Overview
The sneering condescension of a university professor shattered young Isobel Kuhn’s comfortable Christianity. She began to question the foundation of her worldview, formed in a conservative Christian home in Canada. Kuhn entered the party scene of the 1920s, seeking meaning and finding none. Join Isobel Kuhn’s quest for truth that leads her to Christ and then to China.
Isobel Kuhn’s By Searching: My Journey Through Doubt Into Faith, is a classic (and short!) missions autobiography. All believers should read this book, but teens and young adults would especially benefit from Kuhn’s testimony. With blunt honesty, Kuhn recounts how God led her out of what she called “the misty flats” and into the light, walking with God and serving Him.
Highlights
- How God led Kuhn from skepticism to belief.
- How God gave Kuhn opportunities to serve as she grew in the Lord.
- Kuhn’s interaction with missionary J. O. Fraser.
- God leading Kuhn to marry John.
- God’s provision and leading through education to China.
Quotes
- “But one fact stood out. I had cried to God for help, my lips twisted in sardonic unbelief that He even existed, but He had answered swiftly.” (p. 21)
- “If He wanted me on the foreign field–why of course, then I must go to the foreign field. It was not a question of if I wanted to go or not–I was no longer my own. At the time I had no clear indication that is was the foreign field He wanted. I was willing, if it were, to go–that was all.” (p. 43)
- “Life does contain moments of adventure, but these times are interspersed with long periods of plain, unvarnished hard work. The real things in life are attained at these monotonous level periods, so to speak, more than they are at the high peaks of excitement.” (p. 47)
- “A thrown voice could still reach the wharf. I leaned over the side and called out slowly, ‘Let us to on!'” (p. 159)
Other Sources
Related works by Isobel Kuhn continue her story:
- In the Arena which tells the story of her work in China among the Lisu people.
- Green Leaf in Drought Time which tells how her family had to flee China in the early 1950s.
- Ascent to the Tribes which tells the story of her work in Thailand among some of the same people groups she served in China.
Isobel Kuhn is highlighted in Daring Devotion, Day 8.
Isobel Kuhn is one of my favorite missionary authors, and this book one of my favorites of hers.
One small correction: Green Leaf in Drought is not about the Kuhn family but the Arthur Mathews family, the last China Inland Mission family to leave China after Communists took over. Rather than fleeing, they were held there for months before being allowed to leave. The book was about God’s sustenance to them while they endured.