5. Missionary Intent
Chapter 5
Missionary Intent
At the beginning of the new school year, Belle returned to Vancouver for her second year of teaching third graders at Cecil Rhodes School. Her heart may have been in becoming a missionary, but the reality was that she did not have the money or her parents’ blessing to forge out in that direction. She decided that all she could do was keep praying and see what happened.
The children in her class were a little easier for her to control this time around, and Belle knew her way around the curriculum much better. Once she had settled back into teaching her class, she started attending evening classes at the Vancouver Bible College as a step toward reaching her goal. However, Belle calculated that at her present rate of study at the Bible college, it would be thirty-five years before she got to the mission field!
Meanwhile, Belle had little Christian fellowship with anyone her own age in Vancouver, but she did link up with Miss Fouch, a middle-aged woman who’d had to retire early from her missionary service in Formosa because of asthma. Belle and Miss Fouch got together once a week for prayer and encouragement. Sometimes, though, Belle had to admit that it wasn’t very encouraging at all. She did not see how she could possibly escape her situation and get off to the mission field. Other people had miraculous stories of God providing for them, but Belle felt like she was just plodding along from one paycheck to the next.
Christmas, and then New Year 1924, came and went as Belle carried on teaching during the day and attending night classes. Then one evening in the spring of 1924, Belle received a phone call—a call that would change her life. A young woman named Marjorie Harrison, whom Belle had met at The Firs the previous summer, made a request that sounded a little mysterious. “I am staying at the China Inland Mission home here in Vancouver. I would like you to come over and visit me right now, if possible.”
Belle agreed, and on the tram ride to meet Marjorie she tried to imagine what the meeting could possibly be about. The two of them had spoken a few times while at The Firs, but they’d had no contact with each other since then. As far as Belle could recall, Marjorie was a candidate to be a missionary with China Inland Mission (or CIM, as most people referred to it) and should have been in China by now. What could she possibly want to talk to Belle about?
Marjorie was standing at the door of the CIM guesthouse waiting for Belle. The two women embraced each other in a big hug. “It is so wonderful to see you again, Belle!” Marjorie exclaimed. “Come up to my room. I have lots to tell you.”
Belle followed Marjorie upstairs and took a seat on a small chair while Marjorie sat on the bed. “Let me tell you what’s been happening,” Marjorie started. “I’m sure you know that I was to go out to China with CIM.”
Belle nodded. Everyone at The Firs over the summer knew that Marjorie had been planning for several years to go to China and was in the final stages of preparation.
“Things have not gone quite as I thought they would,” Marjorie continued. “Everything was ready to go, and all I had to do was get my medical examination.” Her voice then dropped. “But the doctor would not pass me. I have suffered from headaches for years, and he told me the CIM experience has been that if you are prone to headaches at home, they will be ten times worse in the heat and bustle of China.”
Belle sat in shock. “You mean you’re not going to China? After all that planning? How can they do that to you? Why don’t they let you go and see whether your headaches are really that bad?”
Marjorie smiled. “Belle, it’s fine. I prayed about the matter, and I’m fine with the decision. Of course I wanted to go, but I know God has something else for me here.”
Belle sat, still wondering why she was there. Obviously Marjorie didn’t want someone simply to commiserate with her.
Belle noted a twinkle in Marjorie’s eyes as she continued to talk. “And that brings me to where I am now. I worked and saved enough money for my passage to China, but I feel that it’s the Lord’s money. When I found that I could not go to China, I prayed about the money and asked God to show me what to do with it. Tonight Miss Fouch happened to come to dinner, and she mentioned that you have a call to be a missionary in China. Right then I knew that God was telling me to give you the money.”
Belle gulped, and she felt her eyes growing wide. For once in her life she couldn’t think of anything to say.
“And,” Marjorie continued, “I would like you to use the money to attend Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. There should be enough money to pay your train fare there as well as your first year’s tuition and board.”
Belle felt tears rolling down her cheeks. “Are you sure?” she asked. “That’s a lot of money. You could still use it, I’m sure.”
Marjorie reached out and held Belle’s hand. “I saved every penny of that money believing that it was to be used to send a missionary to China. At the time I thought that person was me, but now I believe it is you, so please let me use the money to help you get there. Of course,” she added, “you will still have to believe God for your pocket money and your second year’s tuition. Will that be an obstacle?”
“Not my biggest obstacle,” Belle responded. “Neither of my parents is happy to see me go, nor is my brother. And my father is in financial difficulties right now. I can’t think of a worse time to leave them all, unless God is calling me to go, and I believe He is.”
“Then I will believe with you,” Marjorie said, “and together we will pray that God removes the obstacles and that you are sitting in class at Moody this September!”
Belle left the China Inland Mission guesthouse in a daze. Could she really be on her way to the mission field? How would her mother ever let her go?
That weekend while visiting her parents, Belle tried once again to gently broach the subject of her becoming a missionary. But her mother, it seemed, was as determined as ever to prevent her from becoming a missionary. “Isobel Miller, haven’t I already told you, you will go over my dead body!” she yelled and then dissolved into weeping before running to her bedroom. She did not come down for the rest of the day, saying that she was too ill to get up or eat.
Belle’s father gave Belle another talking to about upsetting her mother, and Belle decided that God would have to perform another miracle because she could not see any other way to get to China.
That summer Julia Whipple invited Belle to return to The Firs and offered her work as a waitress in the cafeteria in exchange for free room and board. This time Belle jumped at the opportunity to go. There was no place she would rather be for the summer.
Belle had spoken so enthusiastically about her experience at The Firs the year before that her father decided to sign up for the summer conference as well. The two of them set out together from Victoria for Bellingham, Washington.
The main speaker at the conference at The Firs that summer was a man named James Fraser. No one in attendance at the conference seemed to know much about the man except that he was an English missionary who served with China Inland Mission.
Belle found a seat in the open-air auditorium set in a clearing amid a glade of fir trees. She sat with the other conference attendees waiting for the first evening session of the conference to get under way. After the singing of several hymns, James was introduced to the crowd. He was a slender man in his late thirties with a slightly balding hairline and blue-gray eyes. In a clipped English accent he told those gathered a little about himself. He had been born in London, and while attending university, he had felt the call to be a missionary. In 1908, at the age of twenty-two, he had gone to China to serve with China Inland Mission, where he served for sixteen years before taking his first furlough.
James told how CIM had sent him to work near the Burmese border in Yunnan Province in southern China. For the first several years of his service there, he shared the gospel with Chinese residents of the area and helped to establish small churches. During this time he often saw in the marketplace a group of people dressed in bright clothing made from strips of woven fabric sewn together. The women’s tunics were trimmed with cowrie shells and silver ringlets. As well, the people wore flat, colorful, turbanlike hats. James had noticed that the people did not speak Chinese among themselves but spoke a language he had never heard before. James learned that the people were not even Chinese. They were the Lisu, a tribe of people who lived in the mountains that bordered the Salween River Valley. James then began to tell about his first contact with the Lisu people. His description was so vivid that Belle felt like she was no longer sitting in a glade of fir trees in Washington State but had been transported to China and the mountains above the Salween River.
As James described a harrowing journey to reach a Lisu village, traveling over steep mountain trails with sheer drops to the tumultuous river at the bottom of the canyon below, Belle was there in her mind, walking right behind the missionary. She could smell the scent of pine that filled the air and feel the sharp rocks of the trail beneath her feet. When the missionary described the small cluster of houses that made up the village, jutting out on poles over the steep terrain, to Belle it was as if she were there. And when James described the Lisu people and their belief in demons and ancestor worship, Belle could almost reach out and touch the villagers.
All too soon an hour had passed and James finished his presentation, promising to take his audience back to the land of the Lisu and describe more of his work among them the following night. Belle could hardly wait. The next night she was seated early in the outdoor auditorium, waiting for the missionary to begin speaking.
When James rose to speak, he talked about the language of the Lisu. He told how the people had no written language and how over many months sitting with Lisu families in their homes he had learned to speak their language. He had begun to converse with them in something more than the little Chinese some of them could speak. Once he had learned their language, James had set about producing a written form of the language, which became known as the “Fraser Script.” He described how he and two others had begun translating the New Testament into the written form of the Lisu language. Again, Belle sat spellbound throughout the missionary’s presentation.
The following evening James talked about the great struggle at first to win converts. Despite all his efforts in learning the Lisu language and producing a written form of it and in traveling from high mountain village to high mountain village to sit and talk and share the gospel with the Lisu people, there were virtually no converts. Openly and honestly, James told how this circumstance had thrown him into a deep depression and how the arrival by mail of a Christian magazine he had never heard of before had opened his eyes to the power of prayer in all that he did. He wrote to his mother and asked her and her Christian friends to pray for him and the Lisu people, that God would open their eyes to the truth and power of the gospel.
Sure enough, things began to change among the Lisu. More and more Lisu began to accept the gospel and become Christians, leaving their reverence of demons behind and taking down and burning the household altars to their ancestors. But, as James noted, there was plenty more work to be done among the Lisu, who inhabited not only parts of China but also Burma and the mountains of Siam (Thailand), where most of the people were totally oblivious to the existence of the gospel.
On the last night of the conference at The Firs, James made an appeal to those in attendance: CIM needed more young, male missionaries to work among the Lisu people. He explained that for any man who went, it would be a challenging life, full of loneliness and sacrifice as he made his way about the mountains where the Lisu lived. It would be both physically and spiritually challenging. But it would also be a life that brought deep joy and fulfillment, knowing that he was serving God in the greatest way possible.
As she listened to James make his appeal, Belle was deeply moved. And as the missionary pleaded for male missionaries, Belle silently prayed, “I’ll go, Lord. I’m willing to go. I am not a man, but I will go…”