Strangers In The Night - Ida Scudder

1870–1960

Ida Scudder didn’t want to be a missionary. Her grandfather was the first American missionary doctor to serve in India, and his seven sons, including Ida’s father, were all missionaries. Everyone assumed Ida would be one too, but she had other ideas.

After graduating from school in the States, Ida was visiting her parents in India when she had a strange night that changed everything. A man came to the door pleading for help. His wife was in labor and having difficulty. Ida promised to send her father when he got home, but the man protested. Only a woman would be permitted to tend to his wife. Ida explained that, unlike her father, she was not trained as a doctor. She could do nothing to help. The same thing happened twice more the same evening, with news of different women having trouble in childbirth. The next morning, drums beat out a message of death. All three young women had died.

“I shut myself in my room and thought very seriously about the condition of the Indian women,” Ida wrote later, “and, after much thought and prayer, I went to my father and mother and told them that I must go home and study medicine, and come back to India to help such women.”

That was the beginning of a lifelong commitment. Ida Scudder not only returned to India, but she also brought money she had raised to build a women’s hospital. She had to train her own nursing staff, and then she trained new doctors, too. That one awful night of death led to decades of giving life. Ida worked tirelessly, not only at the hospital, but also visiting the outlying villages to offer medical care. The people she served loved her. Gandhi visited. She won honors from British and Indian leaders. She raised up a new generation of doctors and nurses, forever changing the landscape of health care in that massive country.

Consider this: What unique quality do you bring to the Lord’s service? Ida realized that, as a woman, she could have an impact that male doctors couldn’t. What people can you reach, what service can you perform, that maybe no one else can?

He broke the power of death and illuminated the way to life and immortality through the Good News.

2 Timothy 1:10