Find a Verse and Put Your Name in It

The upbringing and education of missionary children is both exciting and exacting. On one hand, few people are more fortunate than missionary kids. They grow up as internationals, the world their home, at ease as polyglots. They roam across Europe or explore Africa as easily as other children go around the block. On the other hand, many mission settings do not offer adequate schooling or needed interaction with other youth.

Ruth Bell Graham vividly remembers September 2, 1933. She was thirteen. Her father, a missionary surgeon in China, and her mother were sending her to boarding school in what is now Pyongyang, North Korea. For Ruth, it was a brutal parting, and she earnestly prayed she would die before morning. But dawn came, her prayers unanswered, and she gripped her bags and trudged toward the river front. She was leaving all that was loved and familiar: Her Chinese friends, the missionaries, her parents, her home, her memories. The Nagasaki Maru carried her slowly down the Whangpoo River into the Yangtze River and on to the East China Sea.

A week later she was settling into her spartan dormitory. Waves of homesickness pounded her like a churning surf. Ruth kept busy by day, but evenings were harder, and she would bury her head in her pillow and cry herself to sleep, night after night, week after week. She fell ill and in the infirmary she read through the Psalms, finding comfort in Psalm 27:10 - Even if my father and my mother should desert me, you will take care of me.

Still, the hurt and fear and doubt persisted. Finally, in desperation, she went to her sister Rosa, also enrolled in Pyongyang. "I don't know what to tell you to do," Rose replied matter-of-factly, "unless you take some verse and put your own name in it. See if that helps."

Ruth picked up her Bible and and turned to a favorite chapter, Isaiah 53, and put her name in it: "He was wounded and crushed because of Ruth's sins; by taking our punishment, he made Ruth completely well." Her heart leaped, and the healing began.