She was denied re-entry by the new Chinese government, however, and decided to settle in Taiwan, where she set up an orphanage and spent her last years caring for more children.īy the time Gladys died on 3 January 1970, she was famous. But she could not get China off her mind it had become her true home, and she yearned greatly to return. For the next 10 years, she taught children at a school and shared her testimony repeatedly to raise funds for mission work in China. She also took on a key teaching role at a theological seminary that was usually reserved for Chinese women-she had become so naturalised that she was now considered a fellow Chinese.įollowing the Communist takeover of China, Gladys returned to England in 1949. She later moved to Chengdu in the south, where she spent another four years caring for the needy, preaching the good news, and teaching the Bible. “Here at long last is the messenger we have waited for,” they told her. Once, when she visited an isolated monastery, she was surprised to find the inhabitants ready to accept her message of the gospel. It was tiring, but God encouraged Gladys constantly with reminders of the importance of her work. Unable to return to Yangcheng, she stayed on in Sian, where she ministered to war refugees, lepers, and prisoners, and continued going into the mountains to preach to villagers. The tireless missionary, however, was back at work the moment she recovered. Although the long walk to safety left Gladys ill from typhoid fever, she had not lost a single child. It was a death-defying trek that testified to God’s greatness. All in all, it took them about a month to reach Sian. They also saw His constant provision at work in the form of friendly soldiers who shared their meagre rations, a Buddhist monk who housed them in an abandoned temple, and an officer who ordered boats to take them across the Yellow River even though it was officially closed off. Over two weeks, they saw the grace of God first-hand as He protected them from the weather, snakes, and Japanese troops. Gladys had no other means of getting the children-some of whom were still infants-across they simply had to walk.Īnd so, in April 1940, the missionary and her 100 children set off, each of them equipped with little more than a small bowl, chopsticks, a towel, and some kind of quilt to sleep on. But the home was in the city of Sian (Xi’an today) to the west, more than 200 kilometres away and separated from Yangcheng by both mountains and the Yellow River. Gladys heard that the wife of the Nationalist leader, Madam Chiang Kai Shek, had set up a shelter for children orphaned by the war.
The answer that came was a challenging one. The question was: how was she going to ensure the safety of the 100 children under her charge? Her life was also in danger because she had helped the defending Nationalist Army by reporting the movements of Japanese troops while travelling around the region as a missionary as a result, the Japanese had put a price on her head. Air raids by Japanese planes destroyed Yangcheng as well as Gladys’ inn, and successive advances by Japanese troops left the missionary convinced that she had to leave the city. In 1937, the happy state of affairs was disrupted by war erupting between China and Japan. If Gladys had ever fretted over not being a mother, she now had more children than she could ever have dreamed of. Over the next few years, the Inn of Eight Happinesses became an orphanage of sorts, which prompted the provincial governor to start a school. One day, the girl brought back another homeless child, and he was followed by another and yet another.
She named the child Mei-en (“Grace”) but called her by her nickname, Ninepence. It started with a beggar woman offering to sell her daughter to her filled with compassion and knowing that she could give the girl better care, Gladys gave the woman all the money she had on her-the equivalent of nine pennies-and adopted the child. By this time, Gladys had also started to take in unwanted and orphaned children.
0 kommentar(er)
