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

the day, and work hard again (if allowed) in the evening, but this is not considered wise, for it is tropical after all, and this means a gradual substitution of water for blood in your veins.”

With a beginner’s aptitude for hasty generalizations she wrote that she found the Indian people “a series of contradictions. They are loving and lovable, cruel and needing-all-grace to love, bright and dull, eager and lazy to a degree perfectly incomprehensible at home. They are trustworthy and utterly the opposite, courteous and quite barbarous. They are everything you can imagine except, perhaps, straightforward. That the natural man in Eastern lands never, never is. In all sorts of trifles one is tried almost beyond endurance. Appointments are made to be broken, punctuality and speed are unknown—they don’t understand our foolish fondness for getting on—‘is there not a tomorrow?’” The comments are vivid and candid, meant for only a small circle who knew the character of the woman who wrote them. She acknowledged her own limitations when she added, “This is the average native character on the surface. Underneath there is much, much more, but one can’t get at it until one can speak and I am far off that yet.”

She praised God for Jeya, an Indian Christian woman whose name meant victory, “so dear and loving with me, calls me Sister, helps me with Tamil and interprets for me in the wards.” As usual Amy did not waste a day in getting down to business, speaking to the patients in the dispensary. “I wish you could see the strange dark faces and beautiful seemingly eager eyes, and the rich, bright colors and graceful forms—it is all a pleasure in itself, but then there is the sadness of knowing that very little is really going in. These meetings are a ‘sowing beside all waters,’ but I long to be led to the truly seeking soul.”

She had the luxury of a tiny room with its own “bath,” which meant a place where she could dip water from a tub and pour it over herself. She managed to squeeze in also a wardrobe and chest of drawers. She thanked God for the privacy and accepted the lack of quiet, which pulled one out of touch with God—banging doors, crying babies, barking dogs, squawking crows, perpetual noises “of all sorts and conditions all day long and all night long, up to strong and awful attacks of the devil, the Prince of Heathendom.”

Another luxury, taken for granted in the India of the raj, was servants. They worked, of course, according to caste—the house-boy dusted and swept, the cook cooked, the gardener brought the bath water, the dhobie came to collect the laundry, the “sweeper” emptied the latrines.

Amy’s daily schedule went like this:

  6:00 rise

  6:45 tea, toast, and plantain (banana)

  7:00 review language lessons

  7:15 munshie (language teacher) comes

  8:15 prayers in hospital ward

  8:30 language lessons

10:30 breakfast

11:30 rest

  1:00 study

  3:45 tea

  4:30 exercise, pony riding, letter-writing

  7:30 dinner

  8:30 housekeeping and accounts

Amy’s Aunt Annie had little notion of the character of her missionary niece. She wrote to inquire if she read novels. “Do I ever read any novels?!!!! I have hardly time to read my Bible properly, much less anything unnecessary.’’

In keeping the household accounts she got tangled up in trying to sort out rupees, pies, and annas, but that was nothing compared to the battle of learning Tamil, “the Chinese of India,’’ as Amy called it. In March she was “in the throes of grim despair,’’ feeling she would never, never learn it. Somebody wrote from England, citing the story of Jericho, whose walls fell down after seven days’ “compassing.’’ “Fear went,’’ wrote Amy. “I felt as if I could never be afraid again. Someone had prayed the prayer that rises straight up, and God had sent the answer straight down in the form of this story.’’ By July the unfamiliar sound of the language was diminishing, but Amy chafed, wondering why she did not yet understand everything. She was thrilled to have succeeded in reading a Gospel in Tamil. The walls of Jericho were falling. In November, “it is bliss to be able to speak a little and to find that they understand. The next thing is to understand them.” She had finished the “most tiring half’’ of language study, but a month later she admitted that Tamil seemed an ocean in which she was not yet so much as ankle deep.

1. Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, Freedom at Midnight (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975), p. 15.

Chapter 14

Fashionable Christianity

Francois Coillard, missionary of the Zambesi, wrote: “The evangelization of the world is a desperate struggle with the Prince of Darkness and with everything his rage can stir up in the shape of obstacles, vexations, oppositions, and hatred, whether by circumstances or by the hand of man. It is a serious task. Oh, it should mean a life of consecration.”

These were words often quoted by Amy Carmichael. It would be impossible to exaggerate her sense of the seriousness of her calling, and, by contrast, of the apparent superficiality of much in India that called itself Christianity. “The saddest thing one meets is the nominal Christian. I had not seen it in Japan where missions are younger. . . . The church here is a ‘field full of wheat and tares.’”

Since long before Amy’s arrival in India conflict and competition had torn the Christian churches. Caste was a primary factor. The missions that since 1947 have together formed the Church of South India drew their church members largely from three barely compatible groups: the high caste Vellala landowners, the lower caste Paraiya field laborers (Gandhi called them “the people of God,” the current term is “depressed classes”) and, in the southern districts, the intermediate-caste Nadars or palmyra climbers. The work of certain foreign missions, the Salvation Army for one, was limited to lower castes. It is not to be wondered at, given the position of the Untouchables, that they were tempted by what Christianity seemed to offer: an identity hitherto