The following is based on Women of Grace and Guts by Julia Jones and published by Day One.
Women of Grace and Guts uncovers accounts untold for 100 years of women who gave their all for Christ in India. Their testimonies counter a present narrative that missionaries destroyed culture and should have left people to continue in their own religious traditions. However, those who benefitted from these labours, along with their descendants, would strongly disagree with such a view. The book looks particularly at three amazing women missionaries, but we will just meet one in this article: Winifred Booth.
Awakening
Born in Madras (now Chennai) in the Tamil Nadu region of Southern India, Winifred was the fourth generation of a ‘British India’ family. In 1881, Winifred’s father took his wife and seven-year-old daughter on a tour of duty a couple of hundred miles from their Madras home. Due to bad weather, they became stranded and the only accommodation available to them was a simple three-walled pilgrim shelter.
Winifred’s parents soon managed to get to sleep, but seven-year-old Winifred was scared and could not rest. Directly facing the pilgrim shelter was a hideous image of the Hindu god Ganesan, gaudily painted and with red glass eyes which had lights burning behind them. It felt to the young Winfred that these eyes were fixed on her. When her terror had become almost unbearable, familiar words came into Winifred’s mind, but in a way that she had not heard them before. Her mother had often quoted the text, ‘Eyes they have, but they see not’ (Psalm 135:16).
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