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

village in December 1906. “Night after night we were in the little stricken huts, day after day, too . . . and what cholera can be no one can begin to understand who has not fought it alone, without a doctor, without modern weapons.”3

The doctor and the modern weapons were a long time in coming. The work of God is done on God’s timetable. His answers to our prayers come always in time—His time. His thoughts are far higher than ours, His wisdom past understanding.

Although cholera prowled around the Dohnavur Family many times, never once did it enter the gates, even though it was often necessary for Amma and her helpers to come straight back from the stricken village to the compound, stopping only long enough to change clothes. While God sent no miraculous medical assistance He seemed to put a hedge around His helpless children.

1. The Continuation of a Story, pp. 35ff.

2. Overweights of Joy, p. 264.

3. Gold Cord, p. 56.

Chapter 24

Strife of Tongues

Early in 1907 seven Dohnavur girls were baptized in one of the “shallow sheets of water that make our countryside so beautiful after rain. . . . Behind the calm, bright water, more present in a sense than even the hills whose shore that water washed, we saw the striped walls of the temples. There are joys that are unearthly in their power and in their sweetness.”

Amy had learned to expect attack from the enemy of souls whenever an Indian took an uncompromising stand as a Christian. As the Assyrian king Sennacherib swept down upon Israel just after a time of feasting and gladness, so the enemy struck the little company of Dohnavur. This time it was a triple attack. Amy herself, thoroughly exhausted to the point of breakdown, was ordered home. Of course she disobeyed the order. Home? India was home. To leave it was not an option. But she did go to Ooty where climate and civilized comforts provided respite. While she was gone, a particularly virile kind of dysentery swept the nursery in Neyoor. One baby with dysentery is a full-time job for a mother. Ponnammal, with sixteen babies ill at once, wrote to Amma, “All is windy about us now, but the wind will not last always. The waves beat into our boat; but when the Lord says, Peace, be still, they will lie down. Let all your prayer for us be that we may rest in the will of God while the wind lasts.” Ten of the babies died. Sometimes a grave had to be dug to hold two of them. “My little heart’s joy, my own little jewel-of-the-eye has gone. But Jesus stays with me,” wrote Ponnammal.

News of the worst of the three attacks came in a letter from Walker, who was holding the fort at Dohnavur. The enemy had triumphed this time. What Amy called “a great wind from the wilderness” blew on a girl named Jeyanie, one of the convert workers, so that she was under serious suspicion of wrongdoing. It is not named, but in Amy’s eyes was “worse than illness and death,” and Jeyanie was sent away. Then another was involved in “a coil of trouble” which ultimately rendered her useless.

Scenery near the compound.

Ill and out of reach, Amy was assailed by some of the same enemy’s fiery darts in the form of questions. The dysentery had spread rapidly because of overcrowding. There was only one Ponnammal, so to open a second nursery was impossible. Should they have refused the babies and sent them back to the temples? Unthinkable. Should they have waived the matter of gold, silver, and precious stones and settled for whatever help they could get? “But a constraint had been laid upon us. We could not have done that,”1 said Amy, and Ponnammal wrote, “Let us work until we drop, but let us never lower the standard.”

At this time someone sent Père Didon’s Spiritual Letters, a book which was not mere paper and ink to Amy “but force—wind and fire and dew.”

“The roads are rugged,” he wrote, “the precipices are steep; there may be a feeling of dizziness on the heights, gusts of wind, peals of thunder, nights of awful gloom—fear them not. There are also the joys of the sunlight, flowers such as are not in the plain, the purest of air, restful nooks; and the stars smile thence like the eyes of God.”

Still the babies came, each one given in some way to Dohnavur when she might have been given to a very different kind of life. One brought by train from Bangalore was spotted by someone connected with a temple who made an offer. Another was found by a Bible woman who saw the mother standing on a street waiting for an offer. The “precipices” were indeed steep, and Amy felt all the more keenly the need for a comrade, one “who will be utterly other-worldly, utterly single-hearted, utterly consumed. Don’t think I am that myself! I fall far short of my own standard. But that is what I want to be, and that is what we must be if we are to stand the strain and conquer.”2

Occasionally other missions sent candidates to help Amy. Usually they had to be returned. They were accustomed to walking on the beaten track. The “little pile of red sand” which was Dohnavur was “off track” in more ways than geographical, and the standard insisted on was impossibly high. Amy began to pray that every obstacle might be placed in the way of candidates—any silly story about her which might put them off, every variety of test, all possible dissuasions, in order that those who could be kept back should be kept back. Not one person did she want who was not meant for them.

Two Indian teachers came who seemed to be the answer to prayer. Both foundered on the rock of truth and had to be sent back. “If our children were to grow up truthful they must