Gladys Aylward had worked as a London housemaid since she was 14. The China Inland Mission turned her down after she failed their exams. She went anyway, arriving in Yangcheng in October 1930 as an independent missionary. She helped run the Inn of Eight Happiness and became a mother to orphans. In the spring of 1938 she learned the invading Japanese had listed her as a spy. With only one assistant, she led more than a hundred orphans over the mountains toward safety. One morning, hopeless, she cried, “But I am not Moses.” A 13-year-old girl answered, “Of course you aren’t, but Jehovah is still God!” When you feel too small, remember who God is.
Andrew van der Bijl grew up poor in the Netherlands and lived through the 1944 famine, when he ate tulip bulbs to survive. After he gave his life to God, he began reaching believers behind the Iron Curtain. In 1955 he slipped away from a government tour of Poland to visit underground churches. In 1957 he made his first smuggling run into Yugoslavia, with Bibles hidden in his blue Volkswagen. Watching guards search the cars ahead, he prayed, “When you were on Earth, you made blind eyes see. Now, I pray, make seeing eyes blind.” His story became the 1967 book God’s Smuggler, and the world knew him as Brother Andrew. He died in 2022 at 94. God still opens doors that look locked tight.
William Wilberforce had spent nine years fighting to end the British slave trade. On March 15, 1796, his bill finally looked like it might pass. But his opponents handed out free tickets to a popular opera premiere that same night. Several lukewarm supporters went to the show, and the bill lost 74 to 70. Wilberforce wrote in his diary that enough were at the opera to have carried it. Crushed and ill, he thought about quitting. Then old John Newton wrote to him, reminding him that though he could not do all the good he wished, some good was done, and that he had not labored in vain. Wilberforce kept going. In 1807 Parliament abolished the slave trade.
In 2003, thirteen-year-old Bethany Hamilton was lying on her surfboard off Hawaii with her left arm dangling in the water. A shark came up and attacked, pulling her back and forth. In two or three seconds her left arm was gone. A friend’s father pulled her to shore and tied a leash around her arm as a tourniquet. Less than a month later she told CNN that her family and her faith helped her stay positive. She was getting her stitches out and planned to paddle out on Thanksgiving Day. She said she wanted to catch the first wave on her own with no one else’s help. Loss doesn’t get the last word when hope is anchored in God.
One afternoon in April 2023 in Warren, Michigan, a school bus driver called the transportation base to say she felt dizzy and needed to pull over. Seconds later she lost consciousness while the bus was still moving. Seventh grader Dillon Reeves was sitting about five rows back. He threw down his backpack, ran to the front, grabbed the steering wheel and slowly applied the brakes before the bus could veer into oncoming traffic. Then he yelled to his classmates, “Someone call 911. Now!” The superintendent called it an extraordinary act of courage and maturity. You don’t have to be grown to be the one who steps up. God can use whoever is willing to move.
