蔡苏娟 · 1890 – 1984 · Chinese
Christiana Tsai was born on 12 February 1890 in Nanjing into a prominent and wealthy official family. Her father was the Provincial Administration Commissioner of Jiangsu under the Qing dynasty; the household was rich and its rank strictly observed, and she was the eighteenth among many brothers and sisters. Amid fine clothes and fine food, the young girl was often downcast and could find no rest for her soul.
As a girl she was sent to a mission girls' school, at first only to learn English; she had no wish to draw near the gospel and even deliberately avoided talk of faith. But at one meeting an American preacher spoke on “Christ is the light of the world,” and the words moved her deeply. She bowed her head and prayed, asking the Lord to forgive her sins and help her understand the truth. From then on she entrusted her life to the Lord in whom she believed.
When she first turned to the Lord, her family did not understand her and even mocked her, but she bore witness for the Lord with gentleness and perseverance. Day after day, her mother was the first to receive grace and be set free, giving up an opium habit of many years; brothers and sisters, elders and younger relatives in the clan were one after another moved by her faith. According to accounts, she led about 55 members of her family to Christ in the course of her life, becoming a blessing to the whole extended family.
In the winter of 1931, just as her ministry was flourishing, she contracted malignant malaria in Shanghai and was confined to bed, left with a lifelong extreme sensitivity to light: her eyes could never again bear light. For decades afterwards she could only lie in a room carefully sealed against the light. The darkness imprisoned her body but could not imprison her faith. In the darkness she meditated on the Bible and prayed constantly, and people called her the “Queen of the Dark Chamber.”
For many years the American missionary Mary Leaman (李曼) was like a sister to her, staying with her and caring for her; the two also worked together on literature such as a phonetic-script Bible. In 1949 Christiana Tsai crossed the ocean to America with the Leaman family and settled in Paradise, Pennsylvania.
In her darkened room in a foreign land, her testimony spread even more widely. In 1953 her English autobiography, dictated by her, Queen of the Dark Chamber, was published with a foreword by Billy Graham; the book was translated into dozens of languages and encouraged countless people around the world struggling in affliction. Although she could not leave the house and her eyes could not bear light, visitors came in a steady stream, and she received them at her bedside, explained the Bible and prayed for people until old age.
On 25 August 1984 Christiana Tsai went to rest in the Lord in the United States, at the age of 94. Through the illness and darkness of most of her life, she bore witness to a truth at once very simple and very deep: the body may be hemmed in by darkness, but faith can shine within it with a light that never goes out.