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

After nearly a year in Matsuye, Amy wrote in the letter she called her “Scrapperie,” read by many people at home, “I shall never, never, never learn Japanese. You may put it on my tombstone: expired in despair. I am in the middle of my lessons, and have stopped short to tell you so. I answer all Misaki San’s expostulations by assuring her that it is much more important for me to warn you to send out no more missionaries to a land with such a language, than to go on longer trying to learn it.” The length of the words alone (tokiakashiteoagemoshimashoka for example) was daunting.

Here is the last straw which has broken the final back of my resolution . . . I wanted to say, “I like fine weather better than wet”—not a complicated expression, one would imagine. It is the twist of construction that staggers me: “Rain of coming down bad honorable weather than even good honorable weather of days of side good is.”

You may learn pages of this, poll-parrot-fashion, but how to form other sentences in such a world? . . . Poor Misaki San is taking it quite seriously and I am scribbling under a perfect hailstorm of “Ah, Weesong [her pronunciation of Amy’s middle name, Wilson] San, dozo stop and learn more. Please say not so! Ah, Weesong San!

But all was not by any means lost. On the anniversary of her arrival in Matsuye she wrote that she had actually been the speaker at a little meeting, meant to be for children only, but men and women, “who would not otherwise waken up enough to trouble to come were attracted by the singing and crowded into the room. The children, “little wild rabbits a few weeks ago, as tame as pet ones now, clustered close about me.” When the room was jammed past toleration they moved into the courtyard and Amy spoke simply, helped by some men who translated into child language, “crumbling the bread, as it were.”

“We had just finished when an old woman who had been listening with great delight to her small grandchild’s performances in the sing-song line, came up to me and pulled my sleeve, saying, ‘All alone you have come, and well we have understood.’ Wasn’t it good of Him? I was half afraid they hadn’t quite. I thought of the last first of May and thanked God and took courage.”

Her letters describe dozens of meetings, always beginning with singing, always with distractions multiplied—the smokers smoked and tapped their tiny metal pipes loudly on the charcoal braziers, mothers nursed babies, undressed older children and rubbed them down, gongs sounded for prayer in nearby temples, terrible-looking idols gazed down from shelves in the houses where the meetings were held. Sometimes, in the middle of a hymn, “a splash in the near distance tells us that somebody is in the middle of something else—but I refrain. Oh, the strangeness of it!”

It was one thing to speak in a public meeting, but the thought of approaching a family as they sat in front of their own house filled her with fear. “Go and tell them about Me,” she heard her Master say. She had gone a few yards beyond them and it seemed silly to turn, the usual buts rose—I don’t know enough, may make mistakes and do more harm than good. Still that solemn Voice I am learning so slowly to recognize, spoke on—’Go and tell them about Me.’ It must be His, so I went. . . . In the simplest colloquial I repeated ‘God so loved the world,’ told them the very little I could, and left them sadly enough. It was so little My words are so few and so broken as yet, but pray that somehow He may use it to bring glory to His dear name.”

As in Belfast and Manchester, Amy sought out the factory girls. She cut an even stranger figure in their part of town than she had in the city slums at home. She was showered with stones and followed by jeering boys, but never mind. When she invited girls to a meeting nearly eighty came, making Amy cry as she remembered her girls at the two Welcomes and how they had sung “God be with you till we meet again.”

Her great longing was to have a “single eye” for the glory of God. Whatever might blur the vision God had given her of His work, whatever could distract or deceive or tempt others to seek anything but the Lord Jesus Himself she tried to eliminate. Why waste precious time, painful effort, on lesser things? Someone suggested that more girls would be drawn to the meetings if she offered lessons in sewing or embroidery and administered only a mild dose of the Gospel. But these girls worked from five in the morning till half past six in the evening. They had one day off in ten. They hadn’t time for foolishness. Furthermore, so far as Amy could see, there was no scriptural warrant for “consecrated fancywork and chatter,” for “fleshly things rather than spiritual.” “I would rather have two who came in earnest than a hundred who came to play,” she said. “We have no time to toy with souls like this. It is not by ceremonial teamaking and flower arranging, not by wool chrysanthemum-making and foreign sewing-learning, but ‘by My Spirit, saith the Lord.’”1

The young men of Japan we re beginning to learn English, which she regarded as the “open Sesame of the world’s great treasure caves and poison caves too.” She must do something about that, give them an antidote for the Western books full of falsehood and skepticism that were making their way into Japanese. Somehow she fitted afternoon Bible classes for them into her schedule, beginning with the book of Daniel.

Meetings in tiny dark rooms, meetings in courtyards, meetings on the street, meetings for women, for children, for men, for