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Show of convulsions. Then we are trying to bring interest and hope into the life of a dear old lady with double cataracts. She is eighty years old and her work in the home is not needed; there are children to wait on her. How can they afford to bring her to the hospital? asks the family, but the old lady turns pathetic sightless eyes towards us and asks if prayer will not help. In the evening it is a relief to the weary women to spend a little while learning a new song; we talk for a few minutes about some Bible passage and after a prayer we all go to bed. During the next few days we go on foot to four other villages. As we pass through one which is strange to us a woman asks us to sit down and rest. We sit under the shade of some willows while Mrs. Chia talks to an ever-increasing crowd about what it is that God really wants of his children. When we reach the next village several women hurry out to meet us, one of them saying. "We are waiting for you because my uncle just heard you talking in the Liu village and said we must get you to tell us about it too!"' That night we were in a village where a relief school was held this summer. Three fine young men have worked there for years to awaken their own people to the value and truth of Christianity, and now the practical demonstration in terms of food for the hungry and school for the illiterate, together with the unselfish service and boundless hospitality of these young men and their mother, has accomplished what mere words could never have done. In the evening the big family room is crammed to the window-sills with eager people who leave only reluctantly at eleven o'clock. A group of young people study the Bible together every evening, and twice a week besides Sunday there is a meeting which in less busy times overflows into the yard. During the time of our stay groups of people listened and learned, yet Mrs. Chia finds time to work patiently at teaching a deaf and dumb girl to talk and to write phonetic characters. In the following days there are brief glimpses of other places, and a night at the home of Pastor Wang, whose tragic death in the hands of bandits shocked us all a year and a half ago. In that town there is a man who is eagerly studying Christianity because of what he saw last spring. When all the village was hungry after seven months of famine Pastor Wang's widow, though obliged to borrow grain for her own family, yet invited the poorest people to come into her alfalfa field and gather for their own food a crop that would have brought in $40 local money. Then when a little later someone stole the large wooden cross from her husband's grave she only said, 'They needed it for fuel'. 'Why', said this new inquirer, T had hunted for years for the true way of life. When I heard these things I felt that I had found it at last!' Sunday finds us in a little old market town, with people coming in from villages on all sides telling each other the good news of abundant crops and getting advice |
