A Chance to Die by Elisabeth Elliot (best book recommendations .TXT) 📕

house, a charming garden, a butler at the door. A table set in a sunny room. White cloth, shining silver. An old lady “like a white violet.” A few days later, a letter saying she wished to give the hall. Amy did not doubt that this was God’s answer.

One thing, however, was lacking. Where would they put it? They asked God. Not one to fold her hands if God might be expecting her to do something besides pray, Amy went straight to the office of the owner of the biggest mill in that part of the city and asked what he would charge for a slice of land. He mentioned a ridiculously small sum. The hall was put up on Cambria Street. Amy named it The Welcome and sent out printed invitations to its dedication, to take place on January 2, 1889.

Come one, Come all,

To the Welcome Hall,

And come in your working clothes.

The invitation described the organization as “The Mill and Factory Girls’ Branch of the YWCA.” She invited her minister to dedicate it. “The windows were in and the curtains were up in time,” she wrote, “in spite of the croakings of the Tin Tabernacle’s raven friends.” Above the platform she hung a long strip with the words, That in all things He may have the pre-eminence. She meant it. She herself (“Nobody”) sat that evening, not on the platform as would have been expected of the prime mover of the enterprise, but in the middle of the audience. Two students of American evangelist D. L. Moody opened the work of The Welcome with a mission in which, for the first time in the British Isles, was sung the gospel song, “I know whom I have believed.” “Souls were won every night,” Amy recorded, but then for a time there was nothing, no power, only deadness. It was her fault, she believed—she had grieved the Holy Spirit by levity following a meeting. “There was nothing wrong in the fun, but it was not the time for it.”

Her brothers and sisters were interested in their big sister’s work at the “Tin Tabernacle,” and no doubt helped her there occasionally. In one issue of Scraps Norman refers to “the most charitable of all charitable objects, The Amy’s Mill Girls’ Society.”

It must have been a lively place, judging from the weekly schedule:

Sunday 4:30

Bible Class

   “        5:30

Sunbeam Band Meeting

Monday 7:30

Singing Practice

Tuesday 7:30

Night School

Wednesday 7:30

Girls’ Meeting

Thursday 7:30

Sewing Club

Monday and Friday 1:20

Dinner Hour Meeting

Wednesday 1:20

Dinner Prayer Meeting

Thursday 4:00

Mothers’ Meeting

First Wednesday in the month—Gospel Meeting—All Welcome.

It was too much for Amy to do by herself. She needed help. What kind? She looked as usual in the Bible for guidelines, and found them in the book of Ezra. When the exiles returned to Jerusalem, they set about rebuilding the temple of the Lord. The enemies of Judah and Benjamin asked to join in the work, claiming that they worshipped the same God. The leaders refused their offer, saying that this house was no concern of theirs but a task which Cyrus, King of Persia, had assigned to the Jews alone. This caused offense and slowed the work, but the Jews stood fast on the principle. Amy would not think of building in any but substances that would survive fire—gold, silver, precious stones. The Lord led her into this truth at the very beginning, she told her “children” later, “and He has kept it as a settled thing in my heart ever since.” She prayed for the right kind of helpers. They came—a band of loyal friends and cousins whose gifts she herself had the gift of recognizing and encouraging.

Methods for raising money which were generally taken for granted by churches and other religious organizations were to Amy thoroughly secular, wholly out of keeping with a life of faith, and unthinkable for The Welcome. She wrote a long piece on the subject for Scraps.

We must have money. We can’t build spires ninety feet high without it, we can’t decorate our churches with elegant windows without it, we can’t issue costly programmes for our social meetings without it, we can’t furnish our sanctuaries with real polished mahogany without it. . . . How are we to get it? You may touchingly plead for the 865,000,000 heathen abroad. You may paint a picture terrible and true of the state of the home heathen at our doors. You may work yourself into hysterics over these and other intensely real realities but you won’t get the money. So another plan must be devised. We shall get up a fancy fair.

A clipping from the newspaper advertising a Grand Bazaar to Liquidate a Debt on Argyle Place Presbyterian Church is pasted in, describing everything from a “fairy palace of a thousand lights,” a Punch and Judy show, ventriloquism, and a shooting gallery, to THE FULL BAND OF THE GORDON HIGHLANDERS. Amy, giving free rein to her imagination, offers other possibilities:

Idle young ladies who like to do good will work sofa blankets, smoking caps, babies’ petticoats, and tea cosies. . . . They will entrap old men and young into buying just one ticket for the exquisite chimpanzee which some kind friend presented to aid us in the liquidation of our church debt (he was sick of the creature however, and glad to get rid of it). . . . Nobody will escape without being regularly besieged by gypsy women, Queen Elizabeths, Mary Queen of Scots, Robinson Crusoes, Robin Hoods, knights, pages, fools, apes and asses, just to buy this very cheap pincushion at 5 /11, and this beautiful pair of slippers at £ 1.19.10, and this sweet baby doll with real petticoats at 19/6—and nobody will escape our clutches without being pretty well fleeced—that I can honestly assure you. Oh yes! we shall get the money for our poor dear little church, and everybody will have the pleasing consciousness of having devoted themselves to the noble cause of screwing, wheedling and extorting money out of a selfish, thoughtless public—for the Cause of God! Ah, there is where a little incongruity seems to come