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

After a brief stay she was put on board the SS Yokohama Maru bound for Shimonoseki where she was to be met, and “off I went without a fear.” The ship was caught in the tail end of a typhoon, making landing impossible, so the captain put her into a madly tossing steam tug full of very seasick Japanese. The tiny tug was buffeted and flung about till everybody was finally “tumbled together out onto the shore.”

Amy was surrounded by a crowd of shouting, gesticulating people, not a white face anywhere. She did her best to explain her predicament. The crowd was friendly, it was certainly interested—it was, in fact, transfixed at the sight—but it was helpless. As she told the story later, she said she laughed till she was positively aching at the absurdity of the whole affair. A foreign port. Nobody to meet her. Not a word of any language she could understand. The girl from the Irish village on the North Sea, standing in the pouring rain beside her pile of luggage on the shore of Japan, laughing. “All this was part of the going forth unto a land I knew not, and everything was just right, and if things went wrong it was so much the more fun. I knew they would come right in the end. And they always did.” So with the charming lightheartedness of faith she only wondered, What next?

There was a sudden rush of Japanese from all quarters. “They carried my boxes and me off to a hotel (made of paper as it seemed to me) and I sat down tranquilly on the mats and waited to see what the angels would do.” They were on the job. Somebody beckoned and she followed. A rickshaw was waiting, in she got, and off she went into the unknown again. “It seems unbelievable but it felt quite natural to me.” The rickshaw bounced through many streets and stopped at a house where a white man appeared. He turned out to be an American trader, thoroughly stunned to find this cheerful diminutive foreigner at his door. He was able to direct her to the home of missionaries, an American girl and an old lady, who had been expecting not Amy but the missionary who was to have met her, who had been delayed because of the storm. “Perfect saints they were, and that evening I was safe with them.”

During the few days’ wait for the lady who was to meet her Amy walked one day along the seashore, talking with one of the Shimonoseki missionaries. A casual remark was dropped which elicited an astonished question from Amy. “You don’t mean to say, the missionary replied, “you think all missionaries love one another?” Precisely what she had thought. How could it be otherwise? “No faintest foreshadowing of the purposes of God was mine that morning,” she wrote, “but I remember the thoughts that rushed through me then. What of ‘See that ye love one another with a pure heart fervently’?4 Was such a life of love lived nowhere?” It was a gray day, with a gray sea, a gray drizzle, and gray thoughts. But it spurred her to prayer, to an earnest beseeching that the Lord would enable her to love as He commanded us to love.

1. John 14:27(neb).

2. J. Mountain, “Jesus, I am Resting, Resting.”

3. Psalms 93:3, 4.

4. 1 Peter 1:22.

Chapter 8

The Romance of Missions

Such a Hallelujah welcome was waiting for me here,” wrote Amy of her arrival in Matsuye on May 1, 1893. “Praise Him who went before to search out a Resting-place. May it be a place of victory too, for His own glory’s sake.”

Amy, always assuming that her correspondents, and later the readers of her books, were as saturated as she was with the language and imagery of Scripture, rarely bothered to cite references. Here she was thinking of the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord that preceded by three days the people of Israel as they journeyed, to “search out a Resting-place.” Whenever the Ark began to move, Moses prayed for victory over their enemies. Amy moved day by day in the spiritual company of those Israelites, guided as surely as they were, by the Lord, and sheltered by the Ark of His presence, which came to rest in Matsuye.

This was an old feudal town with a pagoda-shaped castle on a hill. The town lay between two inland lakes, one of which opened into the sea. Amy sketched a corner of the castle on one of her letters, but sketches could not catch the beauty of it all—“blue and green, brown and purple, opal lights, and changeful shadows, sunset glories on the waters.” The houses were built so that one could look straight through to the garden at the back, where there were dwarf pines, rock work, tiny pools and bridges and lanterns. It seemed to Amy that everything in the houses was made of paper—walls, windows, trays, dustpans, baskets, brooms, strings, handkerchiefs. The walls had a convenient way of sliding back into themselves when not needed. If anyone wished to see out, he had only to touch the paper with his tongue and the translucent became transparent. “An eyehole being thus expeditiously manufactured, what need of glass?”

The Reverend Barclay Buxton was a young man then, one whose name, for Amy and many others, always wore “a little crown of light.” She refers to a “shadow that was with him always,” but does not explain. It was something that might have darkened his whole life and witness, but because it did not she learned that it is possible for those who love the Lord to choose to rejoice. He was a man of great charm and gifts of leadership. They were people of means and had brought with them many English manners and conveniences, including a governess for their three small sons. They lived in a large house and employed servants as the