The gatekeeper at our mission compound limped into the kitchen doorway, bowed crookedly, and announced, “Hsieh si-mu [pastor’s wife], here is His Excellency the Colonel.”
I held my breath. The colonel commanded the troops currently protecting this city of Shenkiu in central China. It was January 1941; the invading Japanese were only a few miles to the east.
The colonel entered briskly and made his announcement: “The enemy is advancing into Henan Province. We have orders not to defend this city. You should find refuge in one of the villages outside.”
I crossed my hands over the sleeves of my wadded e-shang and bowed politely, thanking him for his gracious concern for a “miserable” woman. As the colonel left the room, the icy January blast swept through the doorway. My baby cried. Suddenly, the enormity of our danger overwhelmed me.
Our Margaret Ann was scarcely two months old, Johnny just over a year. Yesterday my husband, urgently needing medical care, had been taken by rickshaw to the hospital 115 miles away. I looked at the little daily Scripture calendar on the wall: January 15. Not until early February would he be back. How would I manage without him? How would I make the myriad decisions that now crowded upon me?
You see, I had not yet experienced the full wonder of God’s power to guide us when all other guides fail. Nor did I guess that as his instrument he would use anything as prosaic as a calendar on a kitchen wall.
By midafternoon, the army garrison in our little city was empty. The departure of the soldiers created panic. Families packed their goods and fled.
The elders of the church called on me before they left. “Come with us,” they pleaded. “We will care for you while Pastor Hillis is away.”
I looked at the concern in their eyes, and I thought of the country homes to which they were headed. My husband and I loved those village homes because we loved the people in them. But they held death for Western babies, as too many little graves in our mission compounds showed.
How could I explain to these friends—without offending them—that I could not take my children into their homes, unheated, mud-floored huts in which three and four generations crowded together amid vermin and filth? Just a few weeks ago, the six-month-old son of the nearest American family had died of dreaded dysentery. No, my babies were chained to this kitchen where I could boil dishes, milk, and water.
But these were not things I could say to Chinese friends. I bowed, I thanked them, I spoke of waiting for my husband’s return, of watching the mission property—and I went to bed that night shaking with terror. When Johnny woke up whimpering in the cold, I took him into bed with me and lay awake a long time, listening to the wind rattle the waxed-paper windowpanes and praying that my little boy would live to see his daddy again.
The next morning I was in the kitchen early to start the water boiling for Margaret Anne’s bottle. Automatically, I reached up to the wall calendar and tore off yesterday’s date. The Scripture verse for the new day gleamed like sunlight. “What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee” (Ps. 56:3 KJV).
Well, I was certainly afraid. I fulfilled that part of it. Now, indeed, was the time to trust God. Somehow the verse sustained me all through the tense day.
The city was being evacuated rapidly. Other church members came to invite me to their family huts. But the Scripture held me. I was not to panic but to trust.
By midmorning the next day, the city was nearly deserted. Then the gatekeeper came to me, eyes blurred with fear. He had to leave, he said, and begged me to find refuge with him in his village beyond the city.
Should I? What could I do without our gatekeeper? The deserted city would be an open invitation to bandits and looters. But the risk to my babies outside was certain; here I still faced only fears. I declined the gatekeeper’s offer and watched him as he sorrowfully took leave.
It was noon before I remembered to pull the page off the little daily calendar on the wall. The tenth verse of the ninth psalm read, “And they that know thy name will put their trust in thee: for thou, LORD, hast not forsaken them that seek thee” (KJV).
As I bowed my head over my noonday meal, my heart poured out its gratitude to God for those particular words at that moment.
My main concern now was food. All the shops in the town were boarded shut. Meat and produce no longer came in daily from farms. I still had the goats for the babies’ milk, but the man who milked them had left for his village. Tomorrow I would have to try to milk them myself. I wondered if I could ever make the balky little beasts hold still.
I slept uneasily that night, wondering how I would feed my children and sure of very little except that we should stay in the city and, somehow, trust God. The sound of distant gunfire woke me.
Before facing the goats, I fixed myself a bowl of rice gruel. Then I tore the old page from the calendar and read the new day’s message: “I will nourish you, and your little ones” (Gen. 50:21 KJV).
The timeliness of the daily verses was becoming almost uncanny. With some curiosity, I examined the back of the calendar pad. It had been put together in England the year before, but God in his all-knowing had provided the very words I needed a year later, here on the other side of the world.
I was still eating the gruel when a woman stepped into the kitchen. She was carrying a pail of steaming goats’ milk. “May I stay and help you?” she asked. “See, I have milked your goats.”
Mrs. Lee had been our neighbor for years, but that morning I stared at her as though she had dropped from heaven. She had no family living, she explained, and wished to show her gratitude to the mission.
Late in the day, a loud rapping at the gate set our hearts pounding. Braver, Mrs. Lee was the one who went to open it. Her face beaming, she returned leading our caller.
“Gee-tze! Gee-dan!” she cried triumphantly. “Chicken! Eggs!”
A frail, black-robed country woman came in with a live chicken and a basket of eggs. “Peace, peace,” she gave the customary Christian greeting as she bobbed to us shyly. The noise of the cannons had not kept her away when she remembered that the missionaries would be hungry.
The calendar promise had come true! God would see to it that our little ones were nourished! That night my heart was full of hope. To the sound of shells bursting in the sky, I prayed that somehow God would spare this city and these gentle people we loved.
The next morning I rushed down to the little square of paper hanging on its nail and tore off the page. “When I cry unto thee, then shall mine enemies turn back: this I know; for God is for me,” the Scripture declared (Ps. 56:9 KJV).
But this time it was too much to believe! Surely it couldn’t be right to take literally a verse chosen just by chance for an English calendar?
As the gunfire drew closer, Mrs. Lee and I began to prepare the house for invasion. Any papers that might possibly be construed to have military or political significance had to be hidden or destroyed. We searched my husband’s desk and the church buildings. By nightfall, the gunfire sounded from both sides of the city. We went to bed dressed, prepared at any moment to meet the Japanese invaders.
I awoke abruptly in the early dawn and strained my ears for the crunch of military boots on gravel. But only a deep stillness surrounded me. There were no tramping feet, no shrieking shells or pounding guns, only the waking murmur of little Johnny in his crib.
Misgivings warred with excitement as I woke Mrs. Lee and we went to the gatehouse, each carrying a child. She was the first to stick out a cautious head. “There is no one in the street,” she told me. “Shall we go out?”
We stepped through the gate and watched as the streets began to fill not with Japanese soldiers but with townspeople returning from their country hiding places. Had the Chinese won?
As if in answer to our question, we met the colonel. “Pastor’s wife!” he greeted me with relief. “I have been concerned about you!”
Then he told us that the Japanese had withdrawn. No, they had not been defeated, nor could anyone arrive at a reasonable conjecture concerning their retreat. The enemy had simply turned back.
I stepped into my kitchen, eyes fixed on a little block of paper pinned to the wall. Oh, you could say it was just a calendar. You could say strangers had chosen those verses without any thought of China or of the war that would be raging when those dates fell due. But to me, it was more than a calendar, and no stranger had picked those lines. To me, it was the handwriting of God.