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

Amy wrote. “The Lord’s name dishonored among the heathen, and I had done it! Far, far better never to have come!” But she heard the Shepherd answer: My sheep hear My voice and I know them and they follow Me. All power is given unto Me. These signs shall follow them that believe: in My name shall they cast out devils. Fear thou not for I am with thee.2

Amy assured the wife that God would answer, and the two went home. An hour later a message came—the foxes had gone, the cords were off, the man was himself again. Next morning he asked to see Amy and Misaki San. Unrecognizable except for the burns, he offered them a spray of scarlet pomegranate blossom and sugared ice water. He and his wife gladly knelt with the women as they prayed, joining in with “Hai! Hai!” (yes, yes).

Amy’s letters to the Keswick magazine, The Life of Faith, are full of stories of prayer answered. One tells of a man and a boy who often discussed the Christians claim that God answers prayer. No, it could not be. But one day the boy was in charge of delivering the cakes to a wedding. He carried them very carefully, but as he stepped from a sampan a fear crossed his mind something would happen to the delicate little cakes. A few minutes later he stumbled and dropped them. There was no time to go back for more, no time even to open the fragile boxes. What should he do? He thought of the Christians’ God, and there on the road prayed his first prayer, “Please let none of the cakes be broken.” It was not until the marriage ceremony was over that the guests were given their boxes of pink and white fan-shaped cakes. Not one was so much as cracked. Back went the boy to his friend. “Now I know that God hears prayer, for God heard me.”

One day Amy gave a New Testament to a student who took it and said, “It will be a seed.” Seeds need to be watered. Prayer was that water, and Amy prayed. On the other side of the world another student, reading a letter from Amy asking for prayer for the Japanese student, “put in five solid minutes’ prayer.” He was Paget Wilkes, an Oxford undergraduate then, who went to Japan, worked in Matsuye, and led to Christ that student for whom he had prayed.

An insight into Amy Carmichael’s understanding of the nature of prayer is given us in her story of what happened at Hirosi. This was a large Buddhist village where only eight or nine Christians shone “like stars in the night.” Amy planned to visit the village, but wanted to prepare herself by praying along the lines of whatever God intended to do there. If she could be sure of that, she could pray with faith. Years later she discovered that Julian of Norwich had held a similar view of prayer: “I am the Ground of thy beseeching: first it is My will that thou have it; and after, I make thee to will it; and after, I make thee to beseech it and thou beseechest it. How should it then be that thou shouldst not have thy beseeching?” As she prayed, Amy felt “pressed in spirit” to ask for a soul, one soul. Next day she went to Hirosi with Misaki San, and a young silk weaver crossed the line”—became a Christian—that evening. A month later they went again. It was two souls she prayed for this time. The silk weaver brought a friend who “found peace,” and an old woman also turned to the Lord. Two weeks passed. Again they went, again they asked God what He wanted to do, and the answer was that four souls were to cross the line. By this time other missionaries in Matsuye had joined in prayer. One of the men felt it was a bit much to ask for four souls, but agreed to ask for two. Things looked anything but encouraging when the women arrived. The Hirosi Christians balked at asking for four. Nobody in town seemed in the least interested. The devil fired his usual darts of doubt: “You can’t expect conversions every time. It’s quite presumptuous. Fancy going back to Matsuye empty-handed! etc.”

Matters were enormously complicated by Amy’s having dropped what she thought an unarguable suggestion, that new converts should burn their idols. Burn their idols? Impossible to let it be known that Christians must do this—it would turn back all inquirers. Amy was adamant, facing what she termed “the Calvary side of the work, a thing to be lived through alone with Calvary’s Christ.” They prayer-meetinged her, asking the Lord to open her eyes, show her the foolishness of transgressing Japanese custom. Then they besought her not to mention idols again. But truth was dearer than success. “I could not buy a soul at the cost of sacrificing truth. The fact that many might and probably would be turned back could not be a proof that this course was wrong, because in John 6:66 we read ‘From that time [speaking of the “hard saying”] many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him.’ The servant is not greater than his Lord.” In the meeting that afternoon the people gazed and smiled and felt nothing. It seemed a prison of mocking spirits. Amy was about to close when a woman said, “I want to believe.” Then her son came and knelt. On the way back from the meeting Amy stopped at the home of Christians who had a friend waiting to ask her the way of salvation. That friend was number three. Where was number four? “Why,” said a man, “It must be my wife. She wants to be a Jesus-person, but she is away at her own village.” She came back early the next morning and confessed before her relatives her desire to be a Christian.

For weeks