Over a century has passed since the founder of the China Inland Mission, Hudson Taylor, has gone to Heaven. He was a man with great vision, and in the early days when China was still murdering people who came in as foreigners especially foreigners who wanted to inject any new ideas about God or religion Hudson Taylor went to China and spent his life there. He did not go by plane, as many of us have done, because there were no planes. In fact, there weren’t even many roads. It is said that Hudson Taylor walked so much that his feet were calloused. There were huge, thick callouses on his feet that made it painful for him to walk in the latter years of his life. Bones gave way a bit, still he kept walking until the day of his death because there was so much to be done.
So Hudson Taylor, through all the years of his life, walked to get to these people – to reach new areas with the news that Jesus loves sinners.
As he grew older, his wife became too feeble to go with him on his long journeys. Far back in the interior China, where Hudson Taylor died, she’d wait in the village, eager for the twilight when her husband would come home. He would come finally, his frail body absolutely at the breaking point and worn out beaten down with the sun, thirsty, tired; and those feet would be aching, aching, aching from the walk.
He would come in and put aside his garments, and his wife would come with a wash basin. Looking up to that noble face, and seeing there all the love of Jesus for the lost and for these Chinese, she would weep a little at the price she saw it cost her husband to keep on going. Then she would put that wash basin, just an ordinary old tin wash basin, on the floor, and she would fill it with warm water.
Then, old as she was and unable to walk out through the villages as he did, she would get on her knees with a little towel and a little bit of soap and wash those gnarled and calloused and knobby old feet, and with her aching hands would massage them.
Time and time again, he would tell her where he had been for Jesus that day. He would talk about the demon possessed he had prayed for; or the woman with a great cancer as an open sore on her leg that he pointed to Jesus; or the little village where he had gone where there were fifty to sixty percent of the people blind or going blind with trachoma, and where he had talked about Jesus who came to restore sight to the blind.
He would tell his story, and she would just massage his feet and wash them. Finally, when she had done the best she could to ease the burning pain in those joints worn out for Jesus, time and time again she would just look up and say, “Hudson, its been a busy day, and you are tired; and I just want you to know that like your face that shines for Jesus, these feet too, are beautiful. They are not only beautiful to me, but to your Lord; for He said, “How beautiful upon the mountain are the feet of them that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace; that bringeth good tidings of good, that publisheth salvation … ” (Isaiah 52:7). Maybe you are saying that you have been ignored, and your gifts and talents are despised. Maybe you are just doing what seems the most ordinary, commonplace things among men. All you have to use or work with or give to God is your feet. God makes the humblest and most despised beautiful.
God wants you to give Him the despised, the humdrum things in your life- like feet- and let Him make them beautiful.
The Gospel Standard