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

there were none like Amy who told it straight, but there were many who popularized mission work by dramatizing the successes and skipping lightly over what was far more commonplace than success. “There isn’t much of a halo in real life,” she wrote, “we save it all up for the missionary meetings.”

The original letters (reprints of which Amy had expressly forbidden) show evidence of another’s attempt, if not to color the facts, at least to sweeten them a bit. Someone had crossed out parts not thought suitable for reprint, such as mention of fleas, lice, or “slimy, crawly things,” filthy slime through which she had to wade, and, in a reference to the inability of the Singhalese to focus their minds, the editor has deleted Amy’s aside, “if minds they have.”

The hard work of visiting—“Do you throw a halo around it?” she wrote:

You go to a hut and find nobody in, you go to the next and find nobody wants you, you go to the next and find an old woman who says yes, you may talk if you like, and she listens in an aimless sort of way and perhaps one or two more drift in, and you go on, a prayer behind each sentence if you are speaking through interpretation (but I hope I won’t have to do that always), an undercurrent flowing all the time, if you are sitting silently listening to somebody else speaking. Perhaps they are thoughtful enough to object—“We ourselves are Buddhists, why should we change? Do you kill animals? We don’t want a religion like that.”

If you ask them don’t they eat eggs and fish, they say oh yes, but they wouldn’t poach an egg (i.e. break the shell!), boiling it is different. They wouldn’t kill a fish, they take it out of the water and it dies of its own accord. . . . It is so disappointing sometimes, just when you think you have got a little bit of the glorious Truth wedged in, when the heart seems touched perhaps by the wonderful story of Calvary, some little triviality comes up, and some question about pigs or eggs sends you back to the very beginning. But there are the bright bits, too, times when a flash of Heaven’s own sunshine lights up the darkness of the darkest mud hut, and one such moment is worth a lifetime’s plod.

Although Amy was told that it was a risky business in Ceylon for single women to visit Buddhist priests, she did it. Taking questions from a crowd also was dangerous. She did that too. A priest turned up in an open-air meeting one day and put these questions: You Christians believe God leads people who are in earnest to the Truth, do you? Yes. Do you deny that Gautama Buddha was in real earnest? No. How was it, then, that he did not find it? Amy’s answer, recorded in a letter: “To our Father and his Father we may leave the gentle Buddha. To the Indian Prince Siddhartha (the teacher of whom Buddha was the deified incarnation), as to the Persian King Cyrus, He may have said, ‘I have even called thee, I have surnamed thee, though thou hast not known Me.’—but what of those,” she added to home friends, “who today are seeking and, so far as we are concerned, seeking as vainly as he? There are some such. In inland China Mr. Hudson Taylor found one. All old missionaries can tell of a few rare souls found blindly groping, if haply they might feel after Him and find Him. Oh that our skirts may be free from the stain of our brother’s blood!”

Because of a doctor’s verdict that it would never do for Amy to return to Japan—she had “brain exhaustion”—she had finally settled down, she wrote in November 1894, to study the Singhalese language. Her luggage was to be sent in a year or so from Japan, and the D.O.M. was shipping a box of clothing to Ceylon for her. She had reached a measure of peace. The Lord’s field for her work would be Ceylon. “All is settled,” she wrote on November 14.

On November 27 she learned that the D.O.M. had had a stroke. Within an hour she set out for Colombo, borrowed warm clothing from a missionary, and sailed for London the next day.

The journey was a nightmare from start to finish. She was so ill she could remember little except pain, fever, fear, heat, then, in Naples, icy wind. The Lord sent along His angels, one of them in Rome to rout her from sleep on one train and get her on the right train for Paris, another a Frenchman who piloted her across Paris to the train for Calais. A rough Channel crossing. Her mother meeting her in London on December 15. December 16—her twenty-seventh birthday. It is doubtful that there was any festivity. Then long days of blank. Finally the faces of beloved Keswick friends, a doctor’s face. Through it all the urgent thought, “I must be well. I must get to Broughton Grange.” She got there in time for Christmas.

1. Nehemiah 8:10.

2. 2 Chronicles 32:7, 8.

Chapter 13

To the India of the Raj

England was very good to me.” Thus Amy summed up in her autobiography the ten months spent there.

She neglected to mention that she became a published author. Marshall Brothers of London brought out during that year (1895) her first book, From Sunrise Land, a collection of letters from Japan with illustrations by the author and William Wilson, the D.O.M.’s son.

It was not her idea. She had to be talked into allowing the material to go into print. Persuaded at last, she explained her primary reason in the introduction:

“These little letters were written just for ‘home’; remembering this, your kindness will excuse mistakes and informalities. And the same plea applies to the little sketches scattered throughout. . . . Others could tell you far more, and far more worthily, of the showing forth of His hand