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

and when one is really ill, there is nobody kinder, she would buy tons of chocolate if thereby she could ease the sufferer—if she had the cash.” Atom: “a gigglety creature, packed full of condensed electricity, very fond of lessons, sweets, rowdyism, wrestling, with a large amount of natural affection.” As for S.S.I., “a dear little jolly old fellow. He is our sunshine.” Blanco was, “of all good-tempered willing fags [flunkies, “go-fers”] he is the goodtemperedest and willingest.” Mother: “There never was such a mother—so good, so loving, so unselfish, so perfect in every way, we can only thank God for her and try to make her shadowed life bright with our love.” Of Amy herself one of them wrote:

Our eldest sister i s the light of our life,

She says she will never be a wife.

Such a promise from a twenty-two-year-old girl might have been taken as a challenge meant only to be refuted. It is to be doubted that Norman and Ernest, at least, took her seriously, and perhaps she did not expect them to. At any rate she kept her word.

That promise may have been partly the fruit of a visit to Belfast during 1887 of Hudson Taylor of the China Inland Mission. In meetings sponsored by Keswick he said that every hour four thousand “pass through the gates of death into the darkness beyond—Saviorless, hopeless.”

“Does it not stir up our hearts,” Amy wrote in Scraps, “to go forth and help them, does it not make us long to leave our luxury, our exceeding abundant light, and go to them that sit in darkness?” She quoted these lines:

Listen! Listen, English sisters

Hear an Indian sister’s plea—

Grievous wails, dark ills revealing

Depths of human woe unsealing,

Borne across the deep blue sea.

We are dying, day by day,

With no light, no cheering ray.

It was a strange providence that brought into Amy’s life during those very meetings one whom she was to learn to love to such a degree as to make her obedience to the call to heathendom excruciatingly more painful than it would otherwise have been. He was the chairman of the Belfast conference, and the man who with Canon Harford-Battersby had arranged the first Keswick tent meeting, Mr. Robert Wilson. He was a man “of massive frame and of great strength, bearded and burly,” his son recalled. “His movements were slow, his humor deep under a solemn exterior, he was sparing in speech and if pressed to a course he thought wrong took refuge in Quaker silence.”4

At the close of the Belfast meeting Mr. Wilson asked if there were questions, and Amy’s aunts, who were staying with the Carmichaels, had several of a doctrinal nature which Amy wrote out on a pink card with a gold edge. Mr. Wilson asked if he might call at their home.

“He was not quite seventy years old then,5 but he had wavy silver hair. His eyes were as blue and as candid as a child’s, and his face was like a child’s too in its fresh colouring; his big frame almost filled our biggest arm chair. He made a beautiful picture as he sat in the firelight.’’

Amy did not know it then, but she had “turned a corner of the road of life.’’

1. J.C. Pollock, The Keswick Story (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1964), p. 20.

2. Ibid, p. 28.

3. Steven Barabas, So Great Salvation (London: Marshall, Morgan, and Scott, 1952), p. 39.

4. Pollock, op. cit., p. 30.

5. In fact, he was not quite sixty.

Chapter 4

The Tin Tabernacle

Early in 1888 Mrs. Carmichael called the children into the dining room one evening to tell them that nearly all of their money had been lost. They knelt together around the table as she committed the matter to God. What seemed overwhelming did not overwhelm her, for she believed that there was nothing she could not expect His wondrous kindness to do. “He has been so kind about other things that we cannot doubt but that He will care for this too.”

There is nothing in Scraps to indicate that their life was interrupted. Amy’s work with the shawlies grew until it began to cause a certain disturbance among some of the church people. To have this crowd of crude and unorthodox characters filling and overflowing the large hall, the prayers of two or three of them sometimes rising simultaneously, was unsettling, to say the least. One official stood in the doorway watching them with folded arms and knitted brows. There must have been some sighs of relief when the crowd grew so phenomenally that they needed a hall that would seat five hundred. The church had no such facility. Amy spotted an advertisement in a magazine for a building made of iron that could be erected for five hundred pounds. It was an awesome sum for her but she knew how to pray and taught the mill girls to pray. An experience when she was ten years old had planted a seed in her mind about the matter of finances for God’s work. Sent out by her grandmother in Portaferry to collect funds for some charity, she approached a man who had just finished building himself a new house. He refused to give anything. Stunned, the little girl pondered the wisdom of asking money from people who don’t really love God. Why not, she thought, ask God to make people who love Him want to give? Amy and the shawlies did exactly that.

Not long afterwards, Amy was fulfilling one of the more odious duties of a girl in her time, “returning calls” with her mother. This meant sitting in drawing rooms with a cup of tea and a piece of cake balanced precariously on the saucer, trying to be polite when one couldn’t help thinking of better ways to spend the time. But the God who teaches us to pray has many ways of answering, and that afternoon’s boredom resulted in the hostess’s mentioning Amy’s work to a friend. The friend asked Amy to lunch.

An old