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

on the editing and revision of her book Raj, Brigand Chief. He perceived her as one living in a hushed atmosphere of awe and veneration, keeping a finger on everything, fearing an alien world. The compound, completely detached from village life, was “flooded with Europeans,” who ate in a separate dining room. “Amma” had no Indian equals, feeling none to be as qualified as Europeans for leadership and responsibility. Her stock-in-trade was crises. Life in this lovesome garden spot was a perpetual ferment of crises and deliverances.

The Neill family succeeded in churning up even more turbulence. Dr. Neill, the father, “made a hit with the girls,” according to one observer, something no man within those precincts had ever presumed to do. To Amy this was a serious threat to the strict separation she felt was necessary in the midst of Hindu society. It is conceivable that this threat was exacerbated by a (perhaps unwitting) feeling of rivalry, not only with the dashing father but with the scintillating son, who far outdistanced all other struggling students by learning Tamil in six months. To make matters worse, the Neills saw ways to improve “the pattern shewn in the mount.” Stephen, who had no idea of the perils of mingling with “the outside,” introduced interscholastic sports. The two doctors suggested that the medical work ought to be entirely separate from the compound so that the villagers could get at it, and Stephen told Amma she ought to move the boys away a bit too.

Amy stuck to the pattern. It had been “shewn.” Who could gainsay it? She did not give in on either of the Neills’ points.

It was a bad mix. Within six months the senior Neills left, and before a year was up Amy was in a state of anguish over Stephen. Apparently reports were earned to her by those Neill called her “spies.” He claimed that he was never given a hearing, though this is vehemently denied by some. In Amy’s view the matter was of the gravest nature: “the spiritual fortunes of the work hung by a thread.”

“A dreadful time of distress,” says her diary. “Never such known here before. I am beginning to sink. Lord, save me.” All the years of prayer for clear guidance, for God’s sole selection of workers for Dohnavur, the pattern shewn, the letters written, the assurances given—had it all come to nothing? How the enemy would be gloating! How those who scrutinized the work for evidence of the life of the Lord Jesus would shrug!

Beside the date of May 30 in her Daily Light she wrote, “1925—most painful night of my life.” A prayer “pressed out of” that night was:

O Savior, must the sword

Smite sharp, nor spare?

Then come, O loving Lord,

Give strength to bear.

O Lord of thorns and nails

And piercing spear

The coward in me quails.

Come near, come near.

Later she called May 30 the night of decision, but no action was taken and things went on for months. In July there was “a strange and dreadful” prayer meeting, in which someone “prayed distressingly about friction.” Friction? It was a word never heard, never used, never thought about in Dohnavur, not by Amy, at any rate. If the word was unthinkable to her, to how many—perish the thought—was it not only thinkable but speakable, and in a prayer meeting at that? She could not be sure the prayer was unnecessary. In August she wrote to a close friend, “I do trust no one will ever know how difficult things are now—not even you, you dear!”

Stephen Neill was, according to one laconic colleague, “temperamentally unsuited to the situation.” Dohnavur was a long way from Cambridge. Working under Amy Carmichael was at best difficult for him (he remembered his first meeting with her as “an impression of power”). Apart from her oracular mystique, she had been influenced, he believed, by strong Plymouth Brethren nonconformism, a bitter pill for an Anglican to swallow. She made veiled reference later to this time when “English worship services became impossible because—no, I must not embark on the reasons.”

Neill was known to have given way to several violent explosions of temper during which he beat some of Amma’s boys, yet in his opinion some of the punishments customarily used in Dohnavur, which he did not name, were “rather severe.” No European or Indian worker who was there at the time seemed to know the exact nature of the problem. One suggested that his writings were perhaps not always in theological harmony with her beliefs, but it seems unlikely that Neill wrote much in Dohnavur. He categorically stated that theology had nothing to do with his dismissal, but declined to mention any other reason.

The night of November 28 was “one of the saddest nights of my life,” Amy wrote in Daily Light, next to the words, “Let not your heart be troubled.”

Biographer Frank Houghton covers in six words what happened: “Next day, the severance took place.”

“I long over him still, miss him and want him and long to be one in affection. The stab is not even beginning to skin over. It’s just red raw,” Amy wrote to a friend nearly a year later.

Stephen Neill went on to become bishop of Tinnevelly, the district which included Dohnavur, but his name was hardly ever mentioned again. Years later he visited the compound. “Amma refused to see him,” said one who was there at the time. Not true, says the one who showed him round the compound. In fact Amy spoke with him kindly.

“Poor, poor S.,” she wrote to one of her few confidantes just after the visit. “It was his spoiling mother and the silly Christian public chiefly. My heart is all one ache for him. . . . This visit has been a burden on our hearts for months. . . . It has deepened our understanding of what we stand for and want to be and by God’s grace must be.”

1. Toward Jerusalem, p. 85.

Chapter 35

The DF Is Born

One day a Dohnavur boy who