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

earnest eyes, a nervous gesture, wisdom and learning in evidence, but not a trace of the petty narrow-mindedness she had imagined. Following the meeting she was introduced to him in Government Gardens. They talked of how she might best learn Tamil.

“I would much rather live in a mud hut with the people around me than among English people in a bungalow,” she told him.

“You could not stand it for long.”

“I would rather burn out than rust out.”

“That should be as God wills.”

There was not a glimmer of a smile in his eyes. “I don’t like you,” Amy decided, and withdrew into the deeps of herself. “I haven’t seen a Mr. Buxton yet,” she wrote to her family, “and I don’t expect to. There are not many on this side of the sea.”

She could have no idea of how her life would be linked to the Walkers.

1. Philippians 2:7.

2. Malcolm Muggeridge, The Green Stick, Chronicles of Wasted Time Vol 1 (New York: William Morrow, 1973), p. 122.

Chapter 15

Company, Church, Crown, and Hindu

Throughout her time in Japan, Ceylon, and India, Amy had written her Scrap letters monthly when possible, sometimes less often, her rule being that she would never write when she could do anything else. Scrap Number 7 was begun on September 23, 1896, the tenth anniversary of the Glasgow convention, where

a door was opened for me into a new life and I took the first step in. . . . Today as I thought of all that has passed since then, of the little little one has learnt or done or been, I felt as if one had not taken even a step into the land which opened out before one ten whole years ago. Tonight in my evening reading this verse came: “In His quiver hath He kept me close.” I never noticed it before. It is the Revised Version of Isaiah 49:2. Is it not beautiful? And does it not fit into the verse linked always to me with September 23, 1886, “able to keep you from falling”? Dear friends, I don’t often write of these inner heart-things in my Scrapperies, but to the glory of His name let me witness that in far away lands, in loneliness (deepest sometimes when it seems least so), in times of downheartedness and tiredness and sadness, always always He is near. He does comfort, if we let Him. Perhaps someone as weak and good-for-nothing as even I am may read this. Don’t be afraid! Through all circumstances, outside, inside, He can keep me close.

Among the circumstances which called for trust in God’s keeping power were the illness of her co-worker Clare, the constant presence of idolatrous customs—tom-toms keeping her awake at night, blood sacrifices being made within earshot, festivals, processions—the daily Tamil grind (she still wished heartily that her fellow-workers would consent to her living alone somewhere with Indians), opportunities to witness of Christ to individuals, some in hospital, some in other places.

There were encouragements—two Anglo-Indian girls who came for instruction and gave themselves to the Lord, a child who listened eagerly to the story of Jesus, a high-caste patient who returned to her village full of the Gospel story. When a single opportunity was missed, Amy chided herself. It had not crossed her mind to inquire whether a certain hospital servant could read. He worked for days before anyone thought to give him a Gospel. When someone did, it was Lilian, the doctor, not Amy. She confessed her dreadful failure to home friends, begging them to pray harder.

Saral came one day with an idea for drawing the women to hear the Gospel. She would teach them to knit with some pink wool she had been given, “and they will love me more and like to listen when I talk about Jesus.”

Amy could not say yes to that. She explained that the Gospel needed no such frills. It is the power of God for salvation. Saral protested that there was nothing in the Bible which bore upon pink wool and knitting needles. Indeed there was—Zechariah 4:6, Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord of hosts. There was no need for tricks which might open houses—houses were open. No need for methods of helping to humanize and fill bare and empty lives—“these women have a full day’s work.” To try to help God with pink fancywork was, she felt, plain unbelief.

At Ooty the Walkers had invited Amy to come to Tinnevelly to learn Tamil. Although she had not yet finished the examinations she was required to take in Bangalore, she made a visit in December of 1896, traveling by train from Madras to the hot plain. From the train window she saw temples in every village, idols under nearly every tree, people working in the fields with Siva’s ashes on their foreheads. “It makes you feel as if you couldn’t sit still. You must do something, try to do something, anything! . . . Oh to get into that stronger, calmer current, out of the feverishness of human haste. Do please, dear friends, ask that we may exchange the eagerness of the flesh for the earnestness of the Spirit and so move in the force of that Holy Wind that we shall be carried along by His great calm.”

Tinnevelly is the mangled English pronunciation of the Tamil Tirunelveli, “Hedge of the Holy Paddy Field,” a town and district at the southern tip of India, divided from the state of Travancore (modern Kerala) by a range of mountains called the Western Ghats or “steps.” The plain, blistering hot in the dry season, was very beautiful after the monsoon, “a great garden, green with the wonderful green of young rice, and set with the shining silver of water.” Other less-watered parts were barren with black soil, stunted trees, few palms. Its people formed an ancient and orthodox group of communities, with nearly three thousand Hindu temples, forty-two of them considered specially holy.

The Walkers of the Church Missionary Society arrived