Hudson Taylor carried a burden for the millions in China’s interior who had never heard the gospel. But he was terrified of sending men and women unprotected into the unknown. In 1865 he wrote in his diary that the conflict was so intense he thought he would lose his mind. A friend invited him to Brighton on the English coast for a break. Walking along the beach, his gloom lifted. He wrote, “There the Lord conquered my unbelief, and I surrendered myself to God for this service.” He left the consequences with God. Within a year Taylor, his family and sixteen young missionaries sailed for China. Obedience gets easier when we hand God the responsibility for results.
At the Battle of Antietam in 1862, Clara Barton arrived near the Cornfield to find surgeons dressing wounds with corn husks because army supplies were far behind. She handed over a wagonload of bandages she had collected herself. With bullets flying overhead, she cradled wounded men, cooked for them and brought them water. As she knelt to give one man a drink, she felt her sleeve quiver. A bullet had passed through it and killed the man she was helping. She kept working until dark, then pulled out lanterns so the surgeons could go on. She later said she never mended that hole in her sleeve. Real service goes where the need is greatest.
Bessie Coleman grew up in Texas and later worked as a manicurist in Chicago. When her brother came home from World War I talking about women flying airplanes in France, she decided the sky would be her arena. She applied to almost every flying school in America and was rejected because of her race and gender. So she took advice from newspaper publisher Robert Abbott, learned French, took a better paying job, and sailed for France in November 1920. She completed a ten-month course in a fragile, dangerous era of flight and in 1921 earned an international pilot’s license. When one door slams, look for the one God may be opening somewhere else.
In 1901, a seven-year-old Indian girl named Preena escaped from a Hindu temple and ran to Amy Carmichael, a young missionary from Ireland. Preena’s widowed mother had dedicated her to be “married to the gods,” which meant a life of abuse. Her hands had been branded with hot irons after an earlier escape. She had heard Amy speak of a God who loves everyone. Amy checked the story and found the evil was even greater than she imagined. She said, “I must do something about it!” That one rescue launched a 50-year work of rescuing girls and later boys, and the Dohnavur Fellowship still carries it on today. One child’s courage can change a missionary’s whole calling.
In the 1840s, a young doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis started counting deaths in two maternity wards at Vienna General Hospital. Women in the ward run by doctors and medical students died at nearly five times the rate of the ward run by midwives. Then a colleague cut his finger during an autopsy and died of the same fever. Semmelweis put it together: the doctors were coming straight from autopsies to deliveries. He ordered his staff to clean their hands and instruments with a chlorine solution, and childbed fever dropped dramatically. You’d think everybody would cheer. They didn’t. Doctors didn’t like being told they were the problem, and Semmelweis eventually lost his job. He had the truth, but nobody wanted to hear it.
