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

1927 as the Dohnavur Fellowship. The “Memorandum of Association” states its object: to save children in moral danger; to train them to serve others; to succour the desolate and the suffering; to do anything that may be shown to be the will of our Heavenly Father, in order to make His love known, especially to the people of India.

That the break was a friendly one is indicated by the Church Missionary Society’s having donated both the original bungalow and the guest house to the Dohnavur Family.

There remained the serious question of who was to be the leader. The constitution of the Dohnavur Fellowship made no bones about who was the supreme Authority. It was the Unseen Leader, the Lord Jesus Christ. The human leader, Amy Carmichael herself (who was not named), “seeks, in cooperation with the other members, to carry out the mind and will of the Divine.’’

They had been praying for years for a hospital, and for a leader for the boys. The arrival of the Neill family looked like the beginning of the answer to both prayers, so the disappointment was keen when they left. In 1924 a young missionary en route to China with the Children’s Special Service Mission, Godfrey Webb-Peploe, had visited Dohnavur. He was the grandson of one of the great Keswick speakers Amy had known, a strong point in his favor, and she could not help thinking of him as a possible leader on whom her mantle might fall. She wrote in the margin of her Daily Light, “Goodbye to G.W.P.—A broken day,” and added these lines from Alfred Noyes’ “The Torch Bearer”:

Let me not live in vain, let me not fall

Before I yield it to the appointed soul.

Some months later Godfrey’s older brother Murray, a physician, decided to go to China as a medical missionary. His widowed mother was to accompany him and wrote to Amy that they would like to stop in Dohnavur en route. That letter was “like the moss rosebud of old home gardens that is hardly to be recognized as a rosebud at all.” It was to blossom in unimagined blessing.

There were now seventy boys in Dohnavur. The thought of their training, education, and spiritual guidance had lain heavy on Amy’s mind for eight years. Questions tormented her: Where were the leaders they needed? What if they were never found? She took her questions to the Lord, and He asked her a few of His own. “Are you prepared to perish with Me, to be counted a fool and worse than a fool by your own world, your missionary world? May I deal with every shred of your reputation just as I choose, and will you be silent? Are you willing to obey in everything, every time, everywhere?”

Five years before this time Amy had stood in the sunset with eight of her fellow-workers, looking over the plain, wondering how to reach the many scattered villages where there was no Christian witness. The towns were shut to the Gospel. But if there were a hospital?

“It was as though there swam into our view a Place of Healing, furnished with all that was required for the help of the people, and we saw the work of the place led by one in whom were the instincts and convictions and the glad abandon of the spiritual pioneer.”2 They went home and wrote down their hope in the logbook and signed their names under the date, January 30, 1921.

Three years later the Neills came, and a doctor from Ireland named May Powell. When Murray Webb-Peploe came he threw his energies into the medical work with Dr. Powell, in makeshift rooms of the old buildings. Amy began to see the two brothers as the very men they needed, Godfrey as Saint Francis for the boys, Murray as Saint Luke for the hospital. She tried to banish the thought—those men were called elsewhere. For the first time in her life she understood the power of the temptation to covet. The command against coveting included “thy neighbor’s manservant.” These two servants were called not to India but to China.

On the night of October 8, 1926, Amy was sleeping on the sand at Cape Comorin when she had a vision. With a sense of light and joy she saw Godfrey and Murray at Dohnavur. But “dreams have no conscience,” she said, and she was not troubled by thoughts of China’s loss. Later, in spite of her wide-awake conscience, it seemed to Amy that God was telling her to pray that they might join the Dohnavur Fellowship. A discipline problem arose shortly after her vision which gave special urgency to the need for men. A boy had said “a very bad thing before the younger boys, too deadly to speak about to Helen, so they came to me.” After prayer for guidance, she shipped him off to Muppanthal, a place they had bought for people with special needs. She furnished him with paper and envelope on which he was to write to her when he had “got through this thing, seen its badness, and hated it.” Then and only then would he be allowed to come back.

“Poor little lad,” she wrote to Murray, “he sobbed as if his heart would break, but it had to be, and will do all the other boys good. All over five know this mire, and the Canaan ways of this land.” She emphasized the need for a “brother, strong and fine and jolly with them as their own. The older men are all married. Helen does all a woman can do.”

The impression that she was to ask for the Webb-Peploes was so strong as to be unmistakable. Yet—as usual, her mind wrestled with the question—might she be mistaken? What if the command were not divine at all, but the human in disguise? How could she ask for what would mean loss to others? Wasn’t such prayer treachery? Ask now was what she believed she had heard.

She asked. The prayer of faith was