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

bombarded again. One day, alone in the woods, her courage collapsed. She waited, “drinking from wells of bitterness and fear.”3 Then “came a question, tender, poignant: ‘You fear to cause loss and hurt to your fellowservant; would I ask you to do so? You fear to intrude into the life of another; would I ask you to intrude? Have I been so long time with thee and yet has thou not known Me?”

Even then the fears did not entirely subside. Assurances alternated with doubts. “There is a place where the human fails, breaks down, turns to ashes. Hope has not a single foothold. In such an hour there is a perishing of everything unless the soul waits in silence for God only.”4

Silence. Amy was silent. God was silent. But He had heard. Godfrey was already on board ship, headed for India with his mother. He had rheumatic fever and needed a rest. Two weeks after the vision at the Cape, they reached Dohnavur, and a few days later he believed God called him to resign from the CSSM and join the Fellowship. Two months went by before he was free to reveal his decision to Amma.

She was overjoyed. Half of her prayer answered! She went on praying. Would not God bring Murray as well? It looked impossible. He had finished language study in Nanking and begun work in 1927 in a CMS hospital in Hangchow. Political events soon squeezed him and all British nationals out of the area. Soviet Russia offered to help Dr. Sun Yat-sen organize an expedition to crush the military governors of the north. An officers’ training school was established in Canton, an army was raised, and the British were ordered to evacuate. Murray spent a few months in Shanghai.

For Amy the battle went on . . . and on. “Unless the Lord and Master of us all, blessed Captain and Pilot, turned the helm this way, we don’t want you,” she wrote to Murray. “I cannot pretend that if He did turn the helm I should be sorry, wretch that I am!” Later she told Murray, “There was a day when I did not know how to bear it. The powers of darkness closed down upon me.” Two years after Stephen Neill left Dohnavur, Murray Webb-Peploe arrived. Those two years were to Amy “the age-long minute,” as she noted in her Daily Light. She expressed her prayer of that time in a poem:

Thou art the Lord who slept upon the pillow

Thou art the Lord who soothed the furious sea,

What matter beating wind and tossing billow

If only we are in the boat with Thee?

Hold us in quiet through the age-long minute

While Thou art silent and the wind is shrill:

Can the boat sink while Thou, dear Lord, art in it?

Can the heart faint that waiteth on Thy will?

Neither she nor Murray knew then that he was to stay, but Amy dared to go on hoping, and felt that God was giving her strong reason to hope. She sat up in bed that evening—it was May 31, 1927—and read Daily Light: “Blessed is she that believed; for there shall be a performance of those things which were told her from the Lord. . . . For all the promises of God in him are yea, and in him Amen, unto the glory of God by us.”

On August 25 came the first gift for the building of a hospital—one hundred pounds.

1. F. W. H. Meyers, St. Paul.

2. Gold Cord, p. 279.

3. Ibid, p. 359.

4. Ibid, p. 360.

Chapter 36

A Secret Discipline

Dear, dear Mother of Murray,” wrote Amy Carmichael to Mrs. Webb-Peploe in the summer of 1928. “He’s sonthum (our own). You know it—you know what it means of heart’s joy too deep for words just now. I have tried to write but cannot. I can only say this and leave you to understand.

“In joy, the greatest that could have come on this side of heaven, and in grateful, grateful love, Amma.”

Events in China had led to Murray’s release from his commitment there. On July 13 he wrote a note to Amma, “May I stay here? Murray.”

“It is all beautiful, the sure leading . . . I ponder it all, turn over every step in the wonderful ordering of events and worship God—I don’t know anything as humbling as an experience like this. We had a thanksgiving service at 11. None of us found it easy to put our thanks into words, I least of all. I blundered through somehow but so poorly that I could only look up and say, ‘Lord, please understand without words, for they won’t come.’”

Amy’s vision at Cape Comorin became reality. Her prayers for leaders for the men and the medical work had been answered precisely as she had hoped. These men exemplified for Amy a quotation from Dean Church: “Manliness is not mere courage, it is the quality of soul which frankly accepts all conditions in human life, and makes it a point of honor not to be dismayed or wearied by them.” Would the pathway be more level and smooth from now on? Could she breathe a deep sigh of relief and turn over the reins, as it were, to the two strong men?

Not by any means all the reins. The Dohnavur Fellowship was a family and Amy Carmichael was, of course, the mother. Whether she had ever thought of Godfrey or Murray or any other man as the father is unlikely, but she began to try to think of Murray as father, at least to the boys. For years she had been grooming her beloved Arulai for the leadership of the whole family. It asked for a certain spiritual intensity and perspicacity she had not found in any man. Barclay Buxton in Japan—“My ever-beloved chief. There will never be anybody quite like him”—had come closest to the ideal. Thomas Walker ran a close second. But there was no such giant around now. In old times God used weak things to confound the mighty. Why not