Jack Voelkel
Isobel Kuhn: Hanging over the Golden Wall
by Lynda MacGibbon
“When I get to Heaven they aren’t going to see much of me but my heels for I’ll be hanging over the golden wall keeping an eye on the Lisu Church!”
Crowds of young women waved and shouted as the ship steamed away from the quay. Their enthusiasm, fit for a celebrity, was, in fact, focused on someone who would have laughed at such a suggestion. Even so, she would have understood the warmth of the farewell.
Just after graduating from Moody Bible Institute in 1926 and with her heart set on China, Isobel Miller found herself back at home in Vancouver, Canada. Although she had been accepted as a candidate for the China Inland Mission, rioting against foreigners in that country was keeping new missionaries out. But that did not mean Isobel could not live out her missionary calling at home.
For nearly two years, Isobel served as the superintendent of the Corner Girls Club, an organization comprised of young Christian women who wanted to reach their colleagues in the marketplace for Christ.
“I have always felt,” wrote Isobel later in her memoir, By Searching,
“that my Corner Club girls were among the loveliest God made. They were ready for any venture that would win souls, but they were also a very merry group. The club rooms resounded with laughter and gay banter in between the earnest prayer meetings and discussions.”
No wonder, when Isobel finally left for China in 1928, her “Corner Girls” were there in force to see her off.
Although she poured her heart and soul into those young women of Vancouver, Isobel never lost sight of what she believed was her true calling: bringing the Gospel to the Lisu people in China’s mountainous Salween River Canyon. The first time Isobel heard of the Lisu she was just 22 years old but was already sensing a call to serve with the China Inland Mission. That she would eventually find her way to Lisuland on the border of China and Burma, Isobel had no doubt.
Isobel first sensed a call to serve in China while reading A Growth of a Work of God, the book about the founding of the China Inland Mission. The call was further affirmed when she attended her second Bible Conference at The Firs in Bellingham, Washington, and heard J.O Fraser speak of his experiences in China, particularly among the Lisu.
The Lisu, learned Isobel, were just beginning to hear of Jesus Christ. By tradition, they were animists and their world was full of demon worship and servitude. With an oral language only, they had never learned to read or write. But slowly, Mr. Fraser and other missionaries were setting the Lisu language down on paper. Slowly they were bringing the message of Christ. And slowly, Lisu were becoming Christians and sharing God’s message with one another.
As Isobel listened to Mr. Fraser ask young men to answer the call to hardship and to loneliness, but also to the glory of serving God in China, she prayed, “Lord, I’d be willing to go. Only I’m not a man.”
Isobel had not always been so willing to follow the call of God on her life. Although she had been raised in a Christian home, with a grandfather who was a Presbyterian minister and a father who was a laypreacher, Isobel slipped into what she termed the “Misty Flats” while in university. Challenged by professors who questioned the truth of Christianity, and attracted a life unencumbered by any religious expectations, Isobel put her faith on hold.
“I had,” Isobel writes, “unconsciously stepped off the High Way where man [sic] walks with his face lifted Godward…I had stepped on to The Misty Flats, the in-between, level place of easy going – nothing very good attempted, yet nothing bad either.”
University years were not, however, without hardship. Isobel suffered through a broken engagement after discovering her fiancé had been unfaithful to her. Distraught, she came close to suicide one night, stopping only after hearing her father groaning in his sleep. That night, Isobel found herself praying, bargaining actually, before God.
“God, if there be a God, if You will prove to me that You are, and if You will give me peace, I will give You my whole life. I’ll do anything You ask me to do, go where You send me, obey You all my days.”
Eight years later, after a short stint as a school teacher, after studying at Moody and working at the Corner Club, Isobel was on enroute to China.
She went wearing an engagement ring. While at Moody, Isobel had met John Kuhn, a fellow student who had also responded to a call to serve in China. John had gone ahead of Isobel. When they reunited in Chengchiang, Yunnan Province, they were married. Their first home was there, on the second floor of a chapel.
Within two years, the Kuhns were asked to move to the city of Tali, not quite Lisuland, but in Isobel’s mind, at least closer. In her early years in China, she longed to live among the Lisu, never forgetting how her heart had responded to Mr. Fraser’s call for missionaries.
The Kuhns spent almost three years in Tali, training other CIM missionaries, teaching the Bible to Chinese Christians and preaching and sharing their faith with their neighbours near and far. In Tali, they also welcomed their daughter Kathryn into their family. Her Chinese name, Hong En, is translated “Vast Grace”.
During the early years in China, Isobel began to learn to be a missionary, a mother, and more than anything else, a humble servant of God. More than once she ran away from John and the Chinese people in frustration and anger. But she came back, each time giving a little more of herself to God, and giving away her reliance on material possessions, expectations and her own traditions.
By 1934, the Kuhns were on their way to Lisuland to join another CIM couple who were assisting a small Lisu Christian church in Oak Flat district. Isobel’s health was fragile at this point, and the family’s initial foray toward the mountains was to see if she could indeed live among the people she already loved.
She could, and did, for another 22 years.
Isobel Kuhn had many confirmations from God throughout her life, from gifts of money that helped her through her studies at Moody, to affirmation that her mother, who had argued against her daughter’s call to mission, gave her approval before she died. When she first arrived in Lisuland, she was given yet another affirmation that God indeed had called her to this place.
When the Kuhns finally arrived in Pine Mountain Village they were met not only by CIM missionary Leila Cook but also by three visiting Lisu who had travelled for seven days across mountain ranges “searching for Jesus.” In the company of the Cooks, the Kuhns and Lisu Christians, the three Lisu visitors became Christians and took their new faith back to their village where many more Lisu also believed.
During her years in Lisuland, Isobel was to know the loneliness, hardship and fears of which Mr. Fraser had spoken so many years before. John was often away, visiting villages, assisting native pastors and helping other missionaries. During war years, he often travelled in dangerous territories to bring other missionaries to safety. Kathryn, too, left the family for boarding school and during the war between Japan and China was interned in a prison camp. Although well-treated, Kathryn was often not able to contact her parents for long stretches of time.
Frequently, Isobel, now the mother of Daniel, the couple’s second child, was the only missionary in their village. But she was never alone, and even in the most dangerous of situations, she believed in God’s provision, and took comfort in the care of her Lisu brothers and sisters.
She had many close friends among the Lisu, including a young Christian woman named Homay who came to live with the family to learn more about her faith. She lived with the Kuhns, helping with household chores. Eventually she began going out on mission trips to unreached villages and helped with administrative work for the mission station in Oak Flat. She was one of three Lisu women who helped type the first translation of the Lisu New Testament.
During their years in Oak Flat, the Kuhns worked with native Christians to establish the Rainy Season Bible School and also a Bible School for Girls, helping many Lisu Christians mature in their faith and take on the evangelization and leadership of their communities.
By 1950, with the Second World War over and Communism overtaking China, it was time for the Kuhns to leave Lisuland and return to North America. But God was not done with Isobel Kuhn yet. Nor was she done with the Lisu.
Isobel was 50 years old when her husband suggested they respond to a request from the China Inland Mission to go to Thailand. Initially, Isobel argued she was too old to learn a new language and to settle into a new land. But eventually, she returned to her promise to God made so many years before: “I’ll do anything You ask me to do, go where You send me, obey You all my days.”
Leaving their children in North America, John and Isobel went to Northern Thailand, where 5000 Lisu people also made their home.
Climbing the mountains of Thailand to visit villages, Isobel suffered two serious falls, injuring her chest. Within four years of going to Thailand, Isobel was on her way back to North America to be treated for cancer.
Isobel spent the last seven years of her life in the United States. During that time she wrote books, enjoyed her children, said good bye to Kathryn as she set off to serve with the China Inland Mission. Finally, she welcomed John back home when he returned from Thailand.
Her love for the Lisu people remained strong until the end. Her husband remembers Isobel once saying “When I get to Heaven they aren’t going to see much of me but my heels for I’ll be hanging over the golden wall keeping an eye on the Lisu Church!”
Back in 1928, as Isobel waved to the crowd of Corner Girls bidding her farewell at the dock in Vancouver, she asked God for a last word that the young women would not forget. As He would so many times in her life, God answered her prayer.
“Let us go on,” she called slowly and loudly to the young women she had been discipling.
Isobel’s life echoes this again and again. “Let us go on,” she wrote in By Searching. “Go on searching and exploring the greatness and the dearness of our God.”
This was Isobel Miller Kuhn’s life.
Lynda MacGibbon is the Director of InterVarsity Canada's ministry in New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. She is a journalist and writes a weekly newspaper column for the Moncton Times & Transcript, as well as a monthly Spiritual Life column to Tidings. She loves spending time near the water.
Sources:
Kuhn, Isobel. By Searching, edited by M.E. Tewksbury, (OMF International 1959, 2001
Howat, Irene. Lights in Lisuland (Christian Focus Publications) 2001, 2004
Hoadley Dick, Lois. Isobel Kuhn (Bethany House Publishers) 1987
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