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

at least in those early days. The work which had to be done was all-consuming, there were few to do it and no time for extraneous activity. But Amy’s sympathies were broad, her reading wide, and during the war she wrote “always with a sense of the sorrow in the homes to which this letter goes. What flaming fires of sorrow you are walking through these months! God comfort you all.”

As one worker commented, “Amma went from crisis to crisis. She saw things as crises—but we had them, God knows, frightful ones!” Once a village lunatic got loose, came into the compound, entered the guest room where a lady was sleeping, lifted her mosquito net, gazed at her, and then sat down in her chair. She remained calm and the man left, but returned. Amy armed herself with a flashlight and a cane, “hoping he would prove amenable to the light and not require further incentive to disappear.” She did not have to apply either, as the servants appeared and escorted him home. It was all in a night’s work, however. “We have a tame lunatic always on hand who chops our wood and has scraps from the kitchen, but this was a new and not at all a pleasant sort to have about.”

There were occasions when the mother was able, with a select group of her children and co-workers, to leave the cloistered life of Dohnavur. Often they made forays in the moonlight out to the plain, which necessitated passing through the village. Once they paused in front of the temple where the men were gathered and Amy spoke to them. “They were as attentive as the women, for they don’t hear ‘preaching’ every day and always enjoy a novelty.” Then little Chellalu, one of the more mischievous children, asked in a stage whisper if she too might speak. She “opened fire on those men, pelting them with facts as to their folly in worshipping somebody who did not love them and had not made them.” Her hearers stood amazed. Chellalu explained later to Amy: “When you were speaking, a voice inside me said very loud, yes, very loud, ‘Chellalu! Tell those men about God!’ and my heart said pickapickapick!”

At Madras Beach.

Then there was a grand tour to Madras. Amy took fourteen children, five helpers, one servant, and one sittie on the train to the big city. They traveled third-class as always. Why? “Because there isn’t any fourth-class!” On the way they saw for the first time a railway station, telegraph wires, signaling systems, the palace and temple of Madurai, bazaars, motorcars, and then in Madras itself, a motorcycle with a sidecar in which they rode, museums, a foundry, a printing press, a cotton factory and—this was a first for Amy, too—a movie. A friend arranged for a “good set” of pictures to be shown instead of the “usual doubtful vulgarities.” The children thought the pictures alive, and were most astonished at the speed with which the soldiers in the war pictures walked. Amy, tired of the customary Oriental saunter, exhorted the girls to follow the soldiers’ brisk example.

A clergyman took them to Madras Beach and, dressed in black suit, clerical collar, and sun helmet, strode into the surf to take pictures of the girls, fully clothed in their white saris which were knotted up around the knees, wading. One of the rare photos of Amma shows her sitting in a beached boat, wearing her sari and helmet, surrounded by satin-haired girls with thick braids, her white hand resting on a black one.

It was during this trip that the issue of furloughs for foreign workers came up. Frances Beath was the sittie accompanying Amy. Her parents, who were in Madras then, wanted Frances to go home to Australia with them. Frances demurred. It was not the time. The parents and many friends thought this quite wrong, a decision not made in freedom but under duress—at least the duress of Amy’s powerful example. She had never taken a furlough. The mother’s feet, according to the Tamil proverb, were tied. Old Mr. Beath pleaded with her to release his daughter. There was no question of releasing her. The young woman was technically quite free to go, but Amy refused to persuade her.

“Supposing you knew the Lord Jesus was to return soon,” said Amy. “What would you do?”

“Why, tell her to stay, of course!” said the man without hesitation. In a flash, he saw what he had said. He laughed. They gave their consent. The issue arose again and again in subsequent years when fellow-workers, feeling “a bit skeletonic,” as one of them put it, raised the question of a furlough or even just a weekend off. All were given to understand from the first that the nature of the work made regular furlough plans impossible. If the doctors insisted on what Amy called “exile” for health reasons, it was granted. Otherwise she simply laid before them the principle that governed her own life: Ask not how little but how much can love give? She would allow them to choose the harder road, as she had written just after the Frances Beath experience.

If we would walk with an ungrieved Lord we must never let the fear of being thought “hard” or, far more subtle temptation, the fear of pain for a younger one whom we love, cause us to influence that one to choose the natural rather than the spiritual. If once a soul has entered the path where the Spirit, not the flesh, is guide, God does not lightly pass over such a lapse. Men may praise it; God condemns it; and those who know their Father know the bitterness of the hiding of His face.

She quoted again, as often in her writings, Tersteegen’s poem:

Across the will of Nature

Leads on the path of God;

Not where the flesh delighteth

The feet of Jesus trod.

O bliss to leave behind us

The fetters of the slave,

To leave ourselves behind us,

The graveclothes and the grave.

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