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

English of their station in life always did, whether in England or abroad. Here Amy was to spend the first months of her stay in Japan in a lovely room which, to her great delight, commanded a view of the mountains.

Buxton was not the stereotypical British colonial, nor the missionary depicted by Hollywood, who spurned the society of “the natives.” There was “not a suspicion of the foreignizing element” in the church in Matsuye, which was a converted Shinto temple—“rather a thorn in the flesh to the Devil, I should fancy,” wrote Amy. The Christians held a welcome meeting for her on the first Saturday evening after her arrival. She went to church, probably for the first time in her life, without hat or shoes. What this meant for a Victorian girl from her cultured home, with her great personal reserve, no twentieth century American or European can imagine. She sat, as everyone did, on the floor, Buxton beside her, interpreting in a running undertone the speech of greeting.

In a letter which began, “This is to be a home-letter in the strictest sense of the word, and isn’t to be trotted round,” Amy answered some of the questions folks at home were asking. Why “trot round” the answers to such trivial questions? What did she wear? In the summertime, cotton dresses, as few layers as possible, for the temperature often stayed in the nineties. In winter, “my blue serge dress and cap (that last dear little bit of home). For coats, my myrtle one with the cape—so warm and light—and for knock-about my good old pilot.” When it was bitterly cold she almost lived in her “big tweed.”

It did not take Amy long to see that European dress was a distraction. Why add an altogether avoidable distraction to the many unavoidable ones of being foreign? If Hudson Taylor could wear the queue and gown of a Chinese, why couldn’t she wear a kimono? She departed from standard missionary practice and asked her colleagues’ indulgence if she wore Japanese dress at least on Sundays. A sensible idea, they realized, and soon all adopted the practice. She had a dark-blue kimono with pale-green finishings, cool and graceful, with the words “God is Love” embroidered on it. “One soon forgets its presence in proving its power to draw one to the people. . . . I am keeping to my own shoes and stockings, however—the native ones being beyond me as yet.” The text furnished an opportunity to explain to the curious her reason for being in Japan. Her hair was a matter of astonishment to the people—“No oil at all!” said one old lady who bowed most devoutly, sidled gently over, gazed at the foreign hair, and patted it. “Is it always fuzzy like that?”

One day she was telling the Good News to an old lady by interpretation. Just when she seemed ready to turn to Christ in faith, she noticed Amy’s hands. It was very cold that day, and Amy was wearing fur gloves. “I cannot remember whether we were able to recall her to what mattered so much more than gloves, but this I do remember, I went home, took off my English clothes, put on my Japanese kimono, and never again, I trust, risked so much for the sake of so very little.”

What did she eat? the folks at home wanted to know. When in the Buxtons’ home she ate more or less what she had always eaten, including a proper English afternoon tea. This was the “hour of hours” to her, for “be it known, though fairly Jappy in other times and places we are thoroughly English then, and revel in the most un-do-without-able of English luxuries.” These included condensed milk, potted meat, bread, and “real” tea, which was three times stronger than Japanese tea. When traveling, however, it was a different story. “Native fish paste, pale mud color and nasty; semiboiled animal, nature unknown; eggs young and old; perfectly raw fish, brown seaweed, black beans in a liquid like senna tea; chicken (usually a fowl of much experience) in sugary juice; leathery scraps floating about in some terribly fishy liquid; sliced bamboo, lily roots, odoriferous radish, sea-weed, sea-ears, sea-slugs, plus pickle, plus rice.

Before she left England, Amy had imposed on herself the discipline of drinking tea without cream and eating toast without butter, in preparation for hardships to be endured. It did not work. It was dull and boring, and it made everyone else nervous, so she gave it up. The Lord knew where her heart was—where He led she’d follow, what He fed she’d swallow. She found when the time came that she didn’t really mind anything nearly as much as she had feared she might. The promised grace was always supplied. The great thing was to learn to be thankful, for “in Japan we don’t know what hardships are.” She was thinking of the rigors of missionary life in inland China or Africa. Admittedly, however, there were occasions during her missionary journeys when, because of seasickness or sheer exhaustion, she could not bring herself to swallow the black liquids or the sea-slugs. Then she would, as unobtrusively as possible (which sometimes meant under the quilts) pull out of her bag bread and tea of the familiar variety.

Amy tackled the study of the language at once. It was a great gulf fixed between her and the people with “dark eyes, dark windows of darker souls,” and she felt the helplessness of the alien. She was surprised and delighted to find that it was possible to start giving out the Gospel by means of an interpreter. A Christian Japanese girl, Misaki San, became her “mouth,” her travel companion, her teacher.

“The honorifics are peculiar,” Amy wrote. “For our ‘go slowly’ they have quite a touching appeal, ‘augustly leisurely going, deign to be;’ if you are hungry, you explain with polite frankness that your ‘honorable inside is empty,’ and if you want to say somebody has died, you say he has