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About the Book
"The Mortification of Sin" by John Owen is a Christian theological work that focuses on the process of killing off sin in one's life. Owen emphasizes the importance of understanding the nature of sin and the need for continual self-examination and repentance in order to overcome it. The book provides practical guidance and encouragement for believers seeking to live a life of holiness and obedience to God.
Gladys Aylward
Gladys Aylward was born in London in 1904 (or a few years earlier). She worked for several years as a parlormaid, and then attended a revival meeting at which the preacher spoke of dedicating one's life to the service of God. Gladys responded to the message, and soon after became convinced that she was called to preach the Gospel in China. At the age of 26, she became a probationer at the China Inland Mission Center in London, but was failed to pass the examinations. She worked at other jobs and saved her money. Then she heard of a 73-year-old missionary, Mrs. Jeannie Lawson, who was looking for a younger woman to carry on her work. Gladys wrote to Mrs. Lawson and was accepted if she could get to China. She did not have enough money for the ship fare, but did have enough for the train fare, and so in October of 1930 she set out from London with her passport, her Bible, her tickets, and two pounds ninepence, to travel to China by the Trans-Siberian Railway, despite the fact that China and the Soviet Union were engaged in an undeclared war. She arrived in Vladivostok and sailed from there to Japan and from Japan to Tientsin, and thence by train, then bus, then mule, to the inland city of Yangchen, in the mountainous province of Shansi, a little south of Peking (Beijing). Most of the residents had seen no Europeans other than Mrs. Lawson and now Miss Aylward. They distrusted them as foreigners, and were not disposed to listen to them.
Yangchen was an overnight stop for mule caravans that carried coal, raw cotton, pots, and iron goods on six-week or three-month journeys. It occurred to the two women that their most effective way of preaching would be to set up an inn. The building in which they lived had once been an inn, and with a bit of repair work could be used as one again. They laid in a supply of food for mules and men, and when next a caravan came past, Gladys dashed out, grabbed the rein of the lead mule, and turned it into their courtyard. It went willingly, knowing by experience that turning into a courtyard meant food and water and rest for the night. The other mules followed, and the muleteers had no choice. They were given good food and warm beds at the standard price, and their mules were well cared for, and there was free entertainment in the evening--the inkeepers told stories about a man named Jesus. After the first few weeks, Gladys did not need to kidnap customers -- they turned in at the inn by preference. Some became Christians, and many of them (both Christians and non-Christians) remembered the stories, and retold them more or less accurately to other muleteers at other stops along the caravan trails. Gladys practiced her Chinese for hours each day, and was becoming fluent and comfortable with it. Then Mrs. Lawson suffered a severe fall, and died a few days later. Gladys Aylward was left to run the mission alone, with the aid of one Chinese Christian, Yang, the cook.
A few weeks after the death of Mrs. Lawson, Miss Aylward met the Mandarin of Yangchen. He arrived in a sedan chair, with an impressive escort, and told her that the government had decreed an end to the practice of footbinding. (Note: Among the upper and middle classes, it had for centuries been the custom that a woman's foot should be wrapped tightly in bandages from infancy, to prevent it from growing. Thus grown women had extremely tiny feet, on which they could walk only with slow, tottering steps, which were thought to be extremely graceful.) The government needed a foot-inspector, a woman (so that she could invade the women's quarters without scandal), with her own feet unbound (so that she could travel), who would patrol the district enforcing the decree. It was soon clear to them both that Gladys was the only possible candidate for the job, and she accepted, realizing that it would give her undreamed-of opportunities to spread the Gospel.
During her second year in Yangchen, Gladys was summoned by the Mandarin. A riot had broken out in the men's prison. She arrived and found that the convicts were rampaging in the prison courtyard, and several of them had been killed. The soldiers were afraid to intervene. The warden of the prison said to Gladys, "Go into the yard and stop the rioting." She said, "How can I do that?" The warden said, "You have been preaching that those who trust in Christ have nothing to fear." She walked into the courtyard and shouted: "Quiet! I cannot hear when everyone is shouting at once. Choose one or two spokesmen, and let me talk with them." The men quieted down and chose a spokesman. Gladys talked with him, and then came out and told the warden: "You have these men cooped up in crowded conditions with absolutely nothing to do. No wonder they are so edgy that a small dispute sets off a riot. You must give them work. Also, I am told that you do not supply food for them, so that they have only what their relatives send them. No wonder they fight over food. We will set up looms so that they can weave cloth and earn enough money to buy their own food." This was done. There was no money for sweeping reforms, but a few friends of the warden donated old looms, and a grindstone so that the men could work grinding grain. The people began to call Gladys Aylward "Ai-weh-deh," which means "Virtuous One." It was her name from then on.
Soon after, she saw a woman begging by the road, accompanied by a child covered with sores and obviously suffering severe malnutrition. She satisfied herself that the woman was not the child's mother, but had kidnapped the child and was using it as an aid to her begging. She bought the child for ninepence--a girl about five years old. A year later, "Ninepence" came in with an abandoned boy in tow, saying, "I will eat less, so that he can have something." Thus Ai-weh-deh acquired a second orphan, "Less." And so her family began to grow.... She was a regular and welcome visitor at the palace of the Mandarin, who found her religion ridiculous, but her conversation stimulating. In 1936, she officially became a Chinese citizen. She lived frugally and dressed like the people around her (as did the missionaries who arrived a few years after in in the neighboring town of Tsechow, David and Jean Davis and their young son Murray, of Wales), and this was a major factor in making her preaching effective.
Then the war came. In the spring of 1938, Japanese planes bombed the city of Yangcheng, killing many and causing the survivors to flee into the mountains. Five days later, the Japanese Army occupied Yangcheng, then left, then came again, then left. The Mandarin gathered the survivors and told them to retreat into the mountains for the duration. He also announced that he was impressed by the life of Ai-weh-deh and wished to make her faith his own. There remained the question of the convicts at the jail. The traditional policy favored beheading them all lest they escape. The Mandarin asked Ai-weh-deh for advice, and a plan was made for relatives and friends of the convicts to post a bond guaranteeing their good behavior. Every man was eventually released on bond. As the war continued Gladys often found herself behind Japanese lines, and often passed on information, when she had it, to the armies of China, her adopted country. She met and became friends with "General Ley," a Roman Catholic priest from Europe who had teken up arms when the Japanese invaded, and now headed a guerilla force. Finally he sent her a message. The Japanese are coming in full force. We are retreating. Come with us." Angry, she scrawled a Chinese note, Chi Tao Tu Pu Twai, "Christians never retreat!" He sent back a copy of a Japanese handbill offering $100 each for the capture, dead or alive, of (1) the Mandarin, (2) a prominent merchant, and (3) Ai-weh-deh. She determined to flee to the government orphanage at Sian, bringing with her the children she had accumulated, about 100 in number. (An additional 100 had gone ahead earlier with a colleague.) With the children in tow, she walked for twelve days. Some nights they found shelter with friendly hosts. Some nights they spent unprotected on the mountainsides. On the twelfth day, they arrived at the Yellow River, with no way to cross it. All boat traffic had stopped, and all civilian boats had been seized to keep them out of the hands of the Japanese. The children wanted to know, "Why don't we cross?" She said, "There are no boats." They said, "God can do anything. Ask Him to get us across." They all knelt and prayed. Then they sang. A Chinese officer with a patrol heard the singing and rode up. He heard their story and said, "I think I can get you a boat." They crossed, and after a few more difficulties Ai-weh-deh delivered her charges into competent hands at Sian, and then promptly collapsed with typhus fever and sank into delirium for several days.
As her health gradually improved, she started a Christian church in Sian, and worked elsewhere, including a settlement for lepers in Szechuan, near the borders of Tibet. Her health was permanently impaired by injuries received during the war, and in 1947 she returned to England for a badly needed operation. She remained in England, preaching there.
In 1957, Alan Burgess wrote a book about her, The Small Woman. It was condensed in The Reader's Digest, and made into a movie called The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, starring Ingrid Bergman. When Newsweek magazine reviewed the movie, and summarized the plot, a reader, supposing the story to be fiction, wrote in to say, "In order for a movie to be good, the story should be believable!" Miss Gladys Aylward, the Small Woman, Ai-weh-deh, died 3 January 1970.
The Blissful and Trivial Life - How Entertainment Deprives a Soul
When we, as a society, stopped reading and started watching, we began thinking and talking less — at least with the same substance or effectiveness. That was the bright red flag Neil Postman began waving in the sixties, captured for future generations in his classic work, Amusing Ourselves to Death. The book was published in 1985, the year before I was born. With the introduction of the television, Postman observed, entertainment did not merely become a bigger and bigger part of our lives — it became our lives. And everything else in our lives — news, politics, education, even religion — was increasingly forced to perform on its stage. Suddenly, everything had to be entertaining. Newspapers gave way to “the nightly news”; classroom lessons made their way to Sesame Street; worship services transformed into televised concerts with TED talks. “The television slowly taught us that nothing was worth our time unless it was entertaining.” The television slowly taught us that nothing was worth our time unless it was entertaining. And anything entertaining, almost by definition, requires less of us — less thinking, less study, less work. Entertainment, after all, isn’t meant to be taken seriously. But when everything is entertainment, doesn’t that mean little, if anything, can be taken seriously? For those who take the glory of God seriously, and our joy in him seriously, that becomes a very serious question. What Will Ruin Society? Postman warned about this devolution long before others noticed what was happening. He writes, [George] Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in [Aldous] Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity, and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. . . . In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right. (Amusing Ourselves to Death, xix) When he wrote those words, television had only been around for thirty years (invented much earlier, but not common in households until the fifties). The internet would not become publicly available until the 90s. Social media didn’t come along for another fifteen years (and really didn’t become widespread until the iPhone in 2007, several years after Postman died). If Postman was right about the early years of television, how much more today — a day when we no longer have to schedule time to sit and watch our favorite shows, but carry our entertainment with us literally everywhere we go? If entertainment could control our lives from a small box in the living room, how much more so when it’s nearly surgically attached to us on our phones? Postman, I believe, was more correct than even he realized — and the implications are not just social or cultural, but spiritual. Irrelevance Binds Us What makes television such a terror to the collective mind of a culture? Postman begins by arguing that the “medium is the metaphor.” Meaning, any given medium — whether text, television, or social media — doesn’t only distribute content, but unavoidably shapes the content. How we consume, he argues, is as important as what we consume. Mediums determine how we take in information. For instance, over time typography (despite its own limitations) generally taught us to follow arguments, test conclusions, and expose contradiction. Television, by contrast, consistently does away with arguments, strips away context, and darts from one image to the next. Television, however, not only teaches us a new way to process information, but it also floods us with information and from far beyond our everyday lives. The telegraph, of course, had begun doing this with words long before the television, but notice what was happening then, even with the telegraph: In the information world created by telegraphy, everything became everyone’s business. For the first time, we were sent information which answered no question we had asked, and which, in any case, did not permit the right of reply. We may say then that the contribution of the telegraph to public discourse was to dignify irrelevance and amplify impotence. (68–69) For the most part, the kind of information that would interest people in both Los Angeles and Minneapolis, would need to be nonessential to life in either place (irrelevance), and all the more so with news from around the globe. Stories had to transcend ordinary life in a real place (part of the appeal for people looking to escape the malaise of ordinary life). And, for the most part, the information had to be the kind of information neither could do anything about (impotence). Postman asks a pointed question of all our media consumption: “How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve?” (68). Television only made the irrelevance that much more accessible and that much more appealing (actual images and videos of celebrities doing everyday activities as opposed to the short descriptions the telegraph could produce). And how much more is this the case through social media? We know more and more about our favorite athletes, actors, and musicians and yet often less and less about our neighbors and the places where we might actually make a difference. Worth a Thousand Images But isn’t a picture worth a thousand words? In 1921, the marketer Fred Bernard famously said so, promoting the use of images for advertising on the side of streetcars. He was probably right as far as streetcars go. If you want to make a memorable impression on someone in a couple seconds, by all means use a picture — but is this effective communication or just effective marketing? Maybe it’s more accurate to say a picture is worth a thousand more sales, or clicks, or likes. Even then, though, can a picture really convey what a consumer needs to know about a new phone, or clothing line, or dish soap? For serious shoppers, haven’t we learned that one coherent sentence of honest description might be worth a thousand pictures? Postman saw that as images overtake words as the dominant form of communication in a society, communication invariably suffers. “I will try to demonstrate that as typography move to the periphery of our culture and television takes to place at the center, the seriousness, clarity and, above all, value of public discourse dangerously declines” (29). We descend into “a vast triviality,” he says. We get sillier. As he attempts to summarize his warning to the ever-entertained, he says, “Our Ministry of Culture is Huxleyan, not Orwellian. It does everything possible to encourage us to watch continuously. But what we watch is a medium which presented information in a form that renders it simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical, and noncontextual; That is to say, information packaged as entertainment. In America, we are never denied the opportunity to amuse ourselves” (141). In the Beginning Was the Word According to Neil Postman, America (and much of the modern world) has laid our collective minds on the altar of entertainment. But why should followers of Christ care about television (or websites or social media)? Should we spend much time worrying about how much we watch and how little we read? Yes, because the fullest Christian life is firmly anchored in words and sentences and paragraphs. When God revealed himself to his chosen people, of all the infinite ways he could have done so, he chose to unveil himself with words. “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son” (Hebrews 1:1–2). God didn’t build a gallery or start a YouTube channel, he wrote a Book (2 Timothy 3:16). “In the beginning was the Word. . . . And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:1, 14). From the beginning, God has put the Word, his Son, at the center of reality, and, in doing so, he has given words unusual power and importance in anticipating, explaining, and celebrating him. Yes, the heavens are declaring the glory of God (Psalm 19:1). Yes, his eternal power and divine nature have been seen, from the beginning, in the things that have been made (Romans 1:20). But “faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Romans 10:17). For now, faith looks “not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:18). And we look to the unseen through words. We may see God in mountains and oceans and galaxies, but we only know him savingly through sentences. He wrote the story that way. Serious Joy in Silly Days If the way we’re using entertainment erodes our ability to reflect, reason, and savor truth, it erodes our ability to know and enjoy Jesus. “Blessed is the man . . . [whose] delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night” (Psalm 1:1–2). If we lose the ability to think, we lose the ability to meditate. And if we lose the ability to meditate, we lose our path to meaningful happiness. The life of the mind, and heart, is a pivotal battleground in the pursuit of real and abundant life. “The life of the mind is a pivotal battleground in the pursuit of real and abundant life.” The medium is not the enemy — television and YouTube and Instagram are not the enemy. But if Postman was right, the medium can be wielded by our world, our flesh, and our enemy when we soak up entertainment and ignore the consequences. What, if any, of your entertainment habits need to be curbed or redirected for the sake of your soul? What are ways you are seeking to cultivate the spiritual gift of your mind — slower Bible study or memorization, reading substantive books, meaningful conversation with friends, more time in unhurried reflection and meditation? As we learn to guard and nurture our minds as our God-given pathways to God, the kinds of mindless entertainment that are undoing millions today will be far less appealing and far less dangerous. And we will find pleasures deeper, and far more enduring, than what we see on our screens. Article by Marshall Segal Staff writer, desiringGod.org
