Note: Names have been changed to protect the believers' identities in this testimony.
Gael was born and raised in mainland China, in the hometown of Confucius. Her hometown carries a surprising history. Long before the gospel reached China, the Chinese people spoke of a supreme God. They called Him Shangdi, “the Lord on High,” or simply Tian, “Heaven.” For thousands of years, emperors offered sacrifices to Him, and Confucius himself spoke of Heaven as a living authority who sees and judges. Some historians, and many Chinese believers today, see in this a people who once knew the one true God.
Gael grew up in the shadow of that history, with a faint sense of Heaven but no knowledge of Jesus. She had heard of Heaven, but she didn’t know that Heaven had a name, a face, and a Son who would come for her.
When Gael was nine, her parents divorced, and her happy childhood ended. Her mother struggled with depression, though Gael wouldn’t understand that until years later. She had to care for her baby sister, who was only a year old. Life was hard, but she learned to rely on herself, and from the outside it looked like she was doing well.
Then, at the end of 2017, her own life crisis arrived. She left for the United States to find a place where no one knew her. There she met Jesus, and everything changed. Heaven finally had a name and a face. That encounter eventually led her to become a missionary, sharing the gospel with people who, like her, grew up with little access to it.
In 2021, Gael was serving as a missionary in Thailand when she learned her mother had been diagnosed with cancer. She rushed back to China, but before she finished her quarantine, the Lord took her mother home. She was only 56.
The illness lasted just 24 days, and Gael says it was filled with signs of God’s grace.
A stranger who shared the gospel. Her first thought on hearing the news was that her mother didn’t yet know Jesus. Gael reached out to a woman she had met only once, at a single prayer meeting. That very evening, this woman visited her mother and shared the full gospel, and the two women wept and prayed together. When her mother called to tell Gael what had happened, she sounded deeply moved. Having never received such care from a stranger, her heart was drawn to the love she had been looking for all her life. She decided to follow Jesus on the spot.
A sister on the ward. COVID restrictions meant neither Gael nor her sister, who were both abroad, could be with their mother in the hospital. But God arranged for a retired hospital worker with a work permit to visit her on the ward.
A church that opened its doors. After twelve days, the doctors said further treatment would not help. Gael wondered where her mother would go and how a brand-new believer could grow in her faith. Then a pastor she had never met called and offered to bring her mother to his church, where sisters would take turns caring for her, pray with her, and sing hymns with her. Her mother agreed immediately. A week later she was baptized, standing for over two hours alongside two other women. Four days after that, she sat in the sun as she always did, told the sisters not to worry about her, and fell into a deep, peaceful sleep.
A guide through goodbye. A teacher from Taiwan helped Gael understand the spiritual needs of end-of-life care. During their video calls, mother and daughter shared love, gratitude, and forgiveness. God healed the resentment Gael had carried since childhood and set her mother free from the pain in her own heart.
Looking back, Gael says: “When I was trapped in a small isolation room at a hotel, helpless as my dearest loved one was about to pass away, God did everything.”
More than 40 friends from around the world joined her mother’s memorial service online. Some began attending church. Some shared the gospel with their families more earnestly. Some began mending their relationships with their parents. Her passing was not a burial but a sowing, like a grain of wheat falling into the ground.
This became the milestone Gael keeps returning to, the place where she encountered God. She had always known the gift of salvation, but eternal life had been a distance “from head to heart.” Standing so close to death, she felt a deep gratitude for the promise of life that never ends, and it helped her cherish the present and look forward to the future.
God was not finished. As Gael shared the gospel at home, her grandmother and aunts came to faith. She wanted to find a church where they could grow, but the nearest house church was a 40-minute drive away, too far for her elderly family. She sensed God was calling her to plant a church in her own neighborhood. In prayer, she asked for two confirmations: a co-worker and a place.
Both came within a day. The pastor of the house church supported the idea and introduced her to a deacon who could partner with her. That afternoon, a sister overheard her prayer request and said, “Use our house! It’s been vacant for over two years, and it’s right in your neighborhood.”
The house was more than three times the size of a typical apartment in the area, beautifully decorated, with Bible stories painted on the walls and Christian books on the shelves. It looked like it had been prepared for exactly this purpose.
A gathering of seven grew within a month to nearly three times that number, many of them the only believers in their families. Later, many were baptized, including members of her own family.
The house that became a church is legally in her mother’s name. She was a woman who never owned a home in her lifetime of wandering. Now it is a place where people are led out of darkness into marvelous light.
“Suffering is unbearable,” Tim Keller once said, “if you aren’t certain that God is for you and with you.” Gael knows this from experience. Her suffering became a milestone because God was present in it, and the place where she met Him became a blessing to others.
It is the pattern Scripture traces from the very beginning. God blessed Abraham so that all nations might be blessed. He blesses the church through Christ so that people from every nation can come to know Him. Gael's story is the same: she was blessed so that others might be blessed. Everyone whose life is transformed becomes, in some way, a blessing to others.
So what is the greatest blessing we can give? Paul answers in 2 Corinthians 5:
“All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation... We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God.”
The best gift we can give anyone is an invitation to be reconciled to the God who has been reaching for them all along.
Please pray for believers in China, and for the work of Within Reach Global as we continue to serve those who are still far from home and far from Him.