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

afterwards Amy felt an irresistible divine pressure to ask and receive according to 1 John 5:14, 15: “This is the confidence that we have in him, that, if we ask anything according to his will, he heareth us: And if we know that he hear us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of him.” The petition this time? Eight souls from Hirosi. Again there was resistance from the Christians there. To ask for something they did not receive would be “a very bad happening.” Amy had no doubt God wanted to give the eight, and offered to stay longer to give Him time. No, they could not possibly arrange more meetings. So Amy, not about to capitulate, read prayer promises. The dear old undershepherd, a man of “perfectly Gladstonian ambiguity and circumlocution,” had locked horns with Amy over every issue that arose, his whole soul protesting against her categorical imperatives. This time he saw that protest would be futile. Slowly he rose, slowly spoke, “You are a Jesus-walking one; if His voice speaks to you, though it speaks not to us, we will believe.” Their trust, greater perhaps in Amy than in God, was rewarded. In His mercy (He knows the measure of faith He has given to each), eight more “stars” now shone in Hirosi. Later in India, bearing very great responsibilities for decision making, Amy remembered the undershepherd’s words and was strengthened in her resolve when Indian fellow-workers questioned her judgment.

And what about the next visit? Sixteen? No. No number at all was “laid on” Amy’s heart. They went to Hirosi, they had the usual meetings, they prayed together with all the Christians there, some came to Jesus, but Amy did not know how many. “We parted in a sort of singing silence.”

When she wrote the Hirosi story for her “children” she acknowledged, in a veiled way, that she had suffered pain because of those Christians. She did not elaborate. “I do not think that is a thing to talk about.”

Fourteen years later Barclay Buxton’s nephew joined him in Matsuye. He often visited Hirosi, and found that the converts from Amy’s time were still firmly rooted in faith.

Utter holiness, crystal pure, was Amy Carmichael’s desire. She did not see how any true Christian could have a lesser. “If we are not clean when we bear the vessels of the Lord,” she wrote in May of 1894, we may profane His holy name in the things which we hallow. Our very service a defiling thing! . . . The need of Japan: prophets of her own who can and will dare, Elijah-like, to stand alone for God, speaking His word faithfully, be that Word like as a fire, like a hammer, marking out, for lifelong loneliness, the man who is ‘the Voice.’”

She herself set the example and paid the price, sometimes in conflict with fellow-believers both European and Japanese. The matter of using pictures of Christ, a common practice among missionaries, was unthinkable to Amy. No one, she felt, had a right to presume to imagine God the Son. Who could possibly separate manhood from Godhead? She shrank in dread from such holy ground, and reminded those who disagreed that the apostles had avoided all appeal to the senses, trusting in the power of the Word alone. The Church, she said, resorted to pictures only when her power had gone.

The merest suggestion of anyone’s choosing missionary work because it was noble and grand, or a mission field because it was pleasant, horrified her. How could people at home write of a “delightful missionary meeting? Had they absorbed nothing of needs unmet, cries unheeded, griefs uncomforted? Did they attend for nothing but the tea and cake, the conversation, the chance to examine exotic curios, and then tell themselves that they were doing all that could be expected of them? “Missionary work is a grain of sand, the work untouched is a pyramid. . . . Face it. Look and listen, alone with God. Then go, let go, help go. But never, never, never think that anything short of this is being ‘interested in missions.’ Never, until this point is reached and passed, delude yourself into believing that you care at all.” Her own experience at Keswick was anything but “delightful.” The tent, thronged and still. Wave after wave of silent prayer, rising solemnly to God. Brief, burning “soldier-words” from soldier-souls. Silent battles raging within. A long hush. A cry as of pain, unavoidable, demanding an answer. She had given her answer, and on countless occasions in the field had had to reexamine her motives. A young missionary once said to her, I would go home tomorrow if I could. It is all a miserable disappointment, and I thought it would be so nice.” She besought her friends, girl friends, and cousins at home to consider the cry and the call, to welcome all tests of whatever sort before they crossed the seas, and to learn to die to self in any shape or form. Experience had quickly taught her that she could not survive the storms without the anchor of the constraining love of Christ and what she called the Rock-consciousness” of the promise given her, He goeth before.

1. Mark 9:18 (Phillips).

2. John 10:27; Matthew 28:18; Mark 16:17; Isaiah 41:10.

Chapter 11

Japanese Head

The first missionary, a tough man named Paul, found that his apostolic duties entailed some stormy bufferings. He was hard pressed, bewildered, hunted, struck down; he was starved, imprisoned, beaten, shipwrecked; he was afflicted with something that needled his flesh. During Amy Carmichael’s first fourteen months as a missionary she was “buffeted” in other ways. She was hard pressed, sometimes bewildered, and finally struck down. Her experiences caused her to meditate on the great vulnerability of the physical body, the same body in which the Life of Christ is mysteriously revealed.

Writing from Imaichi, a town to which she had gone because the only missionary had had to take sick leave and