CHAPTER FOUR
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CHAPTER FOUR
ALWAYS A MISSIONARY
T was in October, 1944 the Kuhns flew over the Hump to India. World War II was still in full swing. Incidentally it was then they discovered that the famous Hump route hovered right over their own section of Lisuland. From India a troopship transported them as refugees over the Indian and Pacific oceans, finally landing them safely in Southern California after thirty-six difficult days aboard. With little delay they hurried off to Philadelphia. There daughter Kathryn joined them. She had been under the wing of Mr. and Mrs. George Sutherland while attending high-school. For the first time they were united as a family of four—and incidentally that was Kathryn's first introduction to her little brother.
Whether in Lisuland or America, wherever Isobel went, she was always a missionary, an effective and tactful one too, on ships, on buses, on the platform, in her home. Like an angler, she was keen to make a cast in the stream of life, hoping for a strike. To audiences of cultured people or groups of tribal folk she ee pressing on with the message of salvation through the Lord Jesus.
Behind this eagerness and explaining it in part, there was a story Isobel liked to tell against herself. Away back in Moody
Institute days, the students had been listening to an inspiring , address on soul winning, the speaker stressing the duty of speaking to someone each day. Isobel was stirred and decided that before leaving the building she would speak to someone about the Lord. Sitting at the end of the row, she waited and scanned faces nearby. Finally she asked a lady, "Are you saved?" The lady eyed her and said, "Are you one of the young missiona candidates?" "Yes," said Isobel eagerly. "Then," said the lady,
"Just pray the Lord to give you tact!"
Perhaps it was because Isobel heeded both the admonition of the speaker as well as the rebuke of the lady that she became so
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ALWAYS A MISSIONARY
_ sympathetically responsive to people in need of spiritual help.
_ If her tongue spoke out too quickly or too freely at times, at _ least it was not tied in knots Lies when she saw a chance to speak a good word for the Saviour.
1945 found the John Kuhn family in Dallas, Texas, in a home of their own, while John studied in Dallas Theological Seminary.
"In a short time," Isobel recalled, "we were having a small group come to our home every Friday night for Bible study and prayer. As I look back now, every single couple of that group reached the foreign field. Italy, Switzerland, Formosa, China,
_ the border of Nepal and the border of Afghanistan, have felt the touch of Christ through those lives."
Isobel enjoyed those days of being a good neighbour, a mother and a "keeper at home."' Yet she was aware of her one vision; she did not forget that, after all, she was essentially a missionary and that the Lisu were her special responsibility. She wrote to her tribal friends, prayed for them, and enlisted others to help in prayer. She wrote about them, too, finishing her second book,
Nests Above the Abyss.
A good friend of Isobel after reading the book with understanding expressed her reaction:
"God, look upon them tenderly The little homes that lie Up high upon the ridges Bencath the bending sky.
God, thrust abroad the messengers To reach the farthest nest That lost ones may be gathered in And numbered with the blest."
Dean I. MacLeod.
Then when the atom bomb changed many plans, John was called to return to China for an important tribal survey. Once again the couple were challenged by the motto of their married life, God first, as Mr. Kuhn sailed for China alone.
Husband and wife had no arguments with God about another separation.
1 Nests Above the Abyss, C.I.M., 1947.
ONE VISION ONLY
"The Lord gave us 2 Corinthians 4:12—'So then death worketh in us, but life in you.' We felt the separation meant 'death' in the sense of breaking up our family life, but that the Lisu
-might gain spiritually."
Returning to Lisuland with Danny in 1947 Isobel had plenty of opportunity for further sacrifices. For several months of that year she was the only white missionary in that isolated part of Lisuland. That year John's demanding duties had hardly taken him from home before she had to wrestle with sickness. Danny came down with dread typhus fever. Lisu church leaders brought their most difficult church problems to her.
Spiritual conflict and physical danger lurked all along Ma-ma's path.
"From the way she has written about the Lisu believers," Mr.
Ivan Allbutt! commented, "'one feels the throb of a missionary pulse akin to that of Paul, who wrote to his converts in Galatia,
"My little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you.' "
But when the tribesmen became Christians, they became Ma-ma's bodyguard vigilantly keeping watch over her when she was alone, her defender when thieves and base men were skulking about at night.
In 1948 the village of Oak Flat was invaded by a band of Communist brigands. They were led by a Chinese named Dai
Yi-gwan, "A man who was my personal enemy,"' said Ma-ma.
"Thad found him out in oppressing the poor Lisu and I had stood .
_up for the people. He hated me from that day on. He was like a demon incarnate. I shudder to think what would have been my fate if God had not uprooted me and sent me across the Salween ;
River just out of his reach."
When the missionaries moved, the Rainy Season Bible School also moved. In fact, Lucius, who had been Ma-ma's faithful
Lisu assistant for years, not only supervised their removal to the Village of Olives, but built them a new house near his own. And Lisu friends, one hundred and fifty of them, lugged piles of logs from the forests to construct their house. They did not halt in their gift of labour till they also had made permanent plans for 1 CIM. Publication Secretary for North America.
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the R.S.B.S. They constructed dormitories to accommodate one hundred persons. Isobel said, "Laughter and perspiration were
J, 8 in good measure and as I sat watching them I prayed in my heart that we might be worthy of their labours of love.
Lucius had told me of one poor family who between them must have given almost forty days of free work on our house."" And they a their own buckwheat crop wait while they gave this labour for the Lord's sake.
Such love more than compensated for Ma-ma's hardships. She met her rewards every day—smiling ones on their sandalled feet!
They kept filing by her shanty door—Lisu she had mothered, "walking in the faith."" As she reviewed them she agreed with the Apostle Paul when he declared that his children in the faith were his glory and joy.
"Tl never forget the inspiration it was being with those Lisu Christians, and seeing their love and devotion, not only to the Lord, but also to their missionaries." Such was Mrs. Estella
Kirkman's testimony after living at the Village of Olives. She had gone there in 1948 to teach Child Evangelism in the R.S.B.S.
"Every afternoon the students would get out and play volley ball, and how Isobel enjoyed watching them! She dbsred and entered thoroughly into their fun." And at other times she entered as sympathetically into their trials.
Isobel balanced her rewarding experiences against those of some people she formerly observed in America. How she pitied that couple! They were childless and alone, daily going out to work just to maintain their richly ordered home. Living for their possessions. "I had a desolating sense of barrenness sweep over me," said Isobel, "and I felt the contrast and aching tragedy of those two lives, with all their God-given possibilities spent on things. What a terrible waste!' she exclaimed. "Oh, that we would awaken to the real values of life! And then I thought of my life, I thought of the flocks of dear warm-hearted fica that run to meet us, that shout with joy at the sight of 'their missionaries,' that cry "Thank you!' with shining eyes of gratitude after a message that has fed their hearts, that pray for us every day— lives that are beautiful in their unconscious selflessness, made so by the power of His cross."
She thrilled with the new life apparent in those who once had
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been dismally heathen. She felt elated with the joy of the illiterates as they learned to read. She sighed with relief when suffering bodies were cleaned up and healed, characters and homes transformed. She exulted over shy young Christians as they budded into bright teachers and blossomed into self-sacrificing evangelists. To her it was pure joy to know that by them the amazing story of Christ's death for every sinner was being sung and preached and demonstrated, far and wide.
— Isobel's imagination could go climbing over the mountains and hear tribal voices echoing what they had heard in the R.S.B.S. Some from even as far as Burma and Nepal had heard the good news from her lips at those classes.
She once wrote to friends who prayed for her and her work, "How I will rejoice in heaven when I see some of you get your rewards! We missionaries get so many on earth here that I wonder if there will be much left to get up yonder!"
Years before, when Isobel was still at college, she had dreamed of being a college dean of girls. But as a foreign missionary, her desire to inspire and help others was not only fulfilled, but rewarded in excess of anything she had ever dreamed.
Seriously Isobel had accepted the challenge of a greater missionary teacher when he said, "The things that thou hast heard of me... the same commit thou to faithful men who shall be able to teach others also" (2 Timothy 2:2). One of Isobel's "faithful men' was named "Second Thomas." With her characteristic friendliness she had kept in touch with him while she was on ~ furlough in 1945. His response she well might have regarded as ample reward for the life-blood she invested in China's tribesland.
"Oak Flat, October 8, 1945 "Big Sister in America, "Because of fellowship with my beloved Jesus Christ, I, Second
Thomas, the slave of Jesus Christ, send greetings to the spiritual mother who has helped my soul and whom I cannot forget but wish to reach by paper.
"Eh-eh Ma-ma, I got the letter you wrote me and the family photo. It was a great joy to me and a heart comfort. I am thanking you. I cannot reach you with my voice but I wish I could have fellowship with you.
ALWAYS A MISSIONARY
— "Eh-ch, it was God's pleasure that I was at Oak Flat those four years. I know it. Ma-ma if it had not been for your teaching and exhorting and for God's keeping, I would have forgotten God and been a wicked fellow, I know it. But God in the fullness of His pity saved me. But here I came to teach, and I studied, and read and woke up and was careful and kept myself" (he quotes the words of Jude 21). "'I thank God very very much.
"In April I had a great sorrow because of this old nature of mine. I was heartbroken with grief. I know it was because I lost my temper. I confessed in front of everybody that it was not God's will. I've been ashamed many times. Please pray for me.
"The writer is the son your spirit bore.
"Second Thomas."