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

was able to be carried up to the Forest, a long and rigorous journey even if you were riding. “One evening I all but raced down the Forest House verandah. It was the last time. Arthritis set in.”

More than three times she prayed Paul’s prayer that the “thorn”2 be removed. The answer was always the one that came to him: My grace is sufficient.

To one of the young Englishmen she wrote, “I wonder if the Lord is not saying not to me only but to you, my Own: See to it that you are in perfect accord with Me and then trust Me to withhold no good thing. If health be that good thing, O how joyful it will be, and every morning I waken with the hope, ‘Perhaps today.’ But I want first to want His will, be that will mine or not.”

It was not Amy’s will to be served. She who had come to India to be servant of all must learn to be served by all. “I had so fully expected to be like the old ox in Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, who kep a goin an a goin’ till he died a-standin’ up, an’ even then they had to push him over,’ that I had been shedding my possessions, not accumulating them.” Now she must accept luxury (“how I loathe it and fear it”)—a proper bed instead of a mat on the tile floor, a room much larger and more beautiful than necessary, all manner of comforts and pleasures which flowed into the room from people who loved her. “My only trouble is that I have had so much too much. The Son of Man hath not where to lay His head.”

1. See Romans 12:2.

2. 2 Corinthians 12:7.

Chapter 42

The Servant as Writer

Though the woman in the bed had no choice but to be served, “servant of all” was still her watchword. One kind of service still open to Amy, when pain did not make it impossible, was writing. As we have seen, she had been writing all her life, almost compulsively. An experience was not complete until she had given expression to it on paper. Sometime before the accident friends had asked her to write the story of the Dohnavur Fellowship and how it began—“just what is hardest to tell,” she said, “because without foolish fuss it is impossible to escape the personal.” Her publisher wanted “a religious document.” She answered with a convenient Tamil word which means can’t or won’t, depending on the speaker s feeling. It would take a higher authority to persuade her. It came early one morning when “a quiet private word ended this ineffective unwillingness.”

So it was that Gold Cord was begun, probably in 1931, and finished after she was confined to bed, though the reader could have no idea of that. The setting of the book she described as “a tragic page of history; not a date but is linked to great events in one or in many of the nations, or to those overwhelming distresses that the very names Armenia, Russia, China, Central Asia, suggest. And all that has happened in India is never out of mind. But the story holds to a single course. It looks across the open frontier to the Country whose forces move unseen among us; for they are the things that matter most, ‘and the life of the spirit has no borders.’ ”

Like all Carmichael books, Gold Cord omits the personal whenever possible. There is no mention of the accident. It is nevertheless deeply personal, deeply revealing of the character and the vision of the author—dedicated to truthfulness, full of love, sensitive to beauty both inward and outward, large of heart and mind, seeing the visible always in the light that streams from the invisible. Though none of her books is “about” her, all are, like all books, the product of who the author is. “A man’s heart determines his speech.”1

Facing each chapter is a quotation from another’s writing or one of her own poems or both. The end papers show a scale plan of the Dohnavur compound and a map of the southern corner of Tinnevelly (Tirunelveli) District. Sepia-tone photographs capture scenes in the compound: a moon-gate, a little girl polishing a brass vessel, close-ups of some of the more beautiful of the Dohnavur children, the House of Prayer, the Path of Quietness, to name a few; and outside: temple walls, plains, the Holy Washerman’s Mountain. But pictures of Amy Carmichael? Not one, in this or any other book published during her lifetime. “There is nothing nice about me, was her view, “I am nothing and less than that.” When someone persuaded her that she must allow a photograph for the sake of her children who loved her she gave in, “in a weak moment,” thought it “horrid,” and regretted it ever afterwards. “I never can understand how anyone can love such a thing. I often hope that those who have not seen me won’t see me till I awake in His likeness.”

The story is told of a noted American minister who had made up his very strong mind to take a picture of the by then famous Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur. He was Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse of Philadelphia, a tall, powerfully imposing man with a booming voice. When I heard the story, I visualized the encounter with the small, gentle lady in the Room of Peace.

“Who won?” I asked.

“She did, of course,” was the answer.

Gold Cord begins with a metaphor—the children’s search for the source of “their” river in the forest. “A tree had crashed through the forest just where the banks were too steep to climb and the undergrowth was too entangled to penetrate. The trunk was covered with orchids, and was a beautiful thing, but it barred the way. Below it was a deep, clear pool.” The children could not reach the source. Amy could not go back to the beginning of her