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

be taught by those who had a regard for truth; and not just a casual regard, a delicate regard. On this point we were adamant.”3

And so the parting of the ways began. Amy Carmichael was marching to a different drummer. There was no getting around that fact. She called herself “the least of His messengers,” yet it was to her, as to God’s anointed prophet Moses, that “the pattern in the mount” was shown. She stood, as it were, with her face to God and her back to the people, waiting to receive His word for the “chosen people.” She had had a vision of holy living. She would not deviate from that no matter how well-established, rational, and practical the ways of older missions seemed to be.

Was love the Gold Cord of life in other missions? An older missionary once said to Amy, “But missionaries always do fall out with one another, and then make it up.”

“We have never lived like that,” Amy replied. “We could not bear to live for one minute out of love with one another,” an answer which she supposed “sounded simply silly to the one who knew so much better than I did about missionary life.”

Did not other missions sometimes hire evangelists? Were there not nominal Christians participating in mission work (not to use them was deemed “impractical”)? Did they understand the motives which led Amy to eschew jewelry, Western dress, and the segregation of Indian and European? Most burning of all questions: was it the Cross that attracted them? Amy did not articulate such questions to them or, so far as one can tell, to anyone. But the questions were unavoidable. She avoided what could be avoided: condemnation—to their own Master they stood or fell, and she left them with Him. She earnestly tried to avoid what can never in honesty be avoided: the exercise of the critical faculty, in other words, judgment. “We seem to be judging when in truth we are only seeking humbly to obey,” she said.

There arose during the early years of the Dohnavur work a fairly strong “Get-Amy-Carmichael-out-of-India” movement among missionaries and Indian Christians. She was a thorn in their sides. Why should she stubbornly refuse to accept the heretofore acceptable—nominal Christianity, for example, or the hiring of workers who hadn’t the “single eye” for God’s glory? Why must she persist in doing the unacceptable—wearing saris, doing work which was beneath her, refusing to pay salaries? The question asked years before by a Japanese, Can you show us the life of your Lord Jesus? was asked again by an Indian. Amy had no other purpose. This was the task assigned: to make the truth visible. When it came to a choice between the good will of the missionaries of South India (and Christians elsewhere) and obedience, there could be no hesitation. She would resolutely follow the Master who knew all about misunderstanding and opprobrium. Even as a little child Amy had known she was set apart. Other children might suck peppermints in church. She was forbidden. Were peppermints wicked? No. There were rules for behavior in the Carmichael family that other families knew nothing about. Never mind the others. “Is that your business, Peter?” said Jesus. “You must follow me.”

Writing years later about the principles on which the Dohnavur Fellowship was founded, she said:

It matters that we should be true to one another, be loyal to what is a family—only a little family in the great Household, but still a family, with family love alive in it and acting as a living bond. To those of us who have lived this life for years it is inconceivable that one to whom this loyalty means nothing should wish to be one of us. It is not at all that we think that ours is the only way of living, but we are sure that it is the way meant for us.

We have one crystal clear reason apart from the blessed happiness of this way of life. It is this: prayer is the core of our day. Take prayer out, and the day would collapse, would be pithless, a straw blown in the wind. But how can you pray—really pray, I mean—with one against whom you have a grudge or whom you have been discussing critically with another? Try it. You will find it cannot be done.4

Theirs not the only way of living? Yet, in the last analysis, was there any other? “It cannot be done.” The attempt to live strictly in obedience to the Word of God taught Amy and her co-workers the meaning of Jesus’ stern words, “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” She expressed something of this lesson, stern though it was, with gentle irony and humor in her poem, “The Calm Community of the Criticized.”

If, though all unawares, and not of ill intent,

Thou steppest one inch outside the beaten track;

If thou in deed or word or preference

Depart from the Accustomed, or ransack

The unexplored, bright treasure-mines of life

And drawing forth their jewels make the House

Religious, as men call it, a glad place—

O then hide, hide thy face.

Or make quick pretence

Of suitable penitence,

For drum and fife

Are out against thee: perish thy mad nous

Or what it was that set thee grubbing where

A decent missionary never should be found.

They’ll chase thee off the ground,

They’ll harry thee,

Proclaim thee singular,

The while the truly sane and sober tar

Thy broken reputation for good sense.

At first, unconscious thou that things are thus—

Being innocent of all intentional wrong—

Thou wilt not know the fervent, general fuss

Pertains to thee at all; but gradually

It breaks on thee that various eyes are bent

Upon thy course, the lightness of thy gains

To scrutinize; and thou wilt see ere long

That certain hands hold firm a piece of chalk

To write thee up upon the wall. Advised

Be thou then, O my friend, in time;

Ponder the manner of thy careful walk;

See that thy very thoughts are close emmewed;

Tune all thy bells to play the usual chime,

Or brace thy spirit to be flayed