The Small Woman on the Mountain Road

In the years when great mission boards measured a person by their schooling and their polish, there lived a small English woman whom the experts judged unfit for China. Her name was Gladys Aylward. She had worked as a parlour maid. She had little formal education, and a mission society looked her over and decided she would not do. She believed the call had not been withdrawn. So she saved what she could from her wages, and in 1932 she bought a ticket and set off overland, alone, across Europe and through Russia, towards a country that had not asked for her.

The journey nearly swallowed her. War rumbled along the rail lines. There were stranded nights and frightening borders and miles she crossed not knowing if the next would be her last. But she reached Shanxi province, and a town called Yangcheng, and an inn that took in muleteers from the mountain roads. There she joined an older missionary, and there the gospel travelled the way news always travelled, by the mouths of weary men around a fire. The people came to call her Ai-weh-deh. She learned their language. She walked their villages as a foot inspector, sent to end the binding of little girls' feet, and that work carried her into homes and into the lives of women and families. Year upon year, she stopped being a stranger and became known.

Then the Japanese army came, and the whole region tilted into terror. The roads filled with the displaced. And Gladys Aylward found herself responsible for children, a great crowd of them, often remembered as near a hundred, with the fighting closing in and no safe place left to keep them. So she chose the mountains. She set out on foot to lead them over the high paths towards the city of Sian, far to the west.

Forget the swelling music of any film. This was no tidy adventure. This was blistered feet on stony ground. This was the smallest children too tired to walk, and the bigger ones carrying them, and an English woman near the end of her strength counting heads again and again. There was hunger that did not lift. There was the sound of soldiers somewhere behind. There were nights in the open and days with nothing certain except the next turn of the path. And the children were not a brave woman's scenery. They were real. They had names. They were frightened and hungry and grieving, and each one had a future known only to God.

Day after day she kept walking, and she kept them walking, and somehow she got them down out of the mountains and through to safety. She herself collapsed afterwards, worn to nothing by what the road had taken. But the children lived.

Here is the thing that is easy to miss. The mountain did not make Gladys Aylward brave. It only revealed what years had already shaped in her. She could lead a hundred children through a war because she had first chosen to stay through the slow seasons, the language she could not yet speak, the trust she had not yet earned, the disappointments no story remembers. The courage of the emergency was made of the patience of the ordinary. Love that keeps walking when the feeling is gone is love that learned to walk long before.

The experts had been sure she would not do. But the road remembered her differently. It remembered a small woman who refused to leave the vulnerable behind, with a crowd of children walking on ahead of her towards the morning. And that is the picture that lasts. Not the unlikely servant standing alone in glory, but the children moving towards safety, because one overlooked woman believed her call had never been cancelled, and she walked.