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

‘honorably deigned to cease to become.’” Upon arrival at one of the small country hotels she was greeted with the announcement that a chicken had “deigned to cease to become,” and that a bath was “on the boil.”

When she had been in Japan for one month she felt it was high time she took a missionary journey. She wrote long, long letters at every stage, filling twenty or more of the thinnest pages imaginable with her round, clear handwriting and delicate drawings (storks, centipedes, people, fish, swordplay, incense burners, pagodas). There was an audience, of course. People hung over her shoulder, studying the writing. “Oh!” said an old lady when Amy explained that she was describing to her family the silkworm business in that village, “Our honorable worms and we ourselves are going to England in a letter!”

Portion of a letter from Japan written on rice paper.

On the first leg of this first journey she and Misaki San traveled by kuruma, the Japanese rickshaw. “Sometimes after a plunge of unusual severity, my kuruma-man would turn with a cheerful ‘Oh!’ and a glance to make sure I was still safely inside.” The roads were nothing but ruts, the ride so jolting that it could not be borne for many hours at a time, so the two women would get down and walk. They traveled in melting heat in crowded trains; in sampans and other boats of various descriptions where they and everyone else were seasick, and in a kango, a sort of sedan chair. The batterings and bufferings of such travel, the discomforts of the tiny hotels, the horrors of the menus could not but have been severe lessons in discipleship for the girl who had lived in the peaceful seaside village, the pleasant house in College Gardens, and the beautiful estate of Broughton Grange. But the girl was a disciple. That had been a clear and final decision, and all subsequent lessons she saw not as “culture shock”—the term had not then been invented so she did not have to bother about that sort of thing—but as the expected terms of her chosen discipleship, the first condition of which is, according to the Master’s words, “He must give up all right to himself.”1

Amy described in smallest detail everything she encountered, “comical topsy-turvy ideas and odd customs,” seldom losing her spiritual perspective or, what is equally important for a stranger in a strange land, her humor. She was a realist, but never a pessimist or a sentimentalist. “Last night as we splashed into pools and knocked up against posts (wind and rain made carrying paper lanterns impossible) I laughed and thought of the Romance of Missions. Throw a love-halo round us, as shining as ever you like, but don’t, if you wish to be true, adorn us with one more romantic.”

The “private” lives of the people were, in the foreigner’s eyes, rather shockingly public. People sat in their open front windows, discoursing, smoking, nursing babies. Then there was the custom of The Tub. The wooden family bathtub was often set in front of the house. “The blaze below, the steam above, with a parboiled head in the midst thereof, reminded one rather painfully of the early Christian martyrs, but nobody seemed to mind.” Amy minded, “But I refrain—!” was all she said about that.

Amy’s notions of privacy had no meaning at all for the Japanese. At night in the little hotels, when she lay down on the floor on quilts, she was surrounded by solemn eyes. One man gazed, she “regretted to say, at my nightdress, which I could only thankfully remember would look like full dress to him. Oh dear, it was dreadful, but too funny to mind very much.” On a later journey, when she was traveling third class (there was no other option) with the Buxtons and other members of the Japan Evangelistic Band, the captain, a European, insisted on Mrs. Buxton’s taking his own cabin and the others making the salon their bedroom. This meant that Amy and two single women shared the salon with Mr. Buxton and a bachelor named Consterdine. Amy told herself that this was really no more inappropriate than overnight railway travel, the resemblance being nearly strong enough to invite an attack of “H.S.”—homesickness. But suddenly the captain reappeared with a carpenter, three youths whose duty seemed to consist in running around, a curtain, a flag, a hammer, and some nails. A partition was rigged up, and Amy fell asleep under the full blaze of the Rising Sun on the Japanese flag. When she woke and saw the great red ball, she realized how far she was from home. “Don’t be a baby, Amy,” she said to herself, “Sing a chorus and look ahead”:

The Lord of the Harvest will soon appear

His smile, His voice we shall see and hear.

The taken-for-granted delays in Japan were hard on Europeans. Amy and the Buxtons had packed for a long voyage but the ship sailed six days later than scheduled. Why should it matter? What difference did three or four or six days make, after all? One could simply look upon the 144 hours as “a welcome little hemming-up time,” but one of the band (Amy does not say which one) regarded them as so much “hanging on.” Surely they were going to be late for everything they were making the journey for if they went on in this happy-go-lucky style. Mr. Buxton, never ruffled, pointed out the obvious: “God knows all about the boats.” The lesson, applicable to anything that troubled her, stuck with Amy, along with another of his sayings, “Good for the flesh!” (spoken when someone objected to their singing as they walked along the road).

Perhaps no part of the cost of being a foreign missionary is greater than the loneliness. The alien experiences a sense of utter isolation, and is tempted to cling with greater tenacity to others of his own language and culture. Amy had a co-worker in the mission