three months of struggling with the Chinese language studies and academic assignments, her enrolment was ended and she took work as a house keeper for a retired missionary couple in Bristol. This couple were a great encouragement to the disheartened Gladys as they shared with her wonderful stories of God’s interventions and dealings on their past mission trips, and she grew in faith that with God nothing is impossible China was still burning in her heart, and by faith she worked every hour she could until she’d paid the £47 fare for a third class, one-way ticket to China on the Trans-Siberian railway. What should have taken three years to pay for was hers, by God’s grace, within a year. According to God’s perfect timing, one day at church Gladys was told of a Scottish missionary couple who were in China. Sadly the husband had recently passed away and the aged widow was trusting God to send a young single woman out to join her in a new work for The Lord. Gladys, seeing the hand of God, believed she was that woman and after making contact, in 1932 she left her home and all that she knew to join Jeannie Lawson in the little town of Yangcheng, set between high mountains. The language, culture, food, customs and dress was a complete contrast to England, and though it took some getting used to, she fully embraced China as her own. After just four years, she applied for Chinese citizenship and was accepted. The people who came to know her gave her had given her a Chinese name, Ai-weh-deh, meaning “virtuous woman” which then became her official national name. This little woman, who in the world’s eyes who had very little to offer, was a great tool in The Lord’s Hands. By His guidance and providence alone she was used to bring the gospel to many traders who passed through her town on route with their goods. She was employed by the government to end the long tradition of foot-binding that disfigured the feet of girls. She was called upon to bring peace and order in a prison system that was full of chaos. She became mother to many an abandoned child and during a time of war she led 100 children on a three week journey over mountains to reach the safety of Sian. The following testimony has been taken from a recording of Gladys Aylward sharing at a meeting. The tenth verse of Malachi chapter 3 says, “Bring all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be food in My house, and try Me now in this,” says the Lord of hosts, “If I will not open for you the windows of heaven and pour out for you such blessing that there will not be room enough to receive it.” “If you will bring,” say’s God, “into My storehouse, your completed tithe,” and you will find as I have found, that your completed tithe, as mine, is this: This is Gladys Aylward, the completed tithe, myself. All I possess, all I have, my head, my heart, my feet, my hands; all that is me is my completed tithe. And when God asks us to do something, He doesn’t ask for one hand, or one foot, or even one day. He asks for the complete you! I left home during the first World war, to please myself. I didn’t care what happened to anybody else, as long as I got what I wanted. And for years I ate what I wanted to, I did what I wanted, I earned my money and I spend it on myself. My life was my own and I was going to do exactly what I liked. If people wanted to be miserable sitting in church, well let them, but I wasn’t going to sit there with them. For those first few years, I had what I call, my “good time,” and the world can give you a “good time.” And then right in the middle of enjoying myself, The Lord Jesus took pity on a rather silly and empty-headed girl, and I was saved. I was saved, not in my home I’m terribly sorry to say, but after I’d left my home and gone to work on London. I was pulled into a church one night by a group of young people who were standing outside their church doors. I that night sat in the church, and for the first time in my life, I realised that Jesus Christ, the Son of the Living God, had died for Gladys Aylward. It shook me, it moved me, and it was going to alter my whole life. I knew the joy of salvation, and believed that this should be handed out, I rushed around handing out tracts and speaking to anybody who would listen, as I sat on the train or on the bus, or in the shop buying goods, about salvation…that was all I knew. I had been saved exactly one year when God planted into my heart the seed for China. I was reading one day a periodical, and in it was an article on China that somebody had written because there had come into the news a few weeks previous, that the first aeroplane had flown over China. And the article pointed out that Western civilisation was going at a great rate to this land and yet there must be thousands, even millions of people in China who had never heard the Gospel. And so, I felt that somebody ought to be doing something about it. Well, weren’t there churches? Weren’t there bibles there? When I discovered there weren’t, well I thought again, somebody ought to be going and telling them. I now believed it was my job to see that at least one person went to China for Jesus Christ. For that next year and two months, every time I went out I called on somebody, either a relation, or a friend, or somebody I knew, and later on people I didn’t know but whose names I saw in the paper, all with this one idea that I could persuade them that they were the very person who should be going to China for Christ. Well I’m terribly sorry, not one of them even took me in earnest. My last try was my own brother, I went home, I caught him in the kitchen, and told him all that was in my mind, and he laughed and he laughed as though it was the biggest joke he’d ever heard. “I don’t know what you’re worrying about them Chinese for. Do you know anything about them?” “No.” “Do you know where China is?” “No.” “Been reading any books about China?” “No.” “Well it’s a queer thing isn’t it? Well what ya worrying about them for?” “Because they do not know Jesus Christ, and I feel they should.” He wouldn’t have it. “I’m not interested” he said, and he made to run from the kitchen where we were standing. He’d already gone out when he put his head around the door, and this is what he said: “If you really believe somebody ought to be going, why don’t you go yourself?” Bang went the door and away he’d gone. I stood, I don’t know how long. It couldn’t be me! I’d never done anything really sensible. I wasn’t educated, I hadn’t any money, and I simply didn’t know where to begin! I didn’t know anything about sermons, I didn’t know anything about church! I rather imagined that missionaries are called in prayer meetings, or they’re ready to be trained or are already trained, but they are at least members of churches, and they must have read the Bible. I’m sorry dear friends, I had done not one of these things, I only knew that Jesus Christ died on Calvary for me, and I believed it. During that next year I tried to find out how one would go to China. I discovered that, well, you just presented yourself to some committee, some fellowship, some society, they accepted you, took over the control of your life, and off you went. But I failed to find anybody who would look at Gladys Aylward more than once. “We’re sorry, you see you don’t even understand your own language, how will you ever learn Chinese?” they said. I agreed. “I don’t know how I’m going to learn Chinese, but I do know God’s called me to go to China.” At the end of that year I was more bewildered than I had ever been in my life. Had God really called me? Then why didn’t somebody believe that what I was telling was the truth, that I had a terrific urge, this something that was pushing me forward to a place and people that I knew nothing about? I went to the word of God. I went to China from what I read in this Bible. I discovered that God spoke to those He called. “And The Lord Jehovah said to Abraham, Get thee out.” Oh, so it’s moving out. For those first few months I just read chapter by chapter through the word of God, I did not know how to move. I had my living to earn, I had commitments to keep. I had a home, and a father and mother whom I was responsible to. I just couldn’t get up and wildly fly off. And as I read chapter by chapter, I discovered that God, when He spoke to these men and women, made promises to them, and through their obedience, He kept His promise. And so one day, I took from this book, the promise that God gave to each one of those men, “You come and follow me, I will do the rest.” Very simply, that’s what God wants of you and me. And Jesus, going towards them said, “Come”, and they came. “I will turn you into something I can use. I will make you into a fisher of men.” Eventually, I just made God two promises. The first, “Dear Lord Jesus, if You will open the way and show me how, I will go myself.” The second, “I will never again ask anyone to do something that I believe You are asking me, the person Gladys Aylward, to do.” I bought for myself a third-class ticket on the Trans-Siberian railway. I did not discuss this with anyone, nobody knew I was going to China, not even my parents until three weeks before I left. My life now was not my own, it belonged to God, and God could do exactly what He liked with it. I can only praise God for a mother and father who did not understand, but who allowed their daughter to go out. I truly believe He asked me to go. You see, one day He walked along and crossed my path and He said, “you can’t do anything you know, I’ll do it through you.” And I remember going home when I felt God was calling me to China and I spoke to my father. “ You know Dad, I would like to go to China.” And my father, rather a silent sort of man, looked at me straight and said, “And what do you think you’re going to do?” I said “I don’t know.” “Well you’re not a nurse are you?” I said “no I’m not.” “And you can’t teach anything can you?” “No” I said. “I can’t.” And then he looked at me and said “Go on, off with you. All you can do is talk!” And I remember going to the bottom of the stairs , and I had a little weep. He didn’t understand, because God hadn’t called him, He called me. And then suddenly through my tears came this, “Well isn’t that it!” So standing there I said, “O Lord, he said talk….well alright then, I’ll talk. And I’ll talk and I’ll talk, and I’ll just keep on talking, and that will be for You.” Nobody, least of all my father, dreamed of how true his words were to become. Almost from that very moment, God put words into my mouth. I travelled through Europe, Poland, Russia, across to Japan, and into the North of China. I was just over twenty and had never been away from home before. In China I joined an old Scottish lady. We didn’t know each other, or anything about each other, but we believed God had put us together. Jeannie was seventy-four, I was twenty-five. She was at the end of her life, I was at the beginning. We did not talk the same, think the same, or want to do the same. We were not in any way similar yet I truly believe God put us together, and had put us in this little town because no one had ever been there for Jesus Christ. We made our little plans, Jeannie and I. We would have our little mission station, and before long, we had our dream of our converts sitting in rows singing their hymns. It never came. We had been there three weeks, a month but we had failed to attract one single person. We got down lower and lower before God and before each other. What should we do? How should we begin? And then one night, Jeannie came in and said “I’m afraid you and I will have to throw some of our ideas to the wind. I don’t know if God wants a mission station here. I’ve been out in the evenings and seen the other courtyards filled when ours is empty, and I’ve discovered that every singe one is an Inn. I’m going to ask God that He will send into this courtyard the same number of men that are going to those other courtyards.” The outcome of these prayers was that the mission station as such was turned literary over night into a mule Inn. This was because, we found, God had put us in a very important place. We lived right in the heart of the mountains, were day in day out went men with animals laden with goods travelling from one place to another on this trade route. These men had to find a resting a place each night for themselves and their animals. And so, every night into our courtyard, that we imagined to be a mission station, there poured these men. They listened to a story told by Jeannie sitting in the middle of the yard, the story of Jesus Christ. The first Christians in that area of China never saw a chapel or church building, or a bible. They heard the story from this little old Scotch woman while they sat on stones in the yard of a mule Inn. We had lived together, Jeannie and I for one year when she died. I now faced a terrific cross. It is not the done thing for a young and single girl to live alone. I lived one week’s journey from the nearest other white people. Convention and the way I had been brought up told me that this should not be. And so I pleaded before The Lord to tell me how to move and where to move to, but I got no answer. Day after day I waited in my reading for the word “Go” but it did not say. And there swept through my thoughts, “Oh Lord, what about Your glory? It won’t be long before there’s an awful rumour about that girl who’s living out there in an Inn that is filled every night with packs of rough men, and not one other woman. And what about ‘my good name’? Surely Lord this isn’t Your will?” Dear friends I have discovered that if you will follow Christ, that if you will claim the promise for the power, He will look after His own glory, He will also look after your ‘good name.’ I went on to live in that Inn for ten whole years, I had yet to hear a rumour of anything to damage God’s glory or my ‘good name’. I did not move, I did not find any word from God to move, despite my own fears and letters from all sorts of people outside, invitations from dear missionaries to go and live with them. And then I suddenly woke up and discovered why God had left me there. I found that I was the only woman in that district with unbound feet. All over the North of China and other places, this custom of binding little girl’s feet had gone on for many years. When the little girl was three years old, and she could properly balance on her little feet, they were bound up. By the time she was twelve her feet were tiny, and she was ready to be married. Is this what God intended? No. I understand that missionaries who had come into China had tried all sorts of ways to stamp this custom out. Now down in the capital of China, there had come into power this lands first Christian leader. He’d been reading a book that showed that God is love. The first reform that this man put on was that the binding of feet was to cease; it would become against the law. This man, mandarin or governor or what ever name you’d like to put on him, had to find somebody that he could pay and send out round the district to stamp this custom out. The man had been looking for this somebody for a long time, he had failed to find one woman with unbound feet, and it was not seemly to send a man. Then, when he was all out of ideas, someone went to him and asked, “Are you still looking for an inspector of feet? There is someone.” Before I knew it the mandarin was standing in my courtyard to ask my help. “Oh no, I couldn’t help anybody, let alone you. You don’t know how foolish I am.” “Woman I am not asking ‘are you wise or are you foolish?’ I’m asking for your help. I’m looking for someone just like you, to whom I can give an honourable and worthy position of the official of feet, simply because you are the only woman with unbound feet in this whole great land.” My heart was pounding and I was sweating with my back against the wall. I had gone to China for Jesus Christ, and I didn’t want to be mixed up with governments and mandarins and politics, and feet! I wasn’t interested, I was interested in souls for The Lord of glory but I couldn’t get rid of this man. Then it seemed that away in the distance was a little voice that sounded just like my brother with his own words, “If you really believe someone ought to be going, why don’t you go yourself?” But feet are nothing to do with me! “Do you really believe they should bind their feet?” came that question from within. Well no, of course not. “Well why don’t you do something about it?” With that, I accepted the job. Something I could never have dreamed of, I became a paid employee of the Chinese government as the Official of Feet! I didn’t get the job because could speak Chinese or climb mountains, or because I knew the people because I didn’t. It was simply because of the size of my feet. You see friends, that’s why you have to put all of yourself in. God didn’t need my hands then, He needed my feet, and He got them. I made it very clear that I had come to preach about my God and that I would continue to serve Him where ever I went. “I understand,” he said. “A man’s god is his own affair. You can take Him with you on your mule.” We would arrive in a village and the people would gather, everybody. And so we would begin, “Shall we learn to sing?” “Sing??” they would say. “Government officials singing?” “Oh yes, we sing!” And they learned to sing, and they listened to stories, and they learned that God had created men and women as little babies, and their feet were the same and He expected them to remain. God was blessing us in amazing ways, whole villages would come out for Jesus Christ. I’ve had bonfire after bonfire for idols and their ancestral gods, and I sang in my hearts as they knelt to take Jesus as their Saviour. Friends, I have not done what I wanted to. I have not eaten what I wanted, or worn what I would have chosen. I have not lived in a house that I would have chosen. I longed for a husband and babies, security and love, but He didn’t give it. He left me alone for seventeen years with one book, a Chinese Bible. And so I know it. I don’t know anything about your latest novels, films, theatres; I live in a rather out of date world, and I suppose you may say “Well that’s awfully miserable isn’t it?” Friends, I’ve been one of the happiest women that have ever stepped this earth, because that’s what God promised. The heavens opening, and the blessings tumbling out. I’ve had a great family of someone else’s children who I have loved and they have loved me. O Lord, give us freedom, freedom in Thee, that You might be able to pick us and out us down, and use us when and where and how you like, that someone might know how much You love them.