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

young men, factory girls, farm worker s; meetings in the afternoons, meetings in the evening, often beginning at ten o’clock when the people came in from the fields, and lasting till midnight—no wonder Amy was exhausted. Once while waiting for a late-night meeting to begin she lay down behind some kind Christian women on a dirty mat on the floor, chilled by draughts, assailed by odors, and fell asleep. She woke to hear her name announced as the next speaker, “and before anybody had time to wonder anything, I was wide awake in my place, text found and all. A curious preparation for speaking, you will think, but I think He gave it to me, so it was all right.”

Amy felt that her ability to sleep in such conditions ought to prove to her fellow missionaries that she was robust enough to “live native.” Why on earth did they make such a fuss about her wanting to do this? Their attempts to teach her the wisdom learned through longer experience than hers made little impression, and she continued to try to persuade them to allow her to discard all Western ways. “If there were less of what seems like ease in our lives they would tell more for Christ and souls. . . . We profess to be strangers and pilgrims, seeking after a country of our own, yet we settle down in the most un-stranger-like fashion, exactly as if we were quite at home and meant to stay as long as we could. I don’t wonder apostolic miracles have died. Apostolic living certainly has.” She did promise her concerned friends that she would not go against the combined wisdom of them all and rush into a life of extreme austerity, but she was deeply troubled by their objections. “Satan is so much more in earnest than we are—he buys up the opportunity while we are wondering how much it will cost.”

She felt keenly her own helplessness, awkwardness, and ignorance, and begged her friends at home to pray. All other powers but prayer seemed infinitesimal and useless by comparison. As she thought of the giants of faith like Elijah or Hudson Taylor, she knew that she was nothing but a baby, “shamefully, yes, shamefully small. ‘That which I know not teach Thou me. Lord, teach us to pray.’” She deplored the tendency she found in herself to do more talking and writing about praying than actual praying. She lacked practice, she wrote, so it was small wonder she was an infant in prayer speech. Would her friends at home help? Would they, when they wakened in the night or were busy at work and her name flashed into mind, would they recognize it as God’s telegram to remind them to pray? Would they telegraph back? “Don’t let a moment slip. More may hang upon your instant yielding than you know or shall know till the great Then comes.”

Amy’s attempts to give her readers the verisimilitude of an actual experience by painting verbal pictures were never more ardent than when she tried to arouse spiritual concern for those who had never heard of Christ. She described a chilly little hotel where she sat trying to dry her clothes over a hibachi while she wrote. Behind her was the “honorable place,” a slab of wood on which were arranged golden persimmons, a spray of blossom, burning candles, and a bowl of incense, offerings to a relative whose anniversary of “deigning to cease to become” they were celebrating. Above the offerings hung a picture of a Buddhist dignitary. In the next room was a shrine with ancestral tablets and a many-armed idol of the goddess of mercy. Lamps swung before it, prayers were chanted. It cut deep into her heart to think of the emptiness of it all, the sadness, the cry of the silence of death.

You who can resist the half-articulate pleading of many and many a heart today, can you resist this? From millions of voiceless souls, it is rising now—does it not touch you at all? The missionary magazines try to echo the silent sob. You read them? Yes; and you skim them for good stories, nice pictures, bits of excitement—the more the better. Then they drop into the wastepaper basket, or swell some dusty pile in the corner. For perhaps “there isn’t much in them.” Very likely not; “there isn’t much in the silence any more than in darkness, at least not very much reducible to print; but to God there is something in it for all that. Oh! you—you, I mean, who are weary of hearing the reiteration of the great unrepealed commission, you who think you care, but: who certainly don’t, past costing point, is there nothing will touch you?

1. Zechariah 4:6.

Chapter 10

The School of Prayer

The new missionary who is sure of his call can hardly help expecting to see miracles when he reaches the place of service. Amy Carmichael had had a glimpse, through her work with the shawlies, of how the other half” lived, had experienced what it is to be a quaint figure presenting a hardly credible message, and knew that not by any means all who hear it find it even interesting, let alone compelling. She had seen some fruit, however. God had honored her faith and her labor of love, and there were many “trophies of grace to show for it. Surely in Japan where the need was far more acute she could expect even greater miracles and trophies. She prayed for them. She worked as hard as she could for them. She believed God’s promises. But again and again her letters express her consciousness of the weakness of her own faith and the overpowering might of the obstacles to be removed. Heathendom was a felt presence, never more overwhelming than in an Eastern carnival or matsuri. She wished she could describe such a scene with a fire-dipped pen even with a pen dipped in her own heart’s blood if that