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

all. The thought that the gift might not be entirely voluntary never crossed her mind.

Once a year a notice was sent around giving food costs in rupees per month, and those who had private means were expected to pay their share.

Allowances were not given to the children during Amy’s lifetime. Some of them grew up without ever having handled money. Pin money was given automatically to workers when God provided it. When one man returned his allowance, Amma said, “Make sure it is not your pride which makes you refuse. God is not responsible for what He has not commissioned,” meaning, one would assume, that it would not do for him to expect God to supply his needs miraculously.

There was one very great luxury for DFs. “Above all luxuries a bathroom to yourself is to my mind the greatest,” was Amy’s comment. She saw to it that each missionary had her own small room with a large storage jar for water, a basin and dipper. A declivity in the floor with a drain provided a place to stand to pour water over oneself. There were both chamber pots and outhouses, the latter with a footboard on each side of a hole in the ground. Whatever served as latrine was given a polite name, “The Place.”

A life of poverty was the ideal Amy had longed for. “I wanted to have no possessions except what I could carry in a big handkerchief!” Her comrades in the Starry Cluster had understood the desire, giving up their jewelry and their money, living the simplest life as itinerants. But it was a different life that was required now because there was a family. Amy wanted to have things to give them—books and paintings, music and microscopes, the things that had made her own childhood so rich. So, like everything else that was hers, she laid down the desire to have nothing and took up family life and all that family life meant. She was a mother. She lived for her children.

The time came when there was a good deal of pressure to change the Pattern in the matter of payment for work done. While Amy acknowledged that it was indeed much easier to have everything settled by contract, such a system was wholly out of harmony with the principle of family life. The Dohnavur Fellowship was patterned after the traditional Indian family, which had nothing to do with wages or salaries. “There is much done every day in Dohnavur that no caste person would do for pay, however much was offered,” wrote Amy, who mentioned to one of her trainees that she had no doubt cut thousands of small toe-and fingernails—“I who said I would never do any work but ‘preach the gospel.’ It takes some of us years to learn what preaching the gospel means.”

The Pattern was a costly way of doing things. She never disguised the fact. “We ask far more than the usual of our boys and girls, and this way of working asks far more of us”

1. 1 Corinthians 8:13.

Chapter 40

Scrub-Land

Early in 1931 Amy gathered the members of the Dohnavur Fellowship in God’s Garden and the decision was made to ask the Webb-Peploe brothers to be the leaders of the men’s side and May Powell of the women’s. Very likely the state of her own health helped Amy to see the importance of planning for others to take over. The headaches that had plagued her for years had become so troublesome that she occasionally took a glass of port mixed with quinine—port to help the headache, quinine “so that I won’t take the wine for its own sake!”

May Powell was called to bring forceps to the Forest one day when Amy had a toothache she did not want anyone else to know about. May arrived to find her in a semikneeling posture on her bed, in too much pain to kneel up, praying for some girls who had a special need.

The tricycle on which she used to careen around the compound had to be given up. She was sixty-three, overweight, less mobile, and needed more rest. She had, since the beginning of the children’s work, made a valiant effort, if not to kiss each child good-night, at least to see every face every day. One evening when she came past the dispensary on this mission May stopped her. “Amma, do go back to your room,” she begged. “Get thee behind me, Satan!” said Amma.

Her diet had been far from ideal. Protein, with the exception of milk, and elderly fowl, was hard to come by. The strains of thirty-eight years, the devastating bereavements, the terrific emotional demands of the fights for Muttammal and Raj, had taken a greater toll than anyone realized. Insomnia, heart trouble, hypertension, tic douloureux (for which she had surgery) and iritis, which fairly blinded one eye, were among other “adversaries’’ she was trying to fight.

The last thing that occurred to Amy was any slackening of missionary zeal. The greater her own weakness, the greater the opportunity to prove divine strength. She continued to pray for a wider outreach from Dohnavur, the collapse of the “walls of Jericho” which were Hindu and Muslim strongholds. In August she took the commands of Isaiah 54:2 as meant for the DF: “Enlarge the place of thy tent, and let them stretch forth the curtains of thine habitations: spare not, lengthen thy cords, and strengthen thy stakes.” Within a day’s drive there were 100,000 Muslims. Couldn’t they “lengthen the cords” to include them?

Mere business sense would have seen it as a poor time to advance. Funds were very scarce. In July there was a four-thousand rupee deficit. But when did Amy Carmichael ever operate on the basis of mere business sense? This, she declared, was “the very time to look for an advance!”

She liked to give picturesque names to places. Eruvadi, for example, she prettily translated “Song of the Plough.” The great hump of a mountain seen in some