Search and Rescue

How deep is your God?

Here around the Campfire we’re wanting to create an environment where a host of different voices, with different passions and insights, can all come together and share. Part of that is our Bookmarked series—where we ask different people to tell us about what they’re reading! Today we have Paul telling us about By Searching: My Journey Through Doubt Into Faith. We think you’ll like it.

“By Searching: My Journey Through Doubt Into Faith” is the autobiographical story of Isobel Miller Kuhn, a Canadian missionary who served the Lisu people, first in China, and then in northern Thailand. Going into this book, I was surprised to find that instead of being about her time overseas on the mission field, this was a much more personal, intimate story of how God brought her to Himself, and the ways that He molded and prepared her in the years leading up to her leaving for China.

Isobel grew up in a Christian household, but upon entering university, she found her faith was challenged by the secular environment she found herself in. This event presages a time of wandering, questioning, and doubt in which she discovers that worldly things cannot satisfy, and that only in surrendering these “tapers”, or candles, as she calls them - can she allow “the rising Sun” to illuminate her soul with light and life.

This section of the book stood out to me personally because it reminds me of things in my own life that I don’t examine too closely, because I see them as a net positive, something that increases the quality of my life. For example, I invest a lot of my own time into social games, and while I think that I have a genuine desire to connect with people and exercise hospitality through games, there is an element of this that comes out of a fear of loneliness, and a desire for acceptance. At no point in this section does the author condemn the things that she used to do, but instead she, like the Apostle Paul, “...[counts] everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.”¹ Reflecting on my priorities with my leisure time is a helpful reminder for me to put things in perspective–am I relying on entertainment to make me happy and feel belonging more than I rely on God and who He says I am?

By Searching documents Isobel’s journey from unbelief to belief, but it also shows her path from spiritual immaturity to maturity. She recounts that during this phase of her life, she looked to Hebrews 6 as a spiritual anchor.

“Therefore let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity, not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God, and of instruction about washings, the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment. And this we will do if God permits.” - Hebrews 6:1-3 (ESV)

I was recently helping teach missionary kids at a conference and one of the lesson topics was our dependence on God–as illustrated by the provision of manna in the desert for the Israelite nation. One of the questions that a student brought up while we were studying the passage was “Why did God stop sending manna to the Israelites when they reached the Promised Land?”

While there are certainly many layers to this question that could be unpacked, I think one possible application would be the process of spiritual maturity. God is our source of Life and Truth, but part of growing in our relationship with Him is that we move from being fed, to learning to feed ourselves from His word. When I started my working life overseas in a new country, I struggled to find a church that felt like it was worth my time to attend. I think this was partially a spiritual attack, but I remember feeling that the messages taught at church often either didn’t feel relevant, or they covered ideas that I already understood. By God’s grace, I finally got over myself (mostly), and have been blessed with a church and community that challenges and encourages me, but I love the idea of God daring us to go deeper. We know that there is no limit to His profundity, and that our search will be rewarded, but it’s a blank check - we get out of it as much as we put into it.

Isobel’s life is a testament to how rich and fulfilling our relationship with God can be if we truly seek Him. We follow her through multiple inflection points in her story–attending Moody Bible University, taking a leadership position with a group of young female Christian entrepreneurs, and choosing to enter the mission field. And at each of these points, she finds that God sustains her, transforms her, and makes more of His eternal, unfathomable self known to her.

I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys missionary biographies, but I would also recommend this to any believer looking for encouragement, or who may be considering or new to missions work. Isobel’s style is very approachable and accessible, and I was continually surprised not by anachronistic elements that marked the work as being of a particular time and place, but by how relevant and relatable her struggles were.

1. English Standard Version, Php 3:8a