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

Amy’s determination not to draw attention to herself had not weakened since she first took the nom-de-plume “Nobody” in the little family journal in Belfast. When her biography of Walker was published, a blurb on the dust jacket—praise she was sure she did not deserve—made her “too ashamed to take any pleasure in the book. O my God, I am ashamed before Thee.” The same motive of self-effacement must have been at least part of what inspired the periodic binges of “covering her tracks” by destroying diaries, a habit which creates tantalizing gaps in the story. Arulai once succeeded in rescuing part of a notebook before Amy had done away with the whole thing, but only God knows how much went into the fire, or into the maws of termites.

A few years later the governor of Madras sent a wire of congratulation on her having been included in the Royal Birthday Honors List. Consternation was her response. A medal? For service in India, service to Him who had died for her? “I have done nothing to make it fitting, and cannot understand it at all,” she wrote to Lord Pentland. “It troubles me to have an experience so different from His Who was despised and rejected, not kindly honored.” She was persuaded at last that it would be ungracious to refuse the award, but she put her foot down when it came to attending the presentation ceremony.

The time spent in the government bungalow in the forest convinced everyone that such a place, though a more commodious one, was needed. The sign was asked for and given, and after several rugged and strenuous expeditions across the plain, into the thickets and up the steep ascents to three or four thousand feet, the perfect spot was found—a small, disused coffee plantation, the Grey Jungle. Money came in for a house, and building began. There were innumerable setbacks. Coolies quit working. Rains came at inopportune times and walls collapsed. Caste conflicts arose among the workers, so that the children took over the carrying of mud and bricks and tiles. At times the sawyers refused to saw so the carpenters were out of work. When the masons failed to protect the tops of walls and huddled in their huts while it rained, Amy and the children and Arul Dasan (who with his wife, Muttammal, had joined the work in Dohnavur) stood in the downpour handing up the mats to keep the walls from dissolving again. The house was finished during the last year of the war for five hundred pounds. They named it the Forest House.

“Green, green forest stretching as far as the eye can see on three sides, rising in mighty billows up the mountains, leaving bare only the rocky tops; high climbing, low dipping forest. A valley, like the trough of the wave of forest green. In the middle of the smother of green the red roof of a house, our forest house. . . . In front the trees drop sharply down, like a cliff dropping to the sea, the green, green sea of the forest.” So she described the place in the opening chapter of From the Forest. And the pool, the joy of their ravine, “jade-green, clear, wonderful water-green, and when the angels are in a very kind mood they send a blue kingfisher to fish there. Then the pool is something quite too lovely for this everyday earth, and sets one thinking what the pools must be among the green woods of Paradise. Then, too, it is deep, deep enough for diving, and its floor of clean white sand, the powdered dust of mountains. In this pool we, the holiday children and whoever is up with them, daily turn into water-babies. . . . If you have troubles, the pool washes them off. Worries are just kissed away.”

In the next few years a number of houses were built in the ravine, including the Jungle House and the Jewel House. They met the need for a place to “come apart,” as the Lord called His disciples, to “rest awhile.”

Amy loved the forest with a passion. She drank its beauty, literally caressed its rocks and trees, sang about it in countless children’s songs. Here, for example, are a couple of lines she wrote to the elephant:

His great big flat feet pound and pound

With a rumpety—dumpety—crumpety sound.

and to the mosquito:

Take good advice and promptly go,

Abominable Mosquito.

Her long poems on the meaning of suffering, Pools and The Valley of Vision, were probably written here, as well as a number of other books, where isolation, quiet, and coolness made the task of writing less arduous than it was in Dohnavur where such commodities were in short supply. “There is so much sadness in the world, so many hearts ache, so many tears fall, it is rather wonderful to be away for a little while in a tearless world, left just as God made it. . . . these elemental things seem to carry one back to the beginnings, the fundamentals, the things that cannot be shaken, ancient verities of God.”1

She explored every foot of the purchased land. Long-suffering servants toiled with her up steep cliffs, blazing trails wherever she wanted to go, lugging up crockery and food when the fancy took her to have a picnic by a just-discovered waterfall, or tea on top of a lookout rock. Children swept the paths daily, decorated the house with flowers, were taught not to disturb other forest dwellers—except for snakes and scorpions, and only if they came into the house. “Then I am afraid we must slay them, for they are where they ought not to be.”

She was most insistent that the children learn to swim. She had learned in Millisle and Strangford Lough, but once nearly drowned in the forest pool when a child dragged her under. Never mind, she told them, the sensation of drowning was lovely. No need to alarm the family back in Dohnavur by mentioning it.

On a peaceful Sunday morning, in the midst of Sabbath