A Chance to Die Elisabeth Elliot (electronic reader .txt) 📖

this cause came I unto this hour. John 12:24-28.

On the back of this note sometime later Amy wrote:

Give and it shall be given unto you, good measure’, pressed down, shaken together and running over. Luke 6:38. God’s Good Measure.

An exceeding and eternal weight of glory. 11 Cor. 4:17,18. Lord, I believe. Help Thou mine unbelief.

Who for the joy that was set before Him—endured.

As seeing Him who is invisible

O small shall seem all sacrifice

And pain and loss,

When God shall wipe the weeping eyes,

For suffering give the Victor s Prize,

The Crown for Cross.

“I will trust and NOT be afraid.

Jan. 18923 Jan. 18935

Sept. 18924 March 3, 18936 from today till He come.”

The paper is dog-eared, insect-eaten, stained. She must have carried it in her Bible for the rest of her life.

Miss Soltau took her shopping for the things she would need in China. Together they packed them in two airtight tin trunks. Everything was ready.

No, it wasn’t. The mission doctor refused to give approval for Amy to go to China, so back she went to Broughton Grange. The D.O.M. was ecstatic. “The Lord has given me back my Isaac!” he said. So it was the old peaceful grange life again. Amy played with her dog, Scamp, rode the pony Wilson gave her, helped with his writing, spoke in women’s meetings. But one thought never left her: “This is not your rest.” Doctors’ verdicts notwithstanding, she knew she had to go.

1. Hebrews 11:8.

2. Mildred Cable and Francesca French, A Woman Who Laughed: Biography of Henrietta Soltau, pp. 154ff.

3. The date of her hearing the GO YE.

4. To the China Inland Mission Home in London.

5. “Go to Japan” (see chapter 7).

6. Sailed for Japan.

Chapter 7

The Rending

On January 13, 1893 “the thought came” to Amy that Japan was the place for her to go. She had been praying and waiting for months, sure that she was not to “nestle down,” that God in His time would make things plain. The battle with her feelings for the Dear Old Man was not finished. The words of Matthew 10:37 were always with her: “He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.”

If it was in fact God’s leading, it was not by any miracle such as a pillar of fire, an audible voice, an angelic visit, a star, or handwriting on the wall. It was not by the ordinary methods by which, in combination, God seems to nudge us in the path of righteousness: circumstances, common sense, godly counsel, biblical principles. It was a thought. We may believe that God can impress such a thought on a mind surrendered to Him, and leave it at that. The pitfalls are many, however, and the story of Amy’s next year or two may illustrate this.

She knew no one in Japan, but the D.O.M. did. Barclay Buxton, a missionary with the Church Missionary Society, was the leader of the Japan Evangelistic Band, a group of young people not necessarily associated with the CMS. Wilson wrote to tell him of Amy’s “strange feeling” (her words) that she was to go to Japan, and asked if he had a place for her. Instead of expecting that Buxton’s reply, negative or affirmative, might be an indication of the will of God, they were so confident of the validity of their first feeling that they followed another one. Both “felt” she should head for Japan at the earliest possible moment. A party of CIM women was to sail on March 3 for Shanghai. Why not go with them? Buxton could send his reply there. Amy confidently booked a passage.

The few weeks that remained before she was to part with her beloved “Fatherie” were filled with anguish. Mr. Wilson believed God had given her to him as if she were his own lost daughter brought back from the dead, and his “flesh and his heart failed” at the prospect of Broughton Grange without Amy. No doubt she kept her sunny disposition with him, and they comforted each other with the promises of Scripture—anyone who relinquishes anything for the Lord’s sake will not go unrewarded. But there were times alone in her room when all the waves and billows washed over her.

“Never, I think, not even in Heaven shall I forget that parting,” Amy wrote fifty-two years later. “It was such a rending thing that I never wanted to repeat it. . . . Even now my heart winces at the thought of it.” At about the same time she told a friend what she had never told anyone: “The night I sailed for China, March 3, 1893, my life, on the human side, was broken, and it never was mended again. But He has been enough.”

The steamship Valetta of the Peninsula and Orient Lines left the dock in Tilbury where many friends of the four women had gathered to say good-bye. Farewells to those leaving nowadays by jet plane are nothing compared to the protracted agonies of dockside partings. Now the traveler simply disappears into the jetway. It is a mere walking into another room. Then it was gangplanks, hours of visiting on board, the “All ashore!” the deep-throated whistles, the throwing off of moorings, the slow glide away from the dock, the almost imperceptible widening of the great gulf between voyager and loved ones, the straining to discern till the last possible moment the diminishing face. When Amy sailed, friends stood on the wharf and sang, “Crown Him with Many Crowns, the Lamb upon His Throne,” and “Like a River Glorious is God’s Perfect Peace,” one of the Keswick hymns. The ship was within a stone’s throw for an hour, so the singing went on and on, the same hymns sung again and again, the words taking on an ever more poignant significance:

Crown Him the Son of Man

Who every grief hath known

That wrings the human breast,

And takes and bears them for His own

That all in Him may rest.

MATTHEW BRIDGES

Amy stood by the rail, watching intently the dear wrinkled face