Today's inspiring/inspired person: Hudson Taylor

Hudson Taylor
35. English missionary to China. Founder of the China Inland Mission. Translated the New Testament into the Ningpo dialect.
36. At his death, after 51 years of service, there were 205 China Inland Mission stations with 849 missionaries. He had trained some 700 Chinese workers, raised four million dollars by faith (following George Mueller’s example), and developed a witnessing Chinese church of 125,000. It has been said that at least 35,000 were his own converts and that he baptized some 50,000.
37. When he first reached Shanghai in 1854, at the age of 22, he wasn’t prepared to find civil war on his doorstep. On top of that, he was forlorn, miserable and homesick. His eyes were inflamed, he suffered headaches, and he was cold. When he preached, people would often run from him or throw mud and stones.
38. After his first few years of nonstop missionary work in China, he found himself beset by a period of many disappointments and severe sorrows. A number of the workers were incapacitated by ill health, while others had died; some of the native converts had lapsed into sin and idolatry; funds were very low. Instead of looking at circumstances, however, he thought of God as “the one great circumstance.” He wrote to a fellow worker: “Pray on! Labor on! Do not be afraid of toil or the cross. They pay well.”
39. Taylor’s first child, Grace, died at eight years of age. Taylor wrote, “Our dear little Gracie! How we miss her sweet voice … and the sparkle of those bright eyes. But He Who said, ‘I will never leave thee,’ is with us … nothing can ever substitute for the presence of Christ.”
40. A few months later, their mission compound was attacked and their home was looted and burned, causing serious injuries to several individuals. Their regular means of finances dried up shortly thereafter. He wrote a friend, “We have 87 cents and all the promises of God.” Exhausted and depressed, Hudson later confessed that only his wife’s love stood between him and suicide.
41. Some time later, Hudson and his wife, who was in extremely poor health, decided to send their four older children, ages 9, 7, 5, and 3, back to England. Their three-year-old boy died one month before they were to leave. Four months after the children went back to England, his wife of 12 years went to be with the Lord. She was 33. They had eight children together, and one stillborn. Four survived.

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Note: Infant mortality around this time was between 20–25% for the first year of life in many parts of the world (and would have probably been higher in China). Average life expectancy was only around 30–35. In other words, in many nations a child had a 20–25% chance of dying before the age of 1, and if he survived, he might only live to 30 or 35.
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42. At his wife’s passing, he wrote, “I am left to toil and suffer alone—yet not alone, for God is nearer to me than ever … I am cast down but not forsaken. Jesus is my life and strength, and His bosom is my resting place now and forever.”
43. The year after his wife died, Taylor had a breakdown. Poor health left him sleepless, leading to painful depression of spirit and difficulty in breathing.
44. Confronted by enormous demands in the conduct of the rapidly expanding mission, buffeted by disappointments and criticisms, “emptied from vessel to vessel,” his spiritual life seemed to him more like a cracked cistern than a gushing fountain of fullness.
45. Writing to his parents in England, he said, “I cannot tell you how I am buffeted sometimes by temptation. I never knew how bad a heart I had. … Do pray for me. Pray that the Lord will keep me from sin, will sanctify me wholly and use me more largely in His service.”
46. As he read the Word and poured out his heart in prayer, he recognized that what he needed was not striving and struggling, but resting; that dedication to the Lord is “not a status of perfection but rather a relationship—a resting in Jesus; that abiding in Christ means oneness with Him, and oneness means that all the fullness of Christ is ours.”
47. He wrote to a fellow missionary: “… No matter how difficult my service, how sad my bereavement, how helpless I am, how deep are my soul-yearnings, Jesus can meet all my needs.”
48. To his sister he wrote: “It is a wonderful thing to be really one with Christ. Think what it involves. Can Christ be rich and I poor? Can your head be well-fed while your body starves? … No more can your prayers, or mine, be discredited if offered in the name of Jesus…, on the ground that we are His, members of His body.”
49. Taylor later remarried, and his second wife had to stay in England to care for their two children recently born, plus the four children from his first marriage and an adopted daughter. He was to travel 30,000 miles (48,000 kilometers) in the next two years, opening new mission stations. His evangelistic journeys kept him away from home for months at a time, and there were even longer separations when his wife and the children were in England. He wrote to his wife, “Sometimes it seems hard to be so long away from you and the children. But when I think of the One Who spent 33 years away from His Home and finished them on Calvary, I feel ashamed of my selfishness.”
50. In hours of trial and loneliness he would play his harmonium, which is a type of organ, and sing some of the great Christian hymns—his favorite being, “Jesus, I am resting, resting in the joy of what Thou art.”
51. Some time later, Taylor had to return to England because of ill health. He was brought to the doors of death by the terrible news of the Boxer Rebellion, the resulting disruption of the work, and the murder of hundreds of missionaries along with the native Chinese Christians. As the telegrams came, telling of riots and massacres, he said, “I cannot read, I cannot pray, I can scarcely think … but I can trust.”
52. Hudson Taylor was so feeble in the closing months of his life that he wrote a dear friend, “I am so weak I cannot work; I cannot read my Bible…. I can only lie still in God’s arms like a little child, and trust.”
53. Taylor was called “a man full of the Holy Ghost and of faith, of entire surrender to God and His call, of great self-denial, heartfelt compassion, rare power in prayer, marvelous organizing faculty, energetic initiative, indefatigable perseverance, and of astonishing influence with men, and childlike humility.”
54. Indefatigable means “untiring: never showing any sign of getting tired or of relaxing an effort.” That’s quite something to be said of someone, that he had indefatigable perseverance.
55. It was Taylor who said, “We must serve God, even to the point of suffering, and each one must ask himself: In what degree, in what point am I extending, by personal suffering, by personal self-denial, to the point of pain, the Kingdom of Christ? … It is ever true that what costs little is worth little.
56. “Christ is infinitely worthy and gracious, for in return for our little all, He will give us Himself and His great all.”