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

him fire and wood. It was all the work of the suitor. The girl’s horoscope had disappeared so no one could prove her age. Then the mission lawyer asked the mission to bribe the father’s side of the case, as he feared it was going against them.

India was a land where “the veriest child can baffle the keenest. The Eastern mind and soul seems to me like a cabinet of secret drawers—you never know when you get to the last one.”

Amy was staggered by the “terrible taking it for granted” that Pappamal would die. “I don’t know about North India, but everywhere in South India there is only one answer when you ask why high caste converts have to be sheltered away from their homes, and why it is impossible for either a Mohammedan or Hindu woman to confess Christ in baptism while she lives at home. And that one answer is: It would mean death—or worse . . . As one of the lawyers said, ‘She will be found down a well, and they will say she found her pain too much to bear and so put an end to it. Often it is so.’ ”

Two boys of the Vellala caste, one of the highest, told Amy that if they believed what she was telling them from the Bible they would be “beaten until they were dead.” Her answer: “It would be the greatest honor in all the world to be beaten until you are dead for Christ!”

Happily Amy’s brains did not liquefy in Ooty, but unhappily she came down with a fever that put her out of commission for two months. Always able to find something to thank God for, she learned during this time what true friends the Walkers were, she like a dear elder sister, he a wise strong elder brother. To them Amy was tungachie, little sister. In what Amy called “this happiest of missionary homes” she recovered, but language study suffered. She told her friends at home of the marvel of being able at last to understand Walker’s sermon, adding a note in the margin, “but I expect it was only because it was an easy one.”

Once in a while the thought that she would rather be in China came back, but she worked away faithfully where God had put her, teaching her Brahman boys whenever they turned up, spending a half hour in the evenings with Royal Jewel, “the jolliest little chap, very much in earnest (I hope).” The Indian headmaster of the mission school offered to give her two hours a day of Tamil if she would teach the schoolboys to sing hymns. Women came in the evening and learned from the Wordless Book, with its black, red, white, and gold pages, representing sin, the cleansing blood of Jesus, the purity He gives, and the glory to come. These women could argue. “God is everywhere, you say. Then He is in the stone, the tree. So we may worship the stone and the tree. Why not, if God is there?” Amy was heartened by reading the letters of Henry Martyn, earlier missionary to India, who wrote, “I have rightfully no other business each day but to do God’s work as a servant, constantly regarding His pleasure. May I have grace to live above every human motive, simply with God and to God.”

There were small excitements, such as the boys bringing her a freshly killed cobra and a scorpion that measured nine inches from nippers to tail tip. She was bitten by an unidentified “puchie.” Since the pain was not great enough for an older scorpion and too great for a hornet, Amy took it to be a “young and innocent” scorpion. “All this is fine fun for me—I can’t sober down into a proper missionary.”

There were dialogues of an altogether sober nature with a new munshie of a high caste, with whom she felt she came “straight against the dead wall of Hinduism.” He asked her to translate into Tamil an English tract he had brought. “Let us meditate on the All-Pervading Spirit, the Fountain of Bliss, the Incomparable One, Eternal, Immaculate, Incorporeal, Omniscient, Unalterable, Holy, Distant, and yet near, Light dwelling in tranquility, All-Comprehensive, Possessor of Perfect Felicity, pure intelligence, inexpressible, and inconceivable. . . .” Amy’s progress in Tamil was obviously far greater than she dared to admit, for she translated this description of God and then asked how, if he believed all this, he could worship stones.

Then came a perfect torrent of exclamations and asseverations and repudiations, like a pent-up river flood suddenly let loose. “I shall bow down to a stone tonight! I shall! Yes! I read you this book now and tonight I shall worship a stone! No! It is not a stone I worship! It is the Divinity who has condescended to meet us mortals by means of this stone. He, the Great God is All-Pervading. He has entered that stone, how I know not, nor do I ask to know.” Here he got beyond me and I could only listen and try to follow and catch the clue again. There he was, earnest, eager, far beyond me in mental power, and yet blind, bound in awful chains which no human hand could sever.

Amy, acutely aware of being, in herself, nothing more than a clay pot—ordinary, plain, fragile—knew that the pot held a priceless treasure which the old Hindu scholar had never seen: “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”3 Would God give these people eyes to see that light?

1. See Numbers 22:28.

2. Crocheted doilies to protect upholstered chairbacks and arms from soil, specifically from “Macassar,” a hair oil.

3. 2 Corinthians 4:6.

Chapter 17

Blissful Work

Eighteen ninety-eight began with weeks of neuralgia which, combined with the heat, made language study even less of a pleasure than usual, but the Scrap letter of February 17 says, “Hallelujah! Hurrah! The exam is passed! I’m free for souls at last!”