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

other incidents showing God’s supply were recounted in a little book called The Beginning of a Story, published in 1908. Here and elsewhere Amy wrote that no appeals for money were ever made or ever authorized to be made. On page 19, however, she did allow herself to say, “Naturally, our greatest need, next to prayer, is just the simple straightforward need of money—to feed our little ones and clothe them, and to provide for the long journeys connected with their redemption and all other expenses bearing upon the salvation of Temple children.” It was a mere statement of fact, so obvious it hardly needed stating. Yet Amy later withdrew the book from circulation, fearing that that line might be taken as an appeal for funds. She did not mind listing other needs in her letters home: prayer first, last, and always; then sewing and writing materials, colored pencils, rattles for the babies, pink or white vests, yardage of sateen (“blue, white, mossy green, terra cotta, or bright golden, not orange or lemon—we have no use for ugly colors. They are not necessarily cheaper than pretty colors. If they were I would pray for grace. . . . I say very humbly, send us something pretty”).

The Family was rapidly outgrowing the buildings, but to plan and finance expansion was a serious business. “Expenditure leads out into expenditure,” she wrote a few years later. “The only expenditure, and all its outworkings, for which God can be held to be responsible is that which He directs.” Questions about finances were asked again and again. Again and again Amy stated her position: Our Heavenly Father knows what we need and gives it to us.

There is no myth, no imagination about it: God does hear when we speak to Him; God does answer us. For money is a tangible, unmistakable thing; you cannot act when you have not got it as you would if you had it. It is not a case of “Believe that you have it, and you have it’’—a kind of faith which has puzzled me from a child. Believe it will come, yes, if you are sure your order is to go forward and buy land or build buildings or save children. But woe unto you if you imagine you have been told to do such things and then find the order has not been signed above. But the sign, the very impress of the signet ring . . . is a solemn thing to see.1

The Cottage Nursery.

Early in 1906 when it seemed that they must expand, they asked for “the impress of the signet ring” in the form of three signs:

1. possession of an adjoining field,

2. money for two nurseries, a kindergarten, and workers’ rooms,

3. a marked increase in the Family.

Two answers came in a short time. The field was purchased. Seventeen children arrived between spring and fall of 1906. The money was not yet in hand, but because of the rains, building could not begin anyway.

No matter how crowded her days and nights, how many demands were made on her time, how impossible privacy or time for reflection might seem to be, Amy Carmichael managed to write. It was a necessity laid upon her. While itinerating and evangelizing and teaching and mothering, any one of which tasks might have exhausted an ordinary woman, she somehow contrived to make time and reserve energy for writing. By this time she had a typewriter, so that was the end of handwritten letters home. Although no Scrap letter survives from 1904 (it is not hard to suppose she was literally too busy to write), and only two from 1905, she wrote Overweights of Joy, a three-hundred page sequel to Things as They Are. It was published in 1906 with the hope that some whose spirits had sunk on learning the terrible facts of the first book would find “something of a cordial” here, although there was no attempt to tone down the facts of Things. Overweights was meant to be a song of praise out of the darkness which was the background of the work. In addition to many more stories of the powers of heathendom and its indifference to the message of Christ, the book contains happy stories and photographs of the children brought out of that darkness into light. Leela was one of those children. She had absorbed a good deal of theology.

“In the beginning,” began Leela in unctuous tones, “the bad devil was good. He was an angel. He lived in heaven. One day all the angels came to sing to God. Then the devil was angry. He got angrier and angrier. He was very rude to God.” Here Leela seemed to freeze all over, and her voice sounded quite deep and awful. Irreverence was far from her intention. “That bad, bad devil said, ‘I won’t stand before God’s chair anymore, and I won’t sing to God anymore. I want to sit in God’s chair, and make God sing to me!’” There was a perfectly horrified pause, as the enormity of the transgression became evident. “So God took him and tumbled him down out of heaven, and he was turned into the devil.”2

One night in a little crowded house in Dohnavur village in 1900 Amy had been asked to nurse a boy with pneumonia. It was her first experience of being in charge of one so ill and although she distrusted the method of treatment (hot oil poultices) she felt she could not add to the family’s distress by suggesting any other. “By the kindness of the Lord, the Healer, he recovered, and so did all others nursed in the same primitive way, but I looked up [i.e. prayed] that first night and asked for a trained nurse.” Nearly seven years later a young woman, believing God had called her to this work, arrived in Dohnavur. She was loving and unselfish, but stayed only a few months before leaving to marry a man she had met on board ship.

Cholera struck the