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

emerald sheet of rice-field; the songs by which we refreshed ourselves as we tumbled along in the heat; the pause outside the village we were to enter; the swift prayer for an open door; the entrance, all of us watching eagerly for signs of a welcome anywhere—for this was pioneer work, not work in prepared ground, and in scores of the places to which we went no white woman had ever been seen before.

Sometimes we would get out at the entrance of the village and walk on till we saw a friendly face—and we almost always found one. We usually separated then, and went two and two, and won our way past the men who would be sauntering in the front courtyard, and so penetrated to the women’s rooms; or, if that proved impossible, we held an open-air meeting somewhere; or sat down wherever we could, and waited till someone came to talk, for we found—at festivals, for example—that if we waited in some quiet street, sitting apparently unconcerned, Indian guru-fashion, on a deserted verandah, or under a tree, that one by one people discovered us, and came and squatted down beside us and asked questions.

Sometimes the listeners were tall men in white loincloths with knives at the belt, “fearless, intelligent, with none of that undignified Englishism adopted by city men.”

Later in the morning the Band went home, or back to the tent, breakfasted, and studied the Bible together, searching its pages “through and through for that without which our work would have been vain.” Afternoons and evenings were spent much as the mornings, except when there was street preaching and music on the baby organ.

Camp scene with the Walkers.

A typical campsite would be a bit of sandy jungle cleared of scrub and thorn, as near to a river as possible. Under the mimosa and palm trees three white tents—a tiny one for Walker, barely big enough to hold him and the irreducible minimum of necessities, one for the three servants (a servant to put up and take down tents and see that white ants didn’t devour them, another to cook, one to run errands). The women had a twelve-by-twelve tent with two side-wings for dressing and for storing the beds during the daytime. There were folding tables and chairs, “a shocking number of belongings,” including all food except milk, which was obtainable in the villages. Most indispensable of all were the books and pictures with which they told the old, old story.

Once in a while the Band believed God wanted them to ask specifically for one convert on a given day. On one such day they were on their way back to the tent without having seen a convert. Something the bandy-man said made Amy ask him when he would come to Jesus. “Tonight,” was his answer. He came into the tent, “we all prayed, and he prayed too, and we think the Good Shepherd found him.” A letter from England told them that people there had asked specifically on that date for a convert. What a cynic would call a coincidence Amy called a clear answer, and more than an answer—a sign of the love of the Lord.

Amy experienced a sense of evil worse than in Japan. Once a devotee of the temple, “very very old and very very bad,” with not one “good line” in his ancient, wrinkled face, came to listen. “After the preaching I went to him, poor old man, so old, so bad. He just scowled and muttered some horrible thing and tottered away.”

Never once were the members of the Band asked to come back and teach again. “Go!” said one woman, “We neither want you nor your book nor your way.” An old leper called out, “Who wants your Lord Jesus here?” A devil-dancer with her hair matted and twisted, her face spotted and smeared with idol marks, snarled at them, “Your god is no god. If I come to him my devil-god will kill me. He is god. Yours died, you say—died and was buried. Your god is no god. Go away and tell your lies somewhere else. Who asks you to tell them here?”

Not all rejected the Truth. There were now and then occasions of tremendous joy when, at sunset, all the Christians streamed out to the nearest lake and the new believer was “buried with Christ in baptism.” “A little to the right the devil shrines, a little to the left the devil temple, and we on the shore watching, praying, singing.”

One boy stood straight and fearless as he told his story. His father was a sage. One day the boy said, “Father, I have a load, the burden of sin is heavy. What can I do to get rid of my sin?” “Learn the Thousand Stanzas and your sin will melt away.” He learned them, but the burden was heavy still. “Is there no other way?” he asked. “You are young. Wait for a year or two, then you may find the way.” But what if he should die? At last “a thirst like the thirst for water came, and I was thirsty, thirsty.” He heard the Christians sing a gospel song, “Earnestly, tenderly Jesus is calling.” Next morning he came to Jesus and drank. “Where was my burden then, where was my thirst? Gone—as the dew when it sees the sun!”

One day Amy had an encounter with a very unusual woman. She looked intelligent, could read, knew the classics, quoted poetry “in, for a woman, a most bewildering fashion.” She scorned Blessing, the widow who had believed only a month earlier. “What could that ignoramus teach me?” the woman wanted to know. “You say you must not tell lies, and here is a regular big one! Learning indeed! Her very grammar is defective! She is the merest block of wood!”

I am only one month old,” said Blessing, “I have no wisdom to answer you, but I can read this Book of God and my name is