At twenty, Isobel Miller nearly took her own life after being abandoned by her fiancé. On the edge of despair, she remembered her father and made a vow to God: if He gave her peace, she would give Him her whole life. It was the beginning of a story of faith forged in pain.
Canadian, with a degree in Arts from the University of British Columbia, she still resisted the missionary call out of fear and family opposition. In 1924, at a missionary conference in Bellingham, in the American state of Washington, she heard missionary James Fraser speak about the Lisu people of China. The following year she went to study at Moody Bible Institute in the United States, where she met John Kuhn, her future husband.
In 1928 she sailed for China with the China Inland Mission. She married John in Kunming the following year, and after some years serving at other stations in Yunnan province, the family settled in 1934 among the Lisu people, in isolated mountain villages.
Life on the field came at a cost. Isobel faced illness, isolation, and the pain of seeing her daughter Kathryn, still a child, sent away to the mission boarding school in Chefoo, on the Chinese coast. With the Japanese invasion, Kathryn was held in an internment camp between 1941 and 1943 and was not reunited with her parents until 1944. Isobel also recorded, without hiding it, the lonely nights, the doubts her faith had to pass through, and the friction with her own husband, both strong willed, in a marriage she described without idealizing it.
In 1938 she founded the Rainy Season Bible School, using the forced pause in farm work during the rains to train Lisu evangelists and pastors amid the mountains of Yunnan. The method became one of the most lasting legacies of her ministry.
In 1950 the family fled communist China. After about two years in the United States, the couple resumed work among thousands of still unreached Lisu people in northern Thailand, starting in 1952.
Diagnosed with cancer in 1954, Isobel returned to the United States for treatment. It was during this final period that she wrote much of her work, including the account of the last missionaries’ escape from communist China in Green Leaf in Drought.
Isobel Kuhn died in 1957, but her books are still read by missionaries and churches around the world. Her life reminds us that faithfulness to a difficult calling, sustained through doubt and loss, can give rise to a church that flourishes decades later.
