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Point me to the skiesThe amazing story of Joan WalesPOINT ME TO THE SKIES Point Me to the Skies is an account of a brief period of remarkable mission work carried out among the lawless Nosu people of South West China from 1948 until it was abruptly cut short in1951 by the Communist take-over in China. The story is told through the life of Joan Wales, a young British missionary. Joan’s troubled childhood and struggles to get onto the mission field provide the more-than-ample context for the book’s central theme. Snatching a window of opportunity, Joan Wales, with three other Western missionaries, exposed themselves to unusual dangers and privations to bring the gospel to the Nosu people, a remote mountainous tribe renowned for its brutality. The setbacks, disappointments and uncertainties they endured recall the heroes of faith of Hebrews 11 who ‘through faith conquered kingdoms…’. Eventually — but, oh, so painfully and slowly — a number of teenage girls and one or two married women come through to real faith in Christ. Then, quite suddenly, the work is over. A moving postscript records Joan’s return nearly 40 years later to discover her ‘teenage’ converts still holding on to the faith they professed all those years ago. This is a remarkable story and told in a God-honouring way. Unfortunately, the book is marred by the author’s clumsy writing style. Overly self-conscious purple passages particularly grate: ‘All at once the aureate ball of the sun appeared, launched into orbit above the horizon, captivating them all in awe’, to quote just one of them. The frequent misuse of words is also aggravating: ‘disparagingly’ instead of ‘disapprovingly’ (page 191), ‘ambivalent to’ instead of ‘oblivious to’, ‘tolerant’ instead of ‘tolerable’ (page 119), etc. A constant stream of lesser grammatical offences will, for now, be passed over. Was the publisher napping? So, unless you have a thick linguistic skin, seek out one of the many better-written accounts of missionary work in inland China. Esther Bennett,
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