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

an easy time? or no wounds? or no heart-breaks? But He healeth the broken in heart and bindeth up the wounds.” There were other testings, “the beating out of the gold that makes us transparent, ‘pure gold, like unto clear glass.’ Goodbye, dear child, His trusted one, His tested one, His beloved one.”

Bees father was not happy with his daughter’s traversing the globe and asked her to wait three years to be sure of her call, both to the man and to Dohnavur, suspending all correspondence with anyone there, including her fiancé and Amy Carmichael. She obeyed him. Here was her chance to prove the truth of Amma’s words to her, Home, with all its prohibitions and opportunities to die daily” offered training far greater than any Bible school curriculum. It was a long obedience, but the father decided not to insist on the full three years’ silence and relented after two.

“If any least wisp of glamor is in your mind ask God to let His wind blow it away,” Amma wrote after that hiatus. “There is none of that rainbow thing in the life here.”

Week after week faithfully the letters went from India to England, letters filled with expressions of love, acceptance, oneness, sympathy and strong exhortations and encouragement. When Bee’s fiancé came to Amy’s room and kissed her, Amy saw it as an expression of a mystical union and wrote, “You are there—you and he and I.” She told Bee that she did not speak to him of her “for I understand too well how much he loves you for that.” Did she imagine that a man in love wants to avoid mention of the beloved? She wrote of the thought that had sustained her when she left her Dear Old Man—the thought of the Wounded Hands parting them, one laid on her, one on him. “He unites you closer than ever and binds you both together to Himself.”

Amy had many terms of endearment for her children, darling being the most frequently used. For Bee, who was often “darling, she chose a special name, Child of my Bonds. In the pain and limitations of her illness she felt she had been given the gift of a very special child, a child who, she began to believe, might take a place which would soon be empty.

1. Matthew 12:34 (TLB).

2. Frank Houghton, Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, p. 330.

3. “If I should say, I know him not, I shall be a liar like unto you: but I know him, and keep his saying.”

Chapter 43

Saint, Fishwife, Vegetable Marrow

In the early evening, when the hills in the distance showed faint and blue, in a patch of rough ground called the Field of the Darling-Pool a little girl stood alone. . . . She was wrapped in a sari, bright like a blackberry leaf in September, or the breast of a forest minivet, the one warm note of color there, and she waited, still as a leaf, for something to happen, for someone to speak.”

So goes chapter 1 of Ploughed Under, written two or three years after the accident. It tells of the early life of Arulai, whom Amy called Star, the girl on whom her hopes of the future leadership of the work depended. As a child Arulai had thought, “If even for one day I might be your daughter it would be as if the heavens touched the earth.”

Arulai was uniquely qualified. Spiritually she was fitted. She, like Ponnammal, was the godly woman Amma had asked God to produce from the very beginning of her work in India. Intellectually she was awake and alive, having at her disposal the English language, which gave access to Amma’s collection of spiritually nourishing books, and the Greek, in which she loved to read the New Testament. “She was one who could go anywhere, do anything,” Amy wrote.

Physically she was weak, due to smallpox and various other illnesses. In 1935 she was ill again. Prayers went up, hopes for her healing went up. Then they plummeted. For four years she was up and down, but by 1939 she was confined to bed in a room within sight of Amy’s room.

She was so near me, not one minute’s walk from this room, and yet I never saw her dear face after one day last October when she came to see me. I could have gone, but at first it was always that she was getting better, and it would have made a fuss to go. Then after March 10 it would have been too hard for her for it would have meant parting—and we never parted. I used to get up at night and look at the red roof of her room and ache to go over.

Amy began to put together a dialogue between “the son” (herself) and the Father, which was later published as His Thoughts Said . . . His Father Said. One of the fragments which may have come out of this separation from Arulai was this one:

“The son was in deep sorrow, and he said, Never, never did I think of not being with him who is my very heart, when he came to the brink of the river.

“His Father said, Will he miss thy hand whom My hand holdeth?”

Arulai was to Amy “perhaps the most precious thing I have on earth.” On April 21, 1939, Amy read 2 Timothy 4, changing the pronouns in verses 6 to 8: “For now she is ready to be offered, and the time of her departure is at hand. She has fought a good fight, she has finished her course, she has kept the faith.” Verse 9 was the one the D.O.M. had sent her, “Do thy utmost to come to me speedily.” For years that verse had been like a knife thrust. “I could not go to him, and one reason was Arulai,” she wrote in the margin of the passage. “Now I can read them without breaking down.” She believed the same would