Recently, I was reading through The Little Woman, the autobiographical account of Gladys Aylward. It’s a fascinating little book of quite a fascinating little lady (literally; never shared her height, but her shoe size was a whopping three) who packed up her British belongings and took the rather spotty Trans-Siberian railroad and a Japanese boat through varying degrees of danger and fearfulness to China. She was in the midst of the Japanese fighting and final Communist takeover, losing her home in the first bombing, and walking with the orphan children she cared for hundreds and hundreds of miles to safety.
Now, obviously, I was quite impressed by all this. I have read few more thrilling accounts of Christians who have been privileged to serve our God in areas whose tourist boasts could not include “safety.” Gladys even refers to herself as a spy at one point - a title I am more than a little envious of. But I read one simple little sentence, phrase rather, that simply stopped me up short, blinking and momentarily stunned.
To make a long chapter as abbreviated as possible, Gladys had just traveled ten days through grueling terrain to preach. She didn’t know exactly whom she was to preach to, only that she was to share the gospel of Christ. A strange man, a Tibetan lama (priest, not mammal) to be exact, came across her and her companion in a rather remote part of the country and invited them to his temple where no less than 500 priests were waiting to be told that Jesus loved them. In sharing the story of the reason behind the priests’ patient wait (which had actually begun five years previous), the head lama makes this fascinating statement: (I’ll share it in the context of the paragraph)
“Eagerly they hurried back to the lamasery and we read the accounts of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. We believed all that it contained, though there was much we could not understand. But one verse seemed of special importance. Christ had said, ‘Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel,’ so obviously one day someone would come to tell us more about this wonderful God. All we had to do was to wait and, when God sent a messenger, to be ready to receive him. For another three years we waited. Then two lamas, out on the hillside gathering sticks, heard someone singing. ‘Those are the messengers we are waiting for,’ they said. ‘Only people who know God will sing.’ ”
Did you catch that. Christ had said, ‘Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel,’ so obviously one day someone would come to tell us more about this wonderful God. Obviously.
If those who have not heard - if those who are waiting to hear - can have a hope, more than a hope, an implicit faith in the power of God and the obedience of His disciples to execute the Great Commission to “GO” and “PREACH” - how dare we hesitate.
