PART II...
The War
The local Mandarin (magistrate) liked to talk with her. He spoke of his long years of education in the Confucian classics. As Gladys listened, she came to appreciate the Confucian ethical content but noted the lack of a provision of spiritual power such as she knew through the Holy Spirit, the missing hope of forgiveness through the sacrifice of Christ, and a total absence ofexpectation of life beyond the grave.
He also shared news with her: the periodic flooding of the Yellow River, the problems of poverty and ignorance of the populace, but most of all the invasion of the Japanese with planes and troops coming ever nearer. She felt more and more identified with the people and decided to become a Chinese citizen.
One day the Mandarin invited her to a special dinner. The prison warden was there, as were other officials, and several wealthy merchants. Then he stood and gave a speech:
From the other side of the world Ai-Weh-Deh journeyed to China, owing allegiance only to her living God. She brought her Christianity to Yang-cheng. She had not sat hidden inside a temple contemplating how virtuous she was. She had unbound the feet of infants. She had helped the poor. She had visited the jails. She had taken orphans under her roof. She had nursed the wounded.
Her faith was alive. More than anyone the Mandarin had ever met, Ai-Weh-Deh demonstrated the power of love. She loved China so much she became a citizen…The Mandarin admitted he had debated with her the merits of her faith against the merits of his old Confucius ways, a hundred times. But Confucianism lives in my head, not in my heart, as Christianity does in Ai-Weh-Deh and her converts. [As a result] I wish to become a Christian! (Wellman, p. 155).
She made friends with officers of the Chinese Nationalist army, led by Chiang Kai-shek. At one time she thought she was in love with Colonel Linnan who wanted to marry her. But she realized they had two very different goals in life, and above all, he was not a Christian. Through Linnan she came to see that China not only faced the danger of the Japanese invasion, but that another Chinese army, the Communists, whilenow collaborating with the Nationalists, would one day provoke a civil war.
Meanwhile the war uprooted people. Four times Yangcheng was bombed and overrun by the Japanese; each time the people returned when the invaders left. Then one day Gladys was informed that the Japanese had put a price on her head; her friends urged her to leave. As the invading army came closer, she gathered up her children and made preparations to seek sanctuary in the far West in Xian. Other joined them. A whole orphanage was entrusted to her care. Soon she was leading 100 children, some of them mere infants.
The prison warden wondered what to do with the prisoners. They couldn’t travel in chains. Custom dictated that he behead them all. Shocked, Gladys presented a scheme to the Mandarin to place them under the care of relatives who would be responsible for them. No one took Feng, the leader, so she did, and he was a great help to her on the long march to safety.
The Long March
“You can’t go by the roads,” her friends warned her, “or the Japanese will see you and strafe you with their planes.” Through little used trails and over high mountains she led her brood. Their cloth shoes wore out, the small children began to cry, and all were hungry. Arriving at the broad Yellow River, she asked herself, “Whatever can I do now?” Then, unexpectedly, the Nationalist army allowed her to use their boats to ferry everyone across.
Once, while alone, some Japanese soldiers saw her and tried to shoot her. Running into a field of grain, sheescaped, though bullets tore through her clothes and one plowed a furrow in her back.
When they finally reached Xian, Gladys was exhausted and ill. She collapsed and was in a semi-coma for weeks. She had a fever of 105 degrees, typhus, pneumonia, and malnutrition. Finally she recovered, and was happy that all the children had been received by one family or institution or other.
She continued working with refugees, lepers, anyone who needed help. She brought to the hopeless the hope of Christ. An American doctor observing the lepers, noted: “Their bodies are so contorted with disease, they cannot kneel. Their hands are so crippled, they can barely receive the elements. Yet their eyes flame with joy and hope. All because Gladys Aylward brought them Christ” (Wellman p. 190).
Once on a long trip she found a Buddhist monastery hidden in a deep valley amid high mountains. She was surprised to discover that they were expecting her. “Here at long last is the messenger we have waited for,” they said, as they accepted her message of salvation through Christ (Wellman p. 191).
Back in England
Her friends insisted she take her first furlough after 17 years, to see her family and recover her strength. Through a popular biography (The Small Woman by Alan Burgess); a Hollywood movie of her life, The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, starring Ingrid Bergman, which received numerous awards; and a BBC interview on “This is Your life,” she became an international figure. She was invited to many places to tell her story and dined with such dignitaries as the Archbishop of Canterbury and even Queen Elizabeth. For a time she was possibly the best known missionary in the world (Tucker).
Elisabeth Elliot recalls a conversation she had with Gladys after hearing her speak in Canada:
I sat on the sofa and talked of missions, missionaries and particularly of singlemissionaries. I had been widowed four years earlier, and she, of course, had never married. Not that she had neverthought of marrying, however. She told me how she had worked happily for six or seven years in China alone, when a missionary couple came to work nearby. She then began to ponder the privilege that was theirs and to wonder if it might not be a lovely thing to be married.
She talked to the Lord about it. She was a no-nonsense woman and very direct and straightforward and she asked God to call a man from England, send him straight out to China, straight to where she was, and have him propose. I can't forget the next line. With a look of even deeper intensity, she shook her little bony finger in my face and said, "Elisabeth, I believe God answers prayer. He called him," and here there was a very brief pause and an intense whisper, which carried more power than her loudest voice. “He called him, but he never came” (Elliot).
The Last Days
But after ten years in England, China beckoned again. Gladys settled in Taiwan, and once again began working with orphans. She opened the Gladys Aylward Orphanage, and within days it was filled with children. She used her fame and prestige to raise money for them. When the burden became too great as her strength began to fail with increasing age, the Lord sent Kathleen Langton-Smith from England to help her with administration. Then one day a wealthy man came to her with a proposition. “I’m opening a very large orphanage and am looking for children to care for,” he informed her. “Oh, what a blessing,” she replied. “I’ll give you most of mine and Kathleen and I’ll only keep twenty babies for ourselves to care for.”
On New Year’s morning, 1970, just one month shy of her sixty-eighth birthday, after speaking to soldiers' wives at the American army base, Gladys went to bed without supper, and later that night slipped into the presence of the Lord she had served so faithfully. Her body now lies in a marble tomb on a hill in the garden of Christ’s College at Taipei, the capital of Taiwan (Swift).
In an interview during her later years, she had expressed her surprise at God’s call to serve Him in China with all her educational limitations. She confided:
I wasn’t God’s first choice for what I’ve done for China. There was somebody else…I don’t know who it was—God’s first choice. It must have been a man—a wonderful man. A well-educated man. I don’t know what happened. Perhaps he died. Perhaps he wasn’t willing…And God looked down…and saw Gladys Aylward