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

Amy Carmichael offered no prizes. Why should a child receive a prize for what her patient teachers had given her? “The great reward was to be trusted with harder, more responsible work.”

Nobody ever received a tip. If nothing else had ever done so, this would have put the Dohnavur Family in a class by itself. Everybody heard that they would help even those who had no money at all. People knew they could count on “not being fleeced in private.”

Amy hated things cheap and nasty. No toy, no picture book reached the hands of her children without prior scrutiny. “Remove silly objects” was one of the watchwords, so anything that might pervert or even perplex was eschewed.

Music was never an accompaniment for conversation. The children were taught to sing, play, and listen. They learned the lesson of Ecclesiasticus from the second century B.C., “Hinder not musick. Pour not out words where there is a musician, and show not forth wisdom out of time.”

Scripture and hymn memorization was an important part of the education. Amy took her cue from Arnold of Rugby: “It is a great mistake to think they should understand all they learn; for God has ordered that in youth the memory should act vigorously, independent of the understanding—whereas a man cannot usually recollect a thing unless he understands it.” On Monday mornings everyone repeated together 1 Corinthians 13, the “Love Chapter,” in Tamil and English. At least one child knew nineteen stanzas of Rutherford’s hymn, “The Sands of Time Are Sinking,” and several whole chapters of the Gospel of John and the book of the Revelation. The children had opportunity from time to time to teach Hindu children, by the Eastern method of sing-song repetition, what they had learned. There was power, they found, in “the merest thistledown of song.”

The children had their own vegetable, fruit, and flower gardens. They sold the produce for the going market price to the housekeeper, kept the coppers in their own little clay banks, and once a year these were ceremoniously smashed in the presence of all, the contents counted, and a collective decision made about whom to give it to.

Remembering the long prayer meetings of her childhood, and her devices for passing the time (counting up in the hymnbook, for example, all the things a dying soul is supposed to say at the exact moment of departure), and the “firstly, secondly, thirdly, finally, and in conclusion” of those long Irish sermons, Amy arranged to spare her children such pains. Meetings, she decided, would be short. “The space of half an hour” sufficed in heaven for “the ultimate act of adoration”—silence—which followed the opening of the seventh seal (Revelation 8:1). It would suffice here, for “the human soul should not be drawn out like a piece of elastic and held so for too long at a stretch.”

The training of a missionary should begin in the nursery; school should continue it; home should nourish it. All influences should be bent one way. That training should not be perplexed by a mixture of thoughts, but expressed in a single line of conduct, clearly recognized for what it is. In other words, till the life of a child has had time to root, it should not be exposed to various winds (confused or conflicting examples and ideals, different ways of making /’s). After it has rooted, let the winds blow as they will. Then they will only cause the roots to take a firmer grip.2

1. Ephesians 6:12 (Phillips).

2. Kohila, p. 22.

Chapter 33

Rendezvous With Robin Hood

Naturally, there was some pressure,” was a remark which was somehow allowed to escape. Amy Carmichael’s vocabulary rarely included words like “naturally” and “pressure.” Life on the highest plane could ignore them. Twinges of the tension she felt between that plane and the one where her feet trod find expression in her prayers and poems:

So let it be, Lord, when we know

The pressure of life’s crowded street,

The ceaseless murmur of its flow,

The mud that lies about our feet.

O lift our souls, from star to star

We would ascend, until we be

In heavenly places still, afar,

The while we walk life’s street with Thee.1

The author of those lines was in a position, early in 1921, to sense keenly her need for supernatural assistance. Her lyric was no mere sentiment. Fourteen babies died of flu. Several of the boys were ill and Arul Dasan needed an operation. Nor Scrip, Amy’s sixteenth book, was just off the press. Meant for “the innermost circle of friends,” it told how God continually sent money to the Family, at the right time and in the right amounts. It was no surprise to her that, upon publication of an account of divine provision, faith should come under fire on that very front. Financial supply dwindled as the work expanded. The supply of workers was critically short.

“Naturally, there was some pressure”—the understatement of the year, encompassing the thousand anxieties of the huge responsibility, the what ifs, the buts, the whys, the help-Thou-mine-unbeliefs. She had to live in the middle of this, to go on making decisions, leading the prayer meetings, writing her letters and her books and her journals, bearing on her mind and in her prayers the name of each individual child, accal, sittie, and annachie (elder brother), of which there were now two, Arul Dasan and an Englishman, Alec Arnot.

When the disciples returned from their apostolic travels the Lord asked them, “Did you lack anything?” Their answer was, “Nothing.” Would Amy Carmichael give any other answer? She would not. If she had responded naturally, she would have had to say, “Yes, Lord. Money. Workers.” God had promised to supply all needs. On that word, not on the sands of self-confidence, she built her house. Given the forces that battered her frailty she would have scorned any attempt to find an explanation for her strength apart from the foundation on which it rested—a Rock that never budged. When the (metaphorical) rains descended and the floods came,