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

for you to do.’” She held to that word when her woman’s heart longed for a man’s love. That day in the cave in Arima, Japan, was one of those days, a day full of fear of a lonely future, when the Voice spoke again: “None of them that trust in Him shall be desolate.”

Again at Ooty, she confessed, there was another proposal, or at least the overture to a proposal. She gave Neela no details. She did not use the word proposal. It was, she said, the last time the “other life” pulled. She added, “It was not a question of giving up His service. It never had been that. And now what was (as others would have told me) such a good thing would have led out into wider opportunities than ever before had been mine, but it would have led out of India. Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do? Shall I do this? And all I heard in answer to that was, ‘No, no, no. I have something different for you to do.’” Shortly after that the work she would never have done if she had been married began. Small wonder she wanted comrades in singleness.

“One thing more,” she added, as Neela was taking dictation of the autobiography meant for the children. “Remember our God did not say to me, ‘I have something greater for you to do.’ This life is not greater than the other, but it is different. That is all. For some our Father chooses one, for some He chooses the other, all that matters is that we should be obedient ‘unto all meeting of His wishes.’”

In the end Amy decided to delete from her autobiography all that part of the story. The pages were put away somewhere. The Family did not need to know.

This poem may refer to this particular secret discipline:

O Prince of Glory, who dost bring

Thy sons to glory through Thy Cross,

Let me not shrink from suffering,

Reproach or loss.

The dust of words would smother me.

Be all to me anathema

That turns me from Gethsemane

And Golgotha.

If Thy dear Home be fuller, Lord,

For that a little emptier

My house on earth, what rich reward

That guerdon were.

And by the borders of my day

The river of Thy pleasure flows,

The flowers thai: blossom by the way

Who loves Thee knows.

1. Katharine Makower, Follow My Leader, p. 127.

2. Ibid, p. 128.

3. 1 Corinthians 7 (PHILLIPS).

Chapter 37

Place of Healing and House of Prayer

One day in 1900 Amy had been asked to help nurse a boy with pneumonia. She went, and did what they asked her to do, but the treatment was appallingly primitive, and it was then she “looked up and asked for a trained nurse.” So it was that in a little crowded house in the village of Dohnavur the medical work—spiritually speaking—began. Then there was the prayer of 1921, on the evening when she and her comrades had looked out over the plains at sunset, thinking of all the suffering shut up in the little shut-up towns. The vision of the Place of Healing came, a place “served by a company something like the early Franciscans in the gaiety of their spirit. They were lovers of their Lord and servants of His sick.”

When Murray Webb-Peploe came, he named his first hospital ward Buckingham Palace. It was nothing but an old hen house. This was expanded by the addition of four mat huts and then an Indian house which was called the Door of Health. The first installment on the purchase of land for a hospital was paid in February 1928. In the following year Amy believed God wanted them all to trust Him for a specific amount for the building—the staggering sum of ten thousand pounds. They agreed, and settled their faith on these words: “This is the confidence that we have in him, that, if we ask any thing according to his will, he heareth us: and if we know that he hear us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of him.”1 Taking the promise quite literally as meant for them in this particular instance (as nearly always, Amma’s conviction that it was according to His will was accepted by all), they assumed the money was “received.” Four months later to the day came a gift of one thousand pounds, and eventually the rest followed.

Medical work was the first “mission field” for the Dohnavur Family. The children were being trained to do everything, anything, however menial, measuring it not by hours or by rupees but by love. They were to learn to be grains of wheat, falling into the ground and dying, and what better field for that “dying” than a hospital where they could give themselves to people from whom they would receive no benefits in return?

It is a high calling, one that appeals strongly—in theory—to more than a few. It looks, from a distance, rather glorious. Living out that calling, one day at a time, in the same old place, with the same old co-workers, doing the same old humdrum jobs, is another matter altogether. Those who tried to offer this selfless service for the love of God found themselves daily open to challenge. Was it really worth it? Would it prove in the end to be really gold, silver, precious stones? They were powerfully tempted by “subtle love of softening things, easy choices, weakenings.”2 Bribes were sometimes offered, jewels or anything that could be turned into money, with the hope of obtaining “first-quality medicine” or whatever might not be given without a bribe. It took time for word to spread that bribes at Dohnavur got the briber nowhere.

The Door of Health, and later the Place of Heavenly Healing, provided private kitchens for each patient’s family—minute cooking cells where Hindu or Muslim might have to smell another’s fish cooking, but would not be defiled by contact with him. The Indian instinct for privacy was respected, and people were made to feel as much