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

Saral, who had been with Amy for more than a year, went to visit her family and did not return when expected. In answer to inquiry there were excuses. At last it was evident that she did not plan to return. Amy had lost another comrade in the fight, and suffered perhaps a deeper pain than that caused by the indifference of the nonbelievers. She began to pray for comrades who would endure.

Friends in England offered to provide a tent for the Walkers and Amy which would enable them to make longer visits in the villages. Unlike Japan where lodging could be had in something resembling hotels, there was nowhere in South Indian villages where a defiling foreigner could lay his head, let alone eat a meal. The tea basket Amy carried on her forays was always an object of curiosity whose beauties she was required repeatedly to display, and when she wanted to “perpetrate the barbarity of consuming a square inch of chocolate” she had to try to find a hidden corner in which she could retire. With the tent they would be ready for “a regular raid into the Kingdom of Darkness with the glorious Light.” But were they truly ready for such an invasion? The tent was a mere physical provision. What about the readiness to be a vessel broken for the Lord, “continually surrendered into the hands of death for Jesus’ sake,” as the apostle Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 4:11, “so that the life of Jesus may be revealed in this mortal body”? That was the crying need: the life—visible, tangible evidence of the truth of what they preached. Too much talk had been heard, too many professions made, without that unarguable revelation. Camping in the villages would give Christ’s ambassadors the opportunity to show the life they talked about.

The Fight became intense in September when a girl, the first of her caste ever to do so, decided to follow Christ no matter what the cost. There was a tremendous row. The girl fled for refuge to the mission bungalow in Pannaivilai where Amy was living with the Walkers. The relatives pursued her, camped on the verandah, putting the household in a state of siege. The poor old mother threw herself on the floor, thumping her head, beating her breast, moaning. They made all manner of promises if the girl would renege—they would not force her to marry, they would let her go to church, worship God at home, anything, if only she would not break caste. “Only come! Come! We are your own people! Come back to us!” There was a breathless pause. Amy could do nothing but watch the girl suffer, wait for her answer. “I cannot go back,” she said, and they began again. At last Walker entered. “You have had a fair field. You have done your best. She is free to go if she wishes.” Then he turned to the girl. “Do you choose to go?” “NO!” she said, with all the strength left in her. That was the end of that interview, but not of the fight. For days there was palaver, threat of lawsuits, wheedlings, a deposition. The mission school was burnt to the ground. Rumor said someone would blow poison in the girl’s face if she went to church. When the girl decided she had nothing more to say to them and would hear no more from them, Amy spirited her away to the mission house in Palamcottah where she was kept safe. She was baptized in October and given a name which meant Jewel of Victory.

In the same month the prayer for a comrade who would endure was answered. Ponnammal, whose name meant Gold, was a widow of twenty-three, a fourth-generation Christian who had taught Sunday school and attended Mrs. Walker’s prayer meetings. She had been a trusted friend for some months,3 “and we felt she was being trained by God Himself for some special service,” but because of family control she was not free to serve the Lord as she wanted. She prayed for this freedom, and suddenly and strangely it came. There was trouble, the family took sides against her, and she was turned out.

“I think God wants to make me pure gold,” she said, “so He is burning out the dross, teaching me the meaning of the fire, the burnt offering, the death of the self-part of me.”

Ponnammal was one of the “Starry Cluster,” the Tamil name given by the people to the itinerant band. Pearl was another one, an Indian “Lydia”4 whose heart God had opened. She had lost an arm as a child, was treated as a disgrace to the family and lived in a “hole,” the sort of place Englishmen rarely saw, or, if they did, never understood Indian India, the old, old India of legend and song.” There was a widow named Blessing and a married woman, Marial. Amy hesitated to admit Marial because “husbands are so much in the way . . . an obstruction and a nuisance. Women need to escape them,” but Marial’s soldier-spirit was irresistible. Her husband was “hardly a man exactly.” “I have spiritual needs—these I expect my God to supply. I have also physical needs these I expect my wife to supply,” he said, so they took him on as a cook, he being “incapable of higher things,” and Marial was thus free to fight the Lord’s battles.” Sometimes the women traveled with the Walkers, sometimes by themselves. They had a flag made of folds of black, red, white, and yellow sateen, “a most useful text for an impromptu sermon,” like the Wordless Book.

The Band and the bandy.

Off we would go in the early morning, walking, or by bullock-cart, as many of us as could get in, packed under its curved mat roof. Stuffiness, weariness, that appalling sensation of almost sea-sickness . . . but one only remembers the loveliness of the early lights on palm, and water, and