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

• Apart from the Bible, can you name three or four books which have been of vital help to you? Apart from books, what refreshes you most when tired?

• Have you ever learned any classical or continental language?

• Have you ever had opportunity to prove our Lord’s promise to supply temporal as well as spiritual needs?

• Can you mention any experience you have passed through in your Christian life which brought you into a new discovery of your union with the crucified, risen, and enthroned Lord?

In a statement written a few years later, Amy Carmichael put it briefly: Do not come unless you can say to your Lord and to us, The Cross is the attraction.

It might be enlightening to investigate whether the psychological screening applied to missionary candidates nowadays selects truer (more “successful”?) disciples than did Amy’s set of simple questions. Neither is a perfect sieve. Recruits wrote, were interviewed in London by the earnest and dedicated but deaf and nearsighted Mrs. Streeter, corresponded with Amy, answered the questions to her satisfaction, and eventually appeared at the Dohnavur bungalows in a bullock bandy with bells jingling.

They came, it seems, in droves, during the twenties. At least one turned up completely unannounced. But they did not all stay. The crucified life did not look quite the same to them in Dohnavur as it had looked on paper. As one famous Christian wrote when a newspaper editor asked what is the trouble with the world, “Dear Sir: I am. Sincerely, G. K. Chesterton.” The trouble with Dohnavur was people.

The reasons for the many departures from Dohnavur were diverse. Some were asked to leave, some peremptorily dismissed. Some left of their own volition, some because of poor health. This last being a fairly respectable way for a missionary to quit the field, the reasons which fell under this heading were sometimes specious. There were personality clashes which all the prayers for oneness in Christ and efforts toward unity did not resolve.

Several women, received in all good faith “in spite of social background” (a matter taken into at least some small account) failed to find a niche. One of them, poor soul, “behaved like a kitchen maid” and was asked to depart.

When the cause was failure of the man or woman concerned, Amy’s lips were sealed. Love covered a multitude of sins. Questions raised were answered with “The full story cannot be told.” More than once a dismissal which she refused to explain to the public brought severe censure on Amy herself, and gave rise to ugly rumors that she was an autocrat who would tolerate no one who refused to obey her implicitly and without question.

The home in Millisle was a place of principles. Compromise was unthinkable. The home she established in India for her children was likewise a place of principles. She could brook no compromise there. Those who could not bring themselves to subscribe to the standard Amy believed she had received from God were, in her view, turning away from Him. She suffered for them and because of them, yet continued to believe absolutely that the lady who did the “vetting” was called by God to that task in England as surely as she herself had been called to hers. They were one in mind and spirit. Prayer was the very heart of it. They asked for the right people. God knew who they were. God answers prayer. Would He not direct the lady, who seemed to be of a rather sanguine temperament, to those she should accept? The principles were sound enough. A sovereign God, however, works through flawed human instruments to whom He has given the power of choice. Sometimes the choices are mistaken. Divine sovereignty permits those mistakes.

Probably no recruits were more promising than a family of four who arrived in 1924—the parents, both of them physicians, along with their daughter and their son, a twenty-four-year-old Cambridge graduate. It was said that if Stephen Neill was a candidate for a university prize, then no one else would compete. With a fellowship from Trinity College which gave him every prospect for a brilliant career in the academic field, he opted for missionary work—to the astonishment of at least one of his classmates, Malcolm Muggeridge. The presence of the Neills in ‘‘little Dohnavur” lent a new respectability in the eyes of some who thought of it as an eccentric backwater. There must be more than met the eye if it attracted such distinguished people as the Neills.

While one contemporary of Amy’s claimed that the Neills came with the idea of “doing a take-over,” Amy Carmichael could not but have been overjoyed that the Dohnavur Family now had two doctors and two men. She was suspicious, however, of the credibility others prized so highly (is not the wisdom of the world foolishness with God?), and, fearing a mistake, perhaps in his motives or his grasp of the true picture, had written more carefully and straightforwardly to Stephen than to any other who had offered. He was not deterred. “He seemed to love all, and feel with us about all.”

Her fears were not unfounded. Perhaps Neill had expected a more visible recognition of his exceptional gifts. One co-worker thought he had somehow hoped to become Dohnavur’s bishop, although he was not yet even ordained as an Anglican priest. “I gave my whole soul to Dohnavur,” he said, but before long he began to see the place as a world of illusion, insulated from the outside world by the high red walls within which love never failed. He could agree that love never dies away, but that it was always victorious? No, that simply was not the case.

As for the woman responsible for the whole phenomenon, “young recruits came to South India and found a myth,” he said, a woman who had infallibility “pushed on her.” “No smallest disagreement was admitted,” yet he remembered peaceful hours spent over breakfast on Amy Carmichael’s verandah as they worked together