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

By July 10 she was comfortably ensconced in a room of the China Inland Mission in Shanghai. She made it her own by hanging family photos and the mottoes she cherished: FAITH IS THE VICTORY, CHRIST IS CONQUEROR, NOT I BUT CHRIST, JUST FOR TODAY, and a single embroidered word, RABBONI, Mary’s word when she saw the risen Christ: My Master! On the table lay a calendar with the words, “The Lord thinketh upon me.” She reminded her correspondents of the million a month dying without Christ in China, and the eighty thousand dead of plague in Hong Kong in the previous few weeks.

“To any whom the Hand Divine is beckoning: count the cost, for He tells us to, but take your slate to the foot of the Cross and add up the figures there.”

The temperature was in the nineties, but the mission house was cool with punkahs (huge fans suspended from the ceiling and operated by a coolie with a rope) waving continuously and cups of hot tea, the Englishman’s cooler, always available. Amy’s “brain oppression” lessened, and as she saw others who were far more in need of a change than she, she felt ashamed that she had given in to tiredness. But, she hastened to explain, her giving in was only because of the fear that she might give trouble to others. She assured her friends that she was not thin—she was, in fact, the “opposite of a shadow —and that “promotion” (to heaven) was not imminent.

Amy had been in Shanghai only a week when, feeling refreshed and without excuse for indulging herself any longer in such comfort, she asked God what was next. The answer came as it had when she went to Japan.

“On the eighteenth of July the word of the Lord came unto me saying, Go to Ceylon. The CIM people were horrified. Was she well enough to go? Did she know what she was doing? Why Ceylon? How could she go alone? Only the last question was settled. Another missionary was making the voyage and would look after her. Forthwith Amy booked a passage for Colombo. Off she sailed on July 28, sure of one thing: He goeth before. “Only whoso has felt the Spirit of the Highest in this most solemn way will understand at all, she wrote pages and pages of explanations to the homefolk who would worry about their “Keswick Child.” It never once crossed her mind that she needed counsel, let alone permission, from those who had sent her. She felt one in spirit with Abraham, “not knowing whither,” and with Luther, “Here I stand—I can do no other.”

“I am prepared for much blame, or at best misunderstanding, but I cannot help it. One dare not do anything but obey when that Voice speaks.” How did it speak? In three ways: through the Word, with unanswerable force, through the inward leading of the Spirit, and (often but not always) through circumstances. She felt confirmed by all of these, although her friends found no confirmation for the last, nor was Amy herself sure there was any infallible warrant for that one in the Bible. The old saints appeared to have gone often in what seemed direct opposition to existing facts. She could see, however, that circumstances, which are all of God’s ordering, might be confirmatory witnesses.

She reviewed the circumstances of this move: She had not wasted much strength in learning Japanese, had had no house or settled station, and few responsibilities in Matsuye, hence would not be missed. Fellow-workers had helped by prayer and by mending and packing her things. The passage to Ceylon cost only ten pounds. When she stopped in Colombo en route to Japan, friends there had remarked that the Lord might send her back to them. God had brought helpful people all along the way. Could there be any doubt that He was in charge? She pleaded all these proofs to her worried loved ones.

“All life’s training is just exactly what is needed for the true Life-work, still out of view but far away from none of us. Don’t grudge me the learning of a new lesson.”

In Hong Kong she caught a chill. On August 2 she wrote in the margin of her Daily Light, “Very ill—fever—alone—kept—comforted.” She was brought (she admitted it) to the very end of herself, of self-strength, self-energy, everything. “What if I never reach Ceylon at all?” she wondered during a turbulent, fevered night. “What if God’s work for me is to give all up and go home by the next boat?” It would certainly look as though her call was false, her faith misplaced, her Master’s voice misunderstood.

When she recounted the journey years later, selective memory had obliterated all but the faithfulness of God. Every one of the imagined (and, as she found, real) objections people had raised was gone. She told her “children” that it had never occurred to her that anyone might misunderstand. The need for explanations had faded from memory, along with the battles fought all the way to Ceylon. She had not reread the shipboard letters describing the wrestlings of mind and soul—“Oh, just awfully the Devil came with doubts and fears!”

1. See 2 Corinthians 12:9.

Chapter 12

Not Much of a Halo in Ceylon

At dawn of the day the ship was to dock in Colombo a small, tired woman stood on deck, tortured with fear, weak, “utterly unfit for the great dim unknown, coming now so close to me.” A moth, Amy said, could have crushed her then. She picked up her Daily Light and read, “The joy of the Lord is your strength.”1 A flood of sunshine fell across the mists and she decided she would trust and not be afraid. Welcomed and invited to stay at a mission cottage in Colombo she was immediately made one of the circle, but felt helpless, trustless, wondered why she had come, and