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

named Florence, whom she referred to in her letters as “Twin.” At a missions conference they found that in the posted dinner lists, Twin and a friend named Mina had been seated side by side.

Well, I was very glad that dear Mina should have Twin, and I don’t think I grudged her to her one little bit, and yet at the bottom of my heart there was just a touch of disappointment, for I had almost fancied I had somebody of my very own again, and there was a little ache somewhere. I could not rejoice in it. . . . I longed, yes longed, to be glad, to be filled with such a wealth of unselfish love that I should be far gladder to see those two together than I should have been to have had Twin to myself. And while I was asking for it, it came. For the very first time I felt a rush of real joy in it, His joy, a thing one cannot pump up or imitate or force in any way. . . . Half-unconsciously, perhaps, I had been saying, “Thou and Twin are enough for me”—one so soon clings to the gift instead of only to the Giver. . . :

Take my love, my Lord, I pour

At Thy feet its treasure-store.

Take myself and I will be

Ever, only, all for Thee.

FRANCES RIDLEY HAVERGAL

After writing this, Amy felt inclined to tear it out of the letter. It was too personal, too humiliating, but she decided the Lord wanted her to let it stand, to tell its tale of weakness and of God’s strength. She was finding at firsthand that missionaries are not set apart from the rest of the human race, not purer, nobler, higher. “Wings are an illusive fallacy,” she wrote. “Some may possess them, but they are not very visible, and as for me, there isn’t the least sign of a feather. Don’t imagine that by crossing the sea and landing on a foreign shore and learning a foreign lingo you ‘burst the bonds of outer sin and hatch yourself a cherubim.’”

Forty years later Amy described for one of her “children” a transaction that had taken place when she was alone in a cave in Arima. Having gone there to spend a day in solitude she faced with God feelings of fear about the future. Loneliness hovered like a spectre on the horizon. Things were all right at the moment, but could she endure years of being alone? The devil painted pictures of loneliness which were vivid to her many years later, and she turned to the Lord in desperation. “What can I do, Lord? How can I go on to the end?” His answer: “None of them that trust in Me shall be desolate.”2

Her mother ventured to ask in a letter whether Amy “loved anybody very much.” Her answer was evasive. Had she met someone who made the possibility of marriage seem attractive, in spite of her early decision to remain single? Mr. Consterdine’s name had occurred once or twice in her letters—apparently a single missionary, kind, protective, thoughtful in small ways. A young woman of Amy’s beauty, gifts, and exuberance of spirit could not possibly have escaped the notice of any European bachelor who might have been around. If Mr. Consterdine or anybody else had proposed to her, she covered it with complete silence. She was a Victorian, with a Victorian’s scrupulous modesty, and she had given over all matters of the heart to Him to whom alone hers was open.

1. Matthew 16:24 (Phillips).

2. Psalms 34:22.

Chapter 9

The Unrepealed Commission

Breakfast at the Buxtons’ was at seven-thirty, followed by the reading of Daily Light. Then came Japanese and English prayers, and from nine till half past twelve language lessons. The midday meal was dinner. Everyone else in the house had time after dinner for rest and play. Not Amy. Rest and play? Perhaps for some it was necessary, but certainly not for her. Such an expenditure of time for a new missionary! She used the hour to teach English to a little boy who was eager to teach her Japanese—“a comical interchange of information!” Tea was next, then visiting, when Amy and Misaki San went to the village of Yokohama to try to find hearers for the Gospel. They usually had another tea there, then an hour’s Bible reading with a young man.

The schedule was unrealistic. Amy’s associates told her it couldn’t be done, so she tackled it with a smile. She couldn’t do it. After a few months she was forced to quit the English lessons and have a bit of quiet after dinner—not to rest, of course, and not to play, but to write letters. She told the folks at home that her poor head was tired and stupid, she had not studied for some weeks, and the enjoyment she had had at first in her lessons had taken wings. “Quiet,” however, was a relative term. She could get away by herself to write, but “downstairs squeaks a concertina (to be borne for the sake of the cause), outside screams a baby (I wish I had some soothing syrup), from one quarter wails a street cryer, to whom nobody seems inclined to attend, from another hammers a cooper. But the worst of the worst is the nerve-distracting shriek of a terrible tin horn performed upon by a youth who has yet to learn compassion.”

Nights were often broken by noise—a gang of boys, for example, thundering with all their might and main on the front door. “Now we have a highly respectable cook-san, who is the happy possessor of a kind heart and a thick head, foreign clothes (always too tight and minus a button or two). He is strangely obtuse as to puddings, but in matters of this sort he shines. The thundering ceased and he held a parley. It ended in tumultuous defeat on the part of the insurgents, and a victory, flat but satisfactory, on his: they retired from