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

story, so she began with the “pool,” that day in Belfast when she and her brothers helped the old woman with the bundle, and a mighty phrase about gold, silver, and precious stones flashed through the fog. There would have been no Dohnavur story to tell if she had not made up her mind that day to build in materials indestructible.

When she had finished Gold Cord, she went on to write thirteen more books, making a total of between thirty-five and forty, depending on whether one counts those which appeared in different forms. Total sales of British editions exceed half a million, all this, of course, with nothing approaching high-powered advertising. By 1950 there were translations into fifteen languages. Twelve of the books had been put into Braille in England, eight in the United States. When a Christian magazine described them as popular she was distressed. “Popular? Lord, is that what these books written out of the heat of the battle are? Popular? O Lord, burn the paper to ashes if that be true.”

She wrote very fast, by hand, on a table or, when in bed, on a writing stand. She seldom rewrote extensively. “Perfection I can never touch, but I do dislike loose threads lying about in a book, or weak lines and needless words.”

She disliked pictures hanging crooked on the wall. She knew how to put her hand on any letter or paper she needed, and always looked “in corners and at the backs of things.” She was in control.

Her style is graceful, often poetic, always lucid. Her descriptions have the power to give to the reader an experience. Her convictions about the handling of truth were sometimes in conflict. To a young biographer she said, “Generally speaking, I think the rule should be—the truth whatever people think. It is truth in a book that helps.” Her test for every word, spoken or written: Is it true? Not always an easy question. Her loyalty to the truth did not bind her to tell the whole truth when there were other considerations, such as, Is it helpful? That depended on definition and other questions: helpful to whom? in what way? She had edited a good many things from the autobiography she wrote for the children because they did not strike her as helpful. “How can I be sure I am choosing those which will be of use to you?” she wrote. She could not be sure. There were three more questions: Is it kind? Is it necessary? Does it have the “seed of Eternity” in it? “Nothing is worthwhile if the seed of Eternity be not in it.”

“There is a false suavity about most that is written from this land now,” she wrote. “We are so afraid to offend, so afraid of stark truth, that we write delicately, not honestly.” Her books give ample evidence of extreme delicacy where the reputations or the edification of others were at stake. Yet it was their edification she had in mind when she wrote at times far less delicately. Delicacy could be perilous. “Our smoothness glides over souls. It does not spur them to action, even though they be Christians to whom the thought of the glory of the Lord being given to another ought to be unendurable.”2

Next to John 8:553 she wrote in the margin of her Bible, “To hide the truth is no less falsehood than to spread error.” For reasons which her truth-loving soul thought sufficient, she carefully hid certain facts, and charged others to see that they remained hidden. Ambiguities, contradictions, errors, uncertainties, even certain mysteries she seemed peculiarly anxious to avoid mentioning.

She hated exclamation points on a printed page. When her publishers arbitrarily inserted them in Things as They Are she was incensed. “So fussy. They give an idea of overemphasis.”

She must have written millions of words. Besides the books which were published she wrote privately for the Family. The long paper called Roots and the autobiography of her early years are examples of these. She wrote hundreds of songs and poems, thousands upon thousands of personal letters, in addition to those with multiple readership such as Scraps, Life of Faith, Dohnavur Letter, and Dust of Gold.

Most astonishing is the number of letters and notes she wrote daily to her own “beloveds” in Dohnavur. Many of these she regarded as her own long before she met them. Accepted candidates received loving, welcoming letters nearly weekly, sometimes for many months before they arrived. Especially notable is the intimate relationship developed with a young English girl, mentioned in an earlier chapter, who was engaged to a man already in Dohnavur. The girl was nineteen when she received Amma’s first letter.

“Dear, perhaps Comrade-to-be,” it began. There were expressions of warm welcome, followed by straight-from-the-shoulder words about the matter of marriage before language-learning. “We do not find we can lower our threshold, as Mildred Cable (missionary to Mongolia) puts it. . . . She has seen the weakness that follows making things easy and not soldierly . . . the battle to which we are committed is so terrific that only the tried and proven will stand, all others will give way and break at the moment of crisis. . . . Soldiers don’t ask for ease or expect it.”

Ill health delayed the girl’s sailing. Amma fully sympathized with the anguish of separation from her husband-to-be. Occasionally she sent a snapshot of him, or wrote about him to Bee. “Bee darling, I love him more every month, and more desire him for you and you for him. He is one of the knightliest men I ever met. Every thought is knightly. He is one in whom a woman’s love may safely rest, as a bird in its nest.” She wrote of his progress in Tamil, his literary touch, and closed that letter with, “Now with you in my arms, Goodbye. Blessings on you, precious child. Your own Amma.”

In another letter: “To His strength, to His tenderness, I commit you both. You are warriors, and when did warriors ask for