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

The language there being Malayalam, two interpreters were needed for the speakers (Amy and Walker), as well as prodigious lung power, since public-address systems were then unknown. There is no report of spiritual results, but it seems that (through Amy’s efforts?) the Indian minister, a Syrian Christian, was delivered from the outlandish getup which certain English missionaries had chosen for him—a suit of “violent checks” and a hat, in which “he looks exactly like a well-dressed monkey.” A comfortable white robe with wide sleeves was a relief for him and very likely another black mark on the missionaries’ list of Carmichael offenses. She had a propensity for upsetting things.

If it were possible to poll all the missionaries who have worked in all the world in all of Christian history, it would be seen that missionary work, most of the time, offers little that could be called glamour. What it does offer, as Amy wrote to prospective candidates in later years, is “a chance to die”—or, as Winston Churchill put his challenge during World War II, blood, sweat, and tears. It offers a great deal of plodding and ploughing, with now and then a little planting. It is the promise of rejoicing, given to those who “go forth weeping, bearing precious seed” that gives heart. So it was with Amy. Her home letters are not triumphant accounts of people turning to God from idols, but little stories of the one or two children in a village who were willing to learn one Scripture verse, sing one little gospel song; the bored Brahman women who were diverted for a few moments by photographs Amy showed them; an occasional dialogue with an educated Hindu; a schoolboy who seemed interested in the Bible. But gradually the letters began to be lightened with stories about the children of her Family.

Amy, age forty-two, with Lola and Leela.

“Did you get caned in school today?”

“No, not exactly caned. I was standing beside a very naughty little girl and the teacher meant to cane her, but the cane fell on me by mistake.”

Their questions were charming:

“Do fishes love Jesus?”

“Stones are young mountains, aren’t they?”

When they saw an English lady wearing a veil: “Don’t they like to look at God’s beautiful world? Do they like it better spotty?” She asked her English friends to send baby vests and lengths of cloth, but not frocks, for which they had no use whatever. She asked for dolls—“girl dolls, please. NOT boys—the games heathen children play are so terribly, unthinkably wicked that boys should never be given.”

The Indian girls did their best to care for the children, but Amy’s itineration became less and less feasible. By August she wrote, “Oh, I am getting so hungry for another child!” and was beginning to see that she must allow her feet to be tied “for the sake of Him whose feet once were nailed.”

1. Amy Carmichael, From the Fight, p. 24ff.

2. Isaiah 65:24 (AV).

Chapter 22

The Vault Beneath the Meadow

The search for children in peril went on assiduously, but as quietly as possible. They found that there were five reasons for children being dedicated to temples. Sometimes it was because of a vow or obedience to a family custom. Sometimes it was in order to escape some social entanglement such as an out-of-caste alliance. When a poor widow or a deserted wife could not find a suitable husband for her child, she married her to the god. In some cases lack of money to perform the death ceremonies required by the caste tempted a mother to give up her child for her husband’s sake.

It was three years before a second temple child was found, three years during which the Starry Cluster continued to travel and Amy continued to try to do the impossible. Her Scrap letters were fewer and further between, but she wrote many letters to friends in India, asking for help in finding the children. She investigated every possible avenue of approach to officials who might be of help in saving them, and pleaded with people at home to pray. Her book Things as They Are seemed of no use at all against the huge forces of the system which was Hinduism. One day, desperate to find words fiery enough to burn people’s consciences, she cried out to God to give them. She wrote down the answer in an old exercise book:

Thou shalt have words,

But at this cost, that thou must first be burned,

Burned by red embers from a secret fire,

Scorched by fierce heats and withering winds that sweep,

Through all thy being, carrying thee afar

From old delights. Doth not the ardent fire

Consume the mountain’s heart before the flow

Of fervent lava? Wouldst thou easefully,

As from cool, pleasant fountains, flow in fire?

Reformers were working in both Bombay and Calcutta, “but the subject bristled with difficulties and action at that time appeared to be impossible.”1 Once she was invited to meet with a group of men who might wield influence in the framing of a law to protect children.

Two of the ten men were in earnest, the other eight enjoyed the talk preparatory and attendant upon all action in India, but they saw no tremendous reason for immediate exertion of any sort. The evil was decreasing: education, civilization, these elevating influences would gradually and pleasantly permeate society. In the meantime, we asked, what about the perishing children? Ah, it was sad, doubtless; that they should perish was indeed regrettable. But after all, were there many imperilled? For his part one old gentleman doubted it, though doubtless, he added cheerfully, unaware of the force of his admission, “a change in the law is much required.”2

Amy went out visiting some of the Indian women who had been mentioned in Things as They Are, hoping to find results from the wave of prayer she believed the book would have generated in England and elsewhere. She reported in her Scrap letter that she found little evidence. One old lady, so kind and hospitable in giving