CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SIX
OUTSTANDING GIRL
'fey Chicago a ruddy beaming face welcomed Isobel. It rose like the sun from the cloud of strange faces at the depot. Dr.
Isaac Page, who had known Isobel since her childhood, grasped her suitcase and piloted her through traffic to Moody Bible
Institute.
After her registration he took her for an ice-cream soda, eager to hear how the Lord had manceuvred her through the phase of college doubts and worldly allurements into new life objectives.
Nine years previously Isobel had been at the docks in Vancouver to wave Dr. and Mrs. Page away to China. At that time, when he had challenged her with "We're going to pray you out to the mission field, Isobel," she just retorted "How mean of you,
Daddy Page!' Now as she told him how the Lord had been answering his patient prayers, tears of joy ran down his round cheeks.
For the first few months at the Institute gifts covered Isobel's expenses for board and room. But there were other needs; sharp winds snapped out a warning that a Chicago winter demanded warmer clothes than she had brought from Vancouver. And, to her dismay, she learned that first-term students were not allowed to supplement their funds by taking employment.
One day when Dr. Page was checking on how Isobel was getting on, she confided in him: "I'm not to work the first term.
Cael say that's the ruling for everybody. I don't know yet what Pll do."
"We'll pray about it," was Isaac Page's only comment.
A aes of days later he sought her out. "I've got permission from the Dean to take you round the corner to introduce you to someone.
"Round the corner" led them to a bank and "someone" proved to be the bank's manager.
The introduction left Dr. Page one hundred dollars poorer
event
OUTSTANDING GIRL
and Isobel with one hundred dollars in a newly-opened bank account. While she stammered her remonstrance her benefactor eee her by saying, "Your father has given me as much as is and more in past years. This is just a small return to him
—take it that way."
So Isobel thanked him but kept wondering how a poor C.I.M. missionary could find $100 to give away all of a sudden like that.
"Some twenty years later when, on a furlough, I met Dr.
Page and decided to ask him, "Was it a legacy?' He threw back his head and just laughed till he cried. "No, Isobel,' he said, hilariously wiping the tears away, "We just emptied our bank account, that was all. We figured that we were old-timers in the life of faith and you just a beginner. It would be easier for us than for you to trust the Lord. A legacy? Oh-ho-ho!' and off he went laughing again."
For several years Dr. Page was based at Chicago as regional secretary for the C.I.M. During Isobel's two years at the Institute she found him and his wife standing by her side in every emergency, counselling her, praying for her. And she was only one of hundreds they helped.
"She was the outstanding girl at Moody those days," said a woman who knew her there. And comments by another fellowstudent fill out the picture. "In the autumn of 1925
Isobel was a Junior when I entered as a new student. I greatly admired her as she led our women's devotions or in the music for them in Chapel. Isobel was not perfect; she was human and young.
She had the faults which naturally accompanied her greater virtues. Whole-hearted and immediate in her own response to God herself, she did at times lack patience with weaker ones. She had a consuming zeal for their good and the glory of God, which occasionally lacked knowledge of the fact that the Holy Spirit had to be allowed time to do His work in a struggling soul.
Once on a deputation assignment, when there was no response from a group of young people to the plea of the leader of the grou ee volunteers for eo missionary service, Isobel impulsively darted to the front of the room and made such an impassioned and rebuking speech that one teen-ager, who had no call for such work and was really unfit for its spiritual and physical demands, went forward from sheer shame, responding
ONE VISION ONLY
to Isobel rather than to the Lord. Of course that was the end of this girl's missionary career!
"On another occasion she laid hold of a fellow-student who had volunteered for foreign missionary service and sought to compel her to attend a Saturday afternoon Student Volunteer meeting just about to begin. The girl hesitated. Isobel charged her with indecision in her own call, and with fear of letting = colours be known, whereas there were two factors in the situation of which Isobel was in ignorance. One was the fact that the girl had a high temperature and was on the way to the Infirmary, and the other was the fact that in the girl's home church a discerning pastor had warned his inner circle of young nee against the modernism at that time creeping into the tee ip of this movement, although of course the Moody Institute branch of it was sound. I know, because I was the girl in this case!
The incident, though remembered, never affected my love for Isobel and our fellowship. Years later, when she was a mellow, mature and very wise teacher of young women, I asked her if she remembered thus 'nailing' me. She did not, of course, and was horrified at the thought.
"But at times, she had the wisdom of the Spirit far, far beyond her own years, far beyond the years of many a much older
Christian. Watching her, I gained the impression which has never been altered: that Isobel walked habitually in a straight line—the straight and narrow line of the known will of God.
Many of us circumnavigated in curves of ease or evasion or postponement of duty. Not Isobel. Therefore she had time and strength for a prodigious amount of work, good work, of all kinds; employment for financial needs—a heavy assignment as waitress at the big Montgomery Ward's cafeteria—sewing and grooming so that she always looked lovely; excellence in class work; a large amount of extra-curricular work on behalf of missions, deputation meetings, prayer meetings and personal friendships (which often, as in my case, amounted to a spiritual . ministry)—with many of her schoolmates. She was instant and constant in obedience to her understanding of God's will; and that understanding was usually a safe guide, for she took time to be alone with God in His Word."
So Isobel's life had a wide intake and a full overflow.
OUTSTANDING GIRL
Of the contributing streams of influence that poured into her _ receptive heart, Dr. Robert Hall Glover was one of the most important. As head of the Missions Course, he underlined certain principles to his students which Isobel practised from then on; "Keep mentally alert; read contemporary publications. Keep v Seip fit; feed on the best of spiritual books. Set aside time
'or reading every day." Probably much of Isobel's output as a writer could be traced to the source of good reading habits.
She remembered, too, Dr. Glover's emphasis on keeping up in personal appearance. This precept Isobel did not neglect even when she later was living far off among earth's humblest gears And in Chicago how it irked her to wear torn and illitting uniforms when she dashed around as a rush-hour waitress in a large untidy lunch room! Things like this, hard and uncongenial, she allowed to work out death to her pride and impatience.
: ai through difficulties or praying them out of the way was Isobel's chosen pattern. For instance, up came the problem of finding a whole hour each day to be alone with the Lord. That demanded some careful planning. Thirty minutes in the evening was not so hard—but that morning half-hour!
"At 6.30 a.m. I was due in the dining-room to set tables. I tried getting up at five but my health suffered. After various efforts I found I could maintain normal weight if I rose at 5.30.
But where to get alone? My roommate slept through till nearly breakfast time and might be disturbed by a light at such an early hour. The only place I could find was the cleaning closet! So each morning I stole down the hall, turned the Sita: pail upside down for a seat and in spite of mops and dust-rags, hanging around my head, I had a precious half-hour with the Master."
A friend noted that Isobel always seemed to have time to pray with others about their troubles, and that she was patient and forgiving, too, if anyone did not seem to appreciate her.
Appreciating Isobel, however, was not hard for most people.
In fact, she was the popular choice of her senior class for their woman valedictorian.
And to top off all others who admired her, along came a stalWart young student, John B. Kuhn. He and his sister Ka were also pledged to the Lord for foreign service under the
he a, ,
ONE VISION ONLY
C.LM. Was it that factor that released the brakes in Isobel's mind and in due time shot John ahead of all others in her estimation?
Isobel tells the storyof their first meeting in this way: "We met in the kitchen of the Moody Bible Institute at Chicago, in the year 1924. We were both students, having to work our way om ot wholly, through school. He had the job of running the dishwashing machine. I was, at that important moment, in the line of waitresses, waiting for the hot food to carry to the tables. It wanted but one minute for the bell to ring which would set us all in motion. I was a new student, burning with impatience to get through my training, so that I might be God's messenger to the Lisu tribe of the China~Burma border. So as I waited I thought disconsolately, "Two years more of this before I can get there.'
| "Quite unknown to me, the dish-washer had also gone into a day-dream, waiting for that bell to ring. He had one foot up on a chair, and with chin in his hand, he was dreaming out into space, unconscious that it was in the direction of the line of waitresses. As I turned quickly, I suddenly found myself falling down into the well of two blue, blue eyes. Down, down I went, until soul met soul, and the shock brought us to ourselves—both of us. Quickly each turned away and tried to get busy with something else; but it had happened. We had met, although I did not even know his name. It was three months before we were formally introduced, yet every day I had to pass him, in order to put away certain dishes. We never looked at one another nor spoke, yet somehow I was perfectly sure that Blue Eyes had investigated me, that he knew my name and all about me! And that was correct.
"I was slower to find out about him; he had come two terms before but as a new student I did not know how to make subtle inquiries! Eventually I was told that the man with the blue eyes was John Kuhn. It really did not matter what his name was, for ae that first moment on, in my thinking it was HE—in capital eters.
"Gradually I discovered that we were both volunteers for China, and both interested in the China Inland Mission. The formality of introduction took place on Clark Street, one evening,
OUTSTANDING GIRL
while gathering for a surprise birthday party for Dr. Isaac Page. From then on, conversations in the kitchen at M.B.I. were proper, of course and the first request for a date took place while
I was filling the evening teapot at the hot water urn!"
John and his pal Francis Fitzwilliam began double-dating Isobel and a friend of hers, Jennie. To boost their prospects, the boys invested in a second-hand car which they named "Jennybelle." Life at the Institute was not all hard work and serious eee Many a frolic did the two couples have bouncing along in good old Jennybelle!
But the course of true love for John Kuhn and Isobel Miller had its ups and downs too. After all, John was four years Isobel's junior, came from sturdy Pennsylvania-Dutch stock, and was quite the temperamental opposite of Irish-Canadian Isobel.
Something happened to make the girl doubt that a future union of their lives was in the directive will of God. Yet she did not ur maudlin tales into the romance-hungry ears of her girl iends. Even one who was of her inner circle knew only that she and John were no longer seen together and that Isobel was suffering because of the separation. The onlooker noticed, "She went straight on with the Lord. As a daughter of the King she didn't cheapen any phase of her life, especially its very core, by indulging in self-pity or self-revelation."
Was this the same young woman who had petulantly thought of taking her life when broken-hearted over her first love affair?
How differently she reacts from a few years before! Now, with the Lord first in her affections, He steadies her, as she grasps His almighty arm. Now she finds stability—the real kind, that He offers to everyone of His own in every time of need!
"And there wasn't even an understanding between us," Isobel confessed, "'when John finished his course at the Moody Bible
Institute and sailed for China in the autumn of 1926."