October 7, 2010

• Book Review: Faithful Women & Their Extraordinary God

  I’ve nearly finished Noel Piper’s book called “Faithful Women & Their Extraordinary God“.  I’ve enjoyed it so much that I just had to share it with someone!

  Noel retells the story of five Christian women who trusted in their extraordinary God to live a life so unfamiliar to most of us in America’s churches today. I had previously read the account of most of these women by other authors so I wasn’t sure how I would respond to hearing their stories told again.  I wasn’t bored in the least. Noel has a gift of being able to weave you right into the midst of these women’s lives. My imagination was swept away to foreign places and I asked myself more than once how I would respond if placed in a similar situation.

  One of the many things I like about the book is that Noel ends each missionary’s story with an application to our own lives. Esther Ahn Kim’s story brought the most conviction and exhortation but the other testimonies were powerful, too. Several of Esther’s ‘preparations for suffering’ will hopefully stay with me forever.

  She practiced living an impoverished life in preparation for her evident imprisonment for standing against the government’s demand to bow to false Gods instead of the true, living God.  Because she knew she would be facing imprisonment for her denial to bow she prepared herself by living a life close to what she pictured the horrors of prison to be. She chose the worst looking food at the market and ate the smallest portions. She also slept on the floor with no blanket. She memorized huge portions of Scriptures (over 100 chapters) which she relied on for her substance when she finally was imprisoned and had no access to the Bible.

  Esther embraced those whom others rejected. Their prison cell rooms were freezing so the women in Esther’s cell huddled together for warmth. They could hear a woman in the cell next to theirs screaming continually day and night. She had no one to keep her warm.  Esther begged the guards until they finally brought her into their cell.  The other women in Esther’s cell wouldn’t come near this other woman because she was so filthy and smelled so bad. But, Esther held her all that night to keep her warm. After a few hours she settled down to sleep. As she slept Esther embraced her feet that were caked with feces to her breast to keep them warm. Her love for this women eventually led her to Christ.

  The testimony of Esther’s mother stood out the most to me.  Her mother never encouraged her to take an easy path away from suffering but helped her prepare for her eventual imprisonment. I tried to put myself in the mother’s place more than once during the story and saw my knees buckle at the thought of one of my children being imprisoned where I knew they would be tortured and lack the nourishment to keep them healthy. Yet, this mother’s eyes were set on the soul of her daughter and the souls of others. She did not shrink back but encouraged her to follow Christ even if it meant death. 

  Esther once said, “I always felt strengthened when I talked with Mother about God and His love. I began to think that life might be worth living in this time of persecution.  It might even be a truer picture of the believer to agonize, to suffer, to be hated, and tortured and even to be killed in obeying God’s words rather than to live an ordinary, uneventful life.”

  A Korean senior officer said, “I have never seen anything like this before. The daughter is great. The mother is greater.”  The mother’s example challenged me to look critically at areas of my mothering to examine whether my approach has been God-centered with my children or ‘Americanized’ to avoid hardship.   I will carry many of the things she said to her daughter in my heart for years to come.

  I like to keep a missionary story in the car to read in places like doctor’s offices or at the pharmacy where I’m waiting in line. I was tempted more than once to bring this book into the house just so I could finish it sooner.

  These five women would also make wonderful companions to your daughters in book form. Their examples will help shake the Americanized view of Christianity and give them a biblical, living picture of what it really means to follow Jesus Christ.

  If you think this book is one you’d like to own we would greatly appreciate your generosity by ordering it from our bookstore. If you click on the link for the title in the first paragraph it will take you to our bookstore. Thank you for your kindness.

  • 5:41 pm
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