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

People in their kindness tried to distract us from this that could not be forgotten. To be with them, hearing their talk, so clear and friendly, reading their books, looking at their pleasant things, was like being in some clean green field full of blessed flowers. But every now and then the face of the field would fall in and discover a vault below; and in the vault chains and darkness and the souls of young children. . . . The desolation of the children who had no deliverer, the wrong we could not redress, the fear, the cold deadness of forced sin, how little of this could be shown then or can be shown now.3

When she told of the child-wives, twelve or ten or eight years old, people said, “Oh, you mean betrothed! Another case of missionary exaggeration!” No, she did not mean betrothed. “We mean married.”

Katherine Mayo’s Mother India documents case after case of appalling physical destruction (“pelvis crushed out of shape,” “so completely ravished as to be almost beyond surgical repair,” etc.) which resulted from child marriage, which, “like its background of public sentiment, is deep-rooted in the far past of an ultra-conservative and passionately religious people. Anyone curious as to the fierceness with which it would be defended by the people, both openly and covertly, and in the name of religion, against any frontal attack, will find answer in the extraordinary work and in the all-too-reticent books of Miss Amy Wilson-Carmichael.”4

One evening when the full responsibility of the compound rested on Amy (the Walkers were in England on furlough), she had what amounted to a vision. The tamarind trees around the bungalow were olive trees, and under them a man knelt alone. She knew it was the Lord, praying there in the garden for the children. So the burden was His, not hers. She need not ask Him to share it with her. He was asking her to share it with Him, to search with Him for the lost lambs. “Who could have done anything but go into the garden and kneel down beside Him under the olive trees?”

Her poem, “The Fellowship of His Sufferings,”5 must have come from that evening’s experience. She is “the lover.” The masculine pronoun refers to herself.

. . . Darkly distinct, he saw a vision pass

Of One who took the cup alone, alone.

Then broke from him a moan,

A cry to God for pain, for any pain

Save this last desolation; and he crept

In penitence to his Lord’s feet again.

. . . Never an angel told, but this I know,

That he to whom that night Gethsemane

Opened its secrets, cannot help but go

Softly thereafter, as one lately shriven,

Passionately loving, as one much forgiven.

And never, never can his heart forget

That Head with hair all wet

With the red dews of Love’s extremity,

Those eyes from which fountains of love did flow,

There in the Garden of Gethsemane.

As she was praying, a pastor in the northern part of the district was traveling. He happened on a group of temple women with children, and prayed then and there that something might be done. Almost immediately he heard of a newborn baby just taken by a temple woman. He was able to rescue her. On March 1, 1904, the first temple baby, thirteen days old, was in Amma’s arms—“the little old, tired baby face, the feeble, weary cry, the little hands moving restlessly as if feeling for a mother.” She nearly died that same night, and “we hardly understood what we had undertaken.” Preena was allowed to name her. She chose one of the precious stones from the wall of the Holy City—Amethyst. The second baby, also saved by an Indian pastor, was named Sapphire. She was a lovely, laughing baby, “a whole round gift of joy.”

A girl named Lavana came, defying her parents’ pleas to return to them. “I cannot possibly come,” she said, “I am a Christian.” They tried to lure her with jewels. “I don’t want jewels. I have Jesus now.” By June the Family had grown to include seventeen children, six of whom were direct answers to the prayer of so many years—they were temple children. The women of the Band were learning that if the Lord of Glory took a towel and knelt on the floor to wash the dusty feet of His disciples (the job of the lowest slave in an Eastern household), then no work, even the relentless and often messy routine of caring for squalling babies, is demeaning. To offer it up to the Lord of Glory transforms it into a holy task. “Could it be right,” Amy had asked, “to turn from so much that might be of profit and become just nursemaids?” The answer was yes. It is not the business of the servant to decide which work is great, which is small, which important or unimportant—he is not greater than his master.

“If by doing some work which the undiscerning consider ‘not spiritual work’ I can best help others, and I inwardly rebel, thinking it is the spiritual for which I crave, when in truth it is the interesting and exciting, then I know nothing of Calvary love,”6 Amy wrote after many years of such “unspiritual” work.

Facilities for the care of these children left much to be desired. A long, low mud room served as kitchen, dining room, night and day nursery all in one. Many of the children were frail when they came and needed mother’s milk. They could find no one in the village willing to feed other people’s children. It simply wasn’t done. Later when a village woman consented to breast-feed one of Amy’s babies in order to save its life, her husband killed her by slow arsenic poisoning for having thus sinned against caste.

Christmas Eve found Amma in the village church with a sick baby in her arms, searching for a Christian mother (surely a Christian mother would be willing?) to nurse it. There was no one. What