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

KNOW?” We know—not the answer to the inevitable Why, but the incontestable fact that it is for the best. “It is an irreparable loss, but is it faith at all if it is ‘hard to trust’ when things are entirely bewildering?”

Others, with a sigh and a shake of the head, observed that it is difficult for us human beings to escape bitterness, even dumb rage, when such things happen.

“It is indeed not only difficult, it is impossible,” Amy wrote. “There is only one way of victory over the bitterness and rage that come naturally to us—To will what God wills brings peace.”

“But are such things the will of God at all?” Amy herself raised the question, and answered it:

The honest heart cannot be content with platitudes. “An enemy hath done this” is a word that reaches far and touches more than tares. If an enemy has done it, how can it be called the will of God? We do not know the answer to that question now. But we have sidelights upon it, such as the vision in Revelation: They overcame him by the Blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony (victory through apparent defeat). . . . And as we rest our hearts upon what we know (the certainty of the ultimate triumph of good) leaving what we do not know to the Love that has led us all our life long, the peace of God enters into us and abides.

Just before Walker left for his mission, a group of them had been sitting under the stars in deck chairs. Amy was seized suddenly with the thought of how it would be if she did not have Walker’s strong arm to lean on in the work. She could not do without it, she said. “Well, you are not asked to!” said Walker with a laugh. But hers was still the soldier spirit, and when the wire came she was still under the same Captain. Her orders had not changed: Give up your right to yourself, take up the cross, follow. The Captain had been over the course before. Would she refuse to obey now? It was a lesson that had to be reviewed many times, for her as for any soldier. She wrote of that lesson in a prayer-poem:

From prayer that asks that I may be

Sheltered from winds that beat on Thee,

From fearing when I should aspire,

From faltering when I should climb higher,

From silken self, O Captain, free

Thy soldier who would follow Thee.

From subtle love of softening things,

From easy choices, weakenings,

(Not thus are spirits fortified,

Not this way went the Crucified,)

From all that dims Thy Calvary,

O Lamb of God, deliver me.

Give me the love that leads the way,

The faith that nothing can dismay

The hope no disappointments tire

The passion that will burn like fire,

Let me not sink to be a clod:

Make me Thy fuel, Flame of God.

“The searching forces of bereavement” were not abated. One week after Walker’s death a little girl of eight died, and within a few months it was found that the beloved Ponnammal had cancer. Amy knew and fully believed that the touch of Christ still had its ancient power. She had seen it often, and had herself been given, for a short time, the gift of a healing touch. But for Ponnammal she had no liberty to “claim” a healing.

Ponnammal, with Preetha and Tara.

“We hardly understand the use of that phrase; we know too little to ‘claim’ where temporal blessings are concerned.” But they prayed. Amy prayed. The accals and sitties prayed. The children, one of whose songs told the story of the little girl who wanted blue eyes, prayed. Was the answer to be yes or no?

“We knew our Father. There was no need for persuasion. Would not His Fatherliness be longing to give us our hearts’ desire (if I may put it so)? How could we press Him as though He were not our own most loving Father?”

Amy spent three months in the Salvation Army hospital at Nagercoil with Ponnammal, nursing her through two operations while she herself suffered from neuralgia and seventy children in Dohnavur (of the Family which by then numbered a hundred and forty) came down with malaria. In July of the same year, 1913, Amy’s mother died. The Daily Light reading for the day the cable came was from the Song of Solomon: “Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out.” If the life of a man or woman on earth is to bear the fragrance of heaven the winds of God must blow on that life, winds not always balmy from the south, but fierce winds from the north that chill the very marrow. It seemed a howling gale that had been let loose on Amy that year.

How was she to go on? She was an orphan. Her own parents gone, her spiritual father and mother gone. She had not known life without such support. Nor has the child, when weaning time comes, known life without its unfailing source of nourishment. Like the weaned child, Amy knew that the lesson assigned now was to learn to do without. She wrote another prayer:

And shall I pray Thee change Thy will, my Father,

Until it be according unto mine?

But, no, Lord, no, that never shall be, rather

I pray Thee blend my human will with Thine.

I pray Thee hush the hurrying, eager longing,

I pray Thee soothe the pangs of keen desire—

See in my quiet places, wishes thronging—

Forbid them, Lord, purge, though it be with fire.

And work in me to will and do Thy pleasure

Let all within me, peaceful, reconciled,

Tarry content my Well-Beloved’s leisure,

At last, at last, even as a weaned child.

Chapter 28

Across the Will of Nature

Matthew Arnold’s tribute to his father in Rugby Chapel was for Amy “one of the lights I steer by.”

If in the paths of the world

Stones might have wounded thy feet,

Toil and dejection have tried

Thy spirit, of that we saw nothing.

To us