Books like Green Leaf In Drought

I'm almost ashamed to display the relatively low "two-star" rating that I'm giving this book. It receives a relatively high average rating here on GoodReads, and perhaps my knocking it will make me appear a little less spiritual than I feel comfortable displaying. It is a good story, and there is a good basic message to it, and that it what saves it from being really unappealing. The Mathews family shows that trust in God sustains them even in the midst of some very difficult trials. It reveals that God is a true help in time of trouble when various self-help techniques would have fallen way short. Positive thinking and other psychological crutches would have been too feeble to maintain them in their persecution. It took total abandonment to the will of God and God's direct intervention on their behalf in numerous situations in order to see them through. God can't just be a positive though for what they did to work; God has to be real and really involved in our lives.But I was disappointed that despite the various quotes, I never felt like I got to know Arthur and Wilda through the book. It just seemed that the format was one for relaying the events that took place, but without really getting into the heads of the main characters. Maybe this is my fault, or maybe the book is just too short to provide that sort of depth, but I just went away from reading it with the feeling that, "These two old missionaries from way back when handled their crises in such and such a manner and it worked for them." Don't get me wrong, I'm an old-school missionary myself, so I'm not attacking the Mathews. In fact, I just wish I had had a chance to really get to know them through the book.Some of the courageous couple's theology was strong, but some was almost reducible to sentimentality it seemed. There was a toying around with the "name it, claim it" practice that almost put Holy Spirit inspirational status on the prayer that every missionary would be able to exit from China without loss of life. And even more disturbing to me was the way devotional Bible reading almost became a practice of divination in which the readers would look to clues on what decisions to make based on the passage of Scripture being read and the phrases that happened to be contained therein. A dangerous practice which is a far cry from "rightly dividing the Word of truth."Lastly, and I don't want to sound callous here, but the Mathews and other missionaries certainly suffered intensely. They faced more than I think I could have been able to withstand - Let me be clear about that. But it seems that the book portrays them as suffering more intensely than the Chinese Christians themselves who often faced martyrdom at the hands of the Chinese Communists. The Mathews and the others certainly did suffer horribly and could have lost one or more members of their little family, but there were numerous Chinese Christian families who did in fact lose family members and didn't have the protection of the status of foreigner. Their stand was even greater, and I wish some effort had been made to relay more of that tale to put things in China in a less Westerner focused perspective.Finally, I do want to applaud the way the book highlighted the witness given to Christ by the sufferings of the Mathews to the villagers where they lived. No doubt the church was challenged and strengthened by their commitment not to compromise. All the preaching and evangelizing in the world couldn't accomplish what that sort of living must have done to impress upon that entire village the reality of a living Saviour who can be fully trusted. The Mathews receive my plaudits; Isabel Kuhn, I'm sorry to say, does not.