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

Raj came toward her. She stretched out her hands. He took them both in his, fondling them “with the eager touch of a loving child.” She pleaded with the men to trust God for protection for their friends, and to give themselves up. It was too late, they said. They would perish. “If only I heard that you had died without a weapon in your hands,” said Amy, “I could bear it.”

“Do not fear for us,” Raj said. “Will God forsake us?”

Two months later the men were trapped. They fired on the police, intending only to scare them off. The police set fire to the house, the men burst out and ran through the village. Raj’s cohort was shot. Raj leaped up onto a bank, swung his gun three times around his head, and flung it away. Then he tore the white scarf from his shoulders and, standing bare to the waist, shouted, “You whose duty it is to shoot, shoot here!” and pointed to his heart. They shot. The bullets missed. Slowly he backed toward a tamarind tree, faced his parents’ graves to the west, did obeisance, returned to the tree and stood with his back against the trunk. Again the police fired—sixteen bullets into the bark around where Raj stood, more bullets in the branches above him and the sand beneath him. Not a bullet found its target. He sank slowly, as though to kneel. They fell on him then. One of them bit his neck to drink “the blood of such a man,” another broke his arm. They dragged him toward the water before a bullet was put into his head at close range.

Amy was in the Grey Jungle when the news reached her. She had only one question: Have they sinned?

“No. They died clean.”

1. Toward Jerusalem, p. 16.

Chapter 34

The Sword Smites Sharp

During the 1920s prayers for new recruits were answered, so far as concerns numbers, “exceeding abundantly.” People were reading Amy Carmichael’s books, prayer groups were being formed around the world for this unusual work, the Scrap letters, intended for an intimate circle of personal friends, became the Dohnavur Letter, no longer handwritten but typed, and even more restrained than Scraps.

It cannot be said that Dohnavur was guilty of false advertising. Never was it deliberately presented as an exciting, glamourous, or even an interesting place. While Amy’s books are filled with descriptions of the beauty of the mountains, the plains, the forests, the rivers and lakes, the little children, and the love that outsiders seemed to observe (“It is as if you were all kin,’’ said one man. “I see only love, I hear only words of love’’), there are pages and pages which deal with the humdrum, the ordinary, the implacable daily round of plain hard work. While she never meant to make her lot look like a hard one (wouldn’t that make it appear that she had a hard Master?), she did mean to be a realist wherever realism was not inimical to her purposes. She included in her descriptions the heat, the isolation, the primitive conditions; she wrote of calumny, disease, death. All these find expression throughout the writings of Amy Carmichael. It was discipleship she preached, and discipleship she practiced. Those who joined her must understand that it was discipleship, of the New Testament variety, that would be taken for granted. Wounds and scars also were taken for granted, as her poem “No Scar?’’ attests:

Hast thou no scar?

No hidden scar on foot, or side, or hand?

I hear thee sung as mighty in the land,

I hear them hail thy bright, ascendant star,

Hast thou no scar?

Hast thou no wound?

Yet I was wounded by the archers, spent,

Leaned Me against a tree to die; and rent

By ravening beasts that compassed Me, I swooned:

Hast thou no wound?

No wound? No scar?

Yet, as the Master shall the servant be,

And pierced are the feet that follow Me;

But thine are whole: can he have followed far

Who has nor wound nor scar?1

“Not a word of attraction can I write to [a prospective recruit]. It will be desperately hard work, iron would snap under the strain of it. I ask for steel, that quality which is at the back of all going on, patience which cannot be tired out, and love that loves in very deed, unto death.” Not of foreigners only was this expected. Some newly converted caste men were set to work hewing stones and digging foundations for the Forest House—in the presence of low-caste coolies. No sterner test could have been applied to prove the validity of their faith. “Grace in teaspoons would have sufficed for a preaching tour. It is honorable to preach,” wrote Amy, who had seen enough of those who followed Christianity for its prestige. Ditchdigging lent dignity to nobody. “Grace in rivers was required for this. Day by day they grew in manliness.”

Constantly Amy prayed, and asked her “prayer warriors” to pray, that those who joined them be sent by the Lord of the Harvest. No others would be able to “stem the tide, keep facing upstream,” no others would “keep on fire. And truly on fire they must be if they are to set the native church on fire, for it is wrapped round and round in wet blankets of the devil’s own weaving and soaking.” Steel, tides, fires—every vivid metaphor she could think of she employed to drive home the seriousness of the call. Stones they must be, shaped and fitted by the Master Stonemason, like the stones prepared in the quarries to fit perfectly into their places in the great temple of Solomon.

There was no psychological grid for missionaries to pass through in those days. Dohnavur asked twenty-five simple questions, among them:

• Do you truly desire to live a crucified life? (This may mean doing very humble things joyfully for His Name’s sake.)

• Does the thought of hardness draw you or repel you?

• Do you realize that we are a family, not an institution? Are you willing