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

If the Children of Israel needed feasts and celebrations and piles of stones to teach them the significance of life and death and sacrifice and the leading of God, why should not the children of Dohnavur need the same? Her deep sense of the importance of observance of special occasions pervaded the life of the compound.

In 1910 Suhinie, one of the loveliest of the convert girls who cared for babies, whose story is told in From the Forest, was taken with a seizure and died within a few hours. While Amy’s grief was honest and human, she saw the Homegoing of a baby or any of the Lord’s lovers as an occasion for joy. Her love of the natural and simple determined the method of burial which became the Family’s standard. Clad in an old white sari, Suhinie was carried to the garden, later called “God’s Garden,” on a cane cot covered with flowers. “If the Lord Jesus does not come first, this is what I shall ask for,” Amy wrote. “No waste, for the living are so needy, no fuss, only loving hands near, and only flowers between me and the good earth.”

The schoolboys, led by Mr. Walker, were first in the procession, then the bier, followed by the women. “Coming home, I remembered Aristides: ‘And if any righteous person of their number (speaking of Christians) passes away from this world, they rejoice and give thanks to God; and they follow his body as if he were moving from one place to another.’ So we sang the happiest things we could.”

In accord with this vision of life the first nurseries had been built of the simplest, most natural materials—sun-dried bricks with earthen floors and thatched roofs, like the ordinary Indian buildings surrounding them. They had not reckoned on the time it would take to maintain such buildings. Termites (the cute nursery song notwithstanding) were a constant nuisance, constructing their tunnels up the walls. The mud floors had to be treated each week with cow dung to harden the surface. Thatched roofs were the perfect target for any who might want to take revenge by setting them on fire.

Could it be right to spend the Lord’s money on more expensive materials? If it was given specifically for that, they would accept it as His permission. As usual, they asked Him about it. The money came, specially designated, and they built a nursery and kindergarten with burnt brick for walls and tiles for roofs and floors. The rooms were Indian—unfurnished except for plain cupboards. There were brass vessels, kept bright with hand polishing, using wood ashes. The beds were grass mats, laid on the polished red tiles. The floor tiles in the schoolroom were the children’s “blackboard” on which they wrote and drew with chalk.

The visitor today sees the same scrupulous cleanliness and order which was of such importance to the founder. She taught the children to keep their little world orderly—theirs was not a God of confusion. Paths were swept daily, floors scrubbed, gardens weeded, “because of the cloud of witnesses”—the communion of the unseen body of Christ and all His angels, who saw where no human eye might see.

And why should not the place be beautiful? Some years before, when Amy was in Travancore on an evangelistic tour, she had admired the ancient style of its buildings in contrast to the “hideous English style” of one of the rajah’s palaces.

“Why people should build ugly buildings when they might as well build beautiful, is as great a puzzle to me as why they should go in for ugly colors when pretty ones are to be had. But we noticed wherever we traveled that the most graceful and beautiful things flourished best out of the sphere of English influence.”

The style of the Dohnavur structures as they are today combines what she found in Travancore with certain elements brought by missionaries from China. All of the buildings are of the same red color as the earth out of which they seem to have risen. Earth-red, too, are the seven-foot walls which surround the property. A visitor cannot fail to notice these, and may question the wisdom of thus separating the Family from the world outside. To Amy the disadvantages, great as they might be, were not nearly so great as the necessity to protect the children. Occasionally a tiger found its way from the nearby hills, but there were other “tigers,” far more to be feared.

All through the year 1910 there were rumblings about Muttammal. She was not out of danger. In January 1911, Amy was summoned again to court. In March came “the supreme hour of the long fight, the hour of utmost defeat, when for the first time we tasted public shame and scorn, and knew how little we had drunk as yet of the cup of our Saviour’s agony for souls.”

On the night before she was to appear in Palamcottah in court she lay on the cane cot on her verandah in the starlight. Her child Muttammal lay in her arms. We do not find the mother frantic with anxiety, or seeking, by sundry deceptions, to steer the child away from the reality of what might take place. Instead she speaks to the little girl, so lately introduced to Jesus, about His mysterious message to John the Baptist just before he was beheaded: “Blessed is he who is not offended in Me.”

“I took her hands in mine and looked down into her upturned face. ‘Promise me, whatever happens, by His grace, you will never be offended in Him.’” Muttammal promised.

Amy went alone to court in the morning. “We were as those smitten in the place of dragons.” The clerk floundered slowly through thirty or forty pages, the voice droning through the heavy heat till he came to words which “stung like a whip-lash”—Muttammal must be returned to her mother, all legal costs to be paid by Amy.

At the moment of the verdict Amy experienced a sudden strange, triumphant joy,