Serving God on the Mission Field While Battling Depression – The Story of a Chinese Missionary

Lisa

We often write about the missionaries from China who go into the 10/40 window to share the gospel in closed nations, but who are they and what brought them to this point? To get to know some of them better, we asked them to share their stories with us.

Lisa’s story begins in the depths of the freezing winter of Northern China. The cold was not only physical. She was the product of generations of deep hurt. Her mother had been sold as a young girl by her parents. Her father had been severely abused. Neither knew how to show love to baby Lisa when she was born. Through poverty and exposure, she developed pneumonia shortly after birth, which resulted in chronic lung disease.

Her parents spent all they had on milk powder and medication. They even sold their cow, which pushed the family deeper into poverty. Whenever her father made some money, Lisa became sick and all the money he had earned went straight to her treatment. They blamed her for their poverty. Lisa felt very depressed and unwanted, and started harming herself.

Her mother was deeply traumatised by what had happened in her childhood and could not bear noise around her. Her father beat her and Lisa severely whenever something bothered him. Lisa longed to go to school, but her parents did not allow her. The only person who showed her some love, was her grandfather. Unfortunately, he remarried after being widowed, to a mean woman who also enjoyed tormenting Lisa.

Her grandfather, however, did eventually persuade her parents to let Lisa go to school. She excelled, learned to read faster than anyone else, and for the first time started to hope that life could be better in the future. Around this time, a woman evangelist came to her village and invited Lisa and her mother to church. Slowly Lisa started to learn about God and pray. At a youth camp at age thirteen, she finally understood the gospel and got baptised a little later.

At age fifteen, Lisa’s parents took her out of school and then abandoned her. Her father went away for work and her mother just left. Because she was home alone, the church offered her the chance to go to Bible school. Six months into her course, she received a call that her parents had divorced and her mother was home and had remarried. Lisa decided to stay on in the Bible school. It was there that she received a call to mission, when she started reading books of Mother Theresa, Hudson Taylor, and other missionaries who came to China. She realised that if she wanted to go to a poor country, she needed some more education and language skills. So, after graduating Bible school and working in the church sometime, she left for the city.

Lisa completed her high school and college, while working to support herself. She then was sent to Myanmar, to teach in a school for refugee children, run by Christians. This was until the Chinese government got wind of what was happening and forced the school to shut.

Because Lisa realised her English needed to get better, she started studying in a small school run by an American missionary. Later she even got the chance to study elsewhere in South Asia and start a theology course in English. However, the school was suddenly closed, and she was forced to return to China. The depression she had struggled with off and on throughout her life, returned in full force. She suffered panic attacks and did not dare to go out of the house. The fear of God was the only thing that stopped her from taking her own life.

A former teacher urged her to get medical help, but in the middle of the pandemic, that was not possible. Her prayers made no difference, nor did talks with her pastor. Eventually, an elder and his wife took her in, along with another girl with mental health issues. They just kept praying with them and taught them how feeling miserable does not mean you cannot still serve and praise God. Lisa realised that is what she still wanted most. She started an online mission course, followed by a week of practical mission experience in a beautiful and summery location in the South of China. There she finally felt the weight of abandonment lifted of her shoulders. She made new friends and nursed her team through a Covid outbreak. Miraculously, she did not get infected, although she had been sickly all her life.

Following that time, she was sent out to serve in different countries, until she ended up in a Muslim nation, where she was mostly confined indoors for security reasons. There she once again experienced mental health issues and had to return to China. Although depression reared its head, she had now better tools to deal with it and the valley was not as deep.

Now she is preparing to once again go out, as she completes special training for church planting among Muslims. God has transformed her from a poor, scared and very sad girl, to a woman who knows her power is complete in weakness. God also gave her the grace to see her mother, father and stepfather repent and start to follow Jesus. She is now reconciled with them, and the hurt that has run in her family for generations can finally begin to heal.