Educating, Inspiring, and Motivating Christian Women

Lou Xiaoying – Modern Guardian Angel

How far would you go to save a life? The purpose of this blog is to encourage women to live a life that is honoring to the Lord Jesus Christ. All of the stories on this blog are about women, and most of them are stories specifically about an individual woman who bravely faced down her culture to serve the Lord by doing what is right no matter the circumstances.

This week’s posting is about a remarkable Chinese woman who rescued over thirty babies, abandoned in the streets or even in dumpsters. I do not know if Lou Xiaoying thought about God. She lives in a Communist country. But there is no question about her love, compassion, and courage in spite of the fact that her government is hostile to the things that she has done.  There is no doubt that she puts those of us living in a comfortable, relatively free country to shame.

What have you done lately to save the life of a helpless being? What have you contributed to the Pro-Life cause? Time and again on this blog, I have tried to encourage women to do whatever they can, no matter how insignificant it may seem, to just do something. (See the postings under the “Social Commentary” category.)

Do we need to have an oppressive government before we will wake up? Must we suffer persecution before we get it?

Lou Xiaoying’s story is popular on the Internet right now. You can go and find the complete account in many places. I would like to just quote the main part from LifeSiteNews.com.

BY Kathleen Gilbert

JINHUA, ZHIEJIANG PROVINCE, China, July 30, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) –

Although 88-year-old Lou Xiaoying may now be close to death, she will not soon be forgotten in her home city of Jinhua.

The Daily Mail on Monday recorded the astonishing story of the elderly woman, whose meager living recycling trash did not stop her from bringing home and caring for all the abandoned infants she came across – all 30 of them.

“I realised if we had strength enough to collect garbage, how could we not recycle something as important as human lives,” she said.

“These children need love and care. They are all precious human lives. I do not understand how people can leave such a vulnerable baby on the streets.”

Under China’s one-child policy parents must obtain a pregnancy permit or face severe penalties, and it is estimated that some 35,000 abortions are committed per day in the country – many of them forced. Investigations have revealed that human rights abuses under the policy are rampant, with family planning police often dealing with “illegal pregnancies” through forced abortions and infanticide.

The woman says her rescue effort began in 1972, when she found a little girl “lying amongst the junk on the street, abandoned.”

Today, Lou suffers from kidney failure, and pictures show her on a hospital bed, where two smiling children interact with her.

Her youngest child, seven-year-old Zhang Qilin, was found in a dustbin as an infant when Lou was 82 years old.

“Even though I was already getting old I could not simply ignore the baby and leave him to die in the trash. He looked so sweet and so needy. I had to take him home with me,” she said.

Last week, outrage shook the Internet when it was revealed a premature baby girl in Anshan city, Liaoning province, had been thrown in the trash with umbilical cord still attached, in a plastic bag with her throat cut. Doctors said she would have died of suffocation within minutes, and had the cut been any deeper, it would certainly have taken the baby girl’s life.

One fan quoted by the Daily Mail said that Lou’s remarkable charity to unwanted infants has put China’s Communist Party to shame and made her a local hero.

“She is shaming to governments, schools and people who stand by and do nothing. She has no money or power but she saved children from death or worse,” said the fan.

I would like to add that she is also shaming Christians who name the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ who blithely live their lives as if there aren’t thousands of babies being brutally murdered every day in the abortion clinics.

Lou Xiaoying has been called a “modern-day guardian angel, who selflessly protected the children she found and gave them a home with lots of love. She did not have money to give and there were no good moments that she had to help, but she did anyways. She gave her life and devoted her time and love to raising the rescued children the best she could. Lou Xiaoying gave over 30 children the one item that money or any material items could not buy, and that was the love of a selfless woman.”

Lou paid for the upkeep of the children by recycling the trash that she found and collected for that purpose.

Every child that Lou rescued was placed in a home. Most of these were friends of Lou and her husband. They were so impressed with her selfless acts of love that they felt compelled to extend the compassion to the children themselves. She inspired others with her love all of her life and is now dying of kidney failure at age 88. Even on her hospital bed, she puts others before herself. She exemplified that Christ-like characteristic better than many Christians do.

Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves; do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others. Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant… (Philippians 2:3-7).

Lou Xiaoying was very different from most people. I am ashamed to say, even very different from most people in our country.  How very tragic that many who call themselves Christians believe that abortion is ok. There is something really wrong here when an ostensibly non-Christian woman can see the beauty of life when we can’t. How the Lord Jesus must be weeping when He sees how selfish we are.

I am really happy to share this story of a woman who was truly generous and giving even in poor circumstances. It should shame us, but it should also be an encouragement that all you need is compassion. The time to do something is NOW. Let this story encourage you to pray for the unborn and their mothers.

Then, if you have never joined a Pro-Life group or given to one, do it now. There are many loving people on the front lines of the Pro-Life movement, unsung heroes and heroines, who are rescuing babies. Will you be one of them?

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None of us can control every situation we find ourselves in. What we can control is how we react when things turn against us. 
~ Wangari Maathai