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

a shining, perhaps, of the Lord’s face. She could not explain it, but it was worth all the subsequent hours which were “emptied of all conscious illumination.”

What she did not know was that by this time Muttammal had disappeared from Dohnavur. No one knew where she had gone. Weeks of silence and uncertainty passed, broken only by an anonymous postcard with the words of 2 Chronicles 16:9,3 suggesting that Muttammal was safe. It was months before she learned the story. A guest, Mabel Beath, to whom Amy had confided, had dressed the child as a Muslim boy and sent her out of the compound by a certain gate. Two Indians met her with a bandy and by circuitous means she was taken to Colombo, Ceylon.

For Amy, of course, the situation could be far more serious than heretofore. Prison looked like a very real possibility. Other children might be endangered. But she dung in faith to the promises of God and went for her usual holiday to the hills. There she met an old friend whom she asked for help. He found the child in Ceylon, escorted her to Penang, Singapore, and Hong Kong, then six hundred miles up the West River to the home of missionaries. For six months they did not hear of her whereabouts. In October came the letter saying she was safe.

Four years later Amy had another of her dreams. She saw Muttammal being married to one of the young men of Dohnavur. She told him of the dream; they consulted Arulai, by then a trusted fellow-worker, who said she had been praying about this very thing for a year. For the man there was nothing unusual about an arranged marriage. It was the custom. So in due time letters were written, the two were engaged, married in Colombo (according to every detail of Amy’s dream), and returned to Dohnavur six years after Muttammal’s nighttime escape.

1. Amy Carmichael, Lotus Buds, p. 307.

2. Gold Cord, p. 67.

3. “The eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to show himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward him.”

Chapter 26

Love Is Not a Sentiment

Let those parents that desire Holy Children learn to make them possessors of Heaven and Earth betimes,” wrote Traherne, “to remove silly objects from before them, to magnify nothing but what is great indeed, and to talk of God to them, and of His works and ways before they can either speak or go.”

Holy Children. That describes what Amy Carmichael as mother desired from the very beginning of the children’s work. Many of those children are old women now, living quietly in the red brick bungalows of Dohnavur after years of self-giving. “Be the first,” their Amma had told them, “wherever there is a sacrifice to be made, a self-denial to be practiced, or an impetus to be given.” It was no empty pedantry. Her own life made the truth visible to her children. The word became flesh and lived with them.

“When we were very small we were on the wings of her love,” said one, but that love had little of sentimentality in it. Nearly all her children speak of her love, but many mention their fear of her as well. She was strict. “No work that is set on following the Crucified escapes the Cross,” she wrote in Kohila, the story of the shaping of an Indian nurse.1 “It would not wish to do so. Sooner or later, if those who must give account to God do not weaken on some point of loyalty to Truth, they will find themselves bearing the Reproach of Christ.” Always in her consciousness was the solemn charge that was hers as one accountable to God for these little ones. It were better that a millstone be hung round her neck than for her to cause one of them to stumble.

Amy with Lullitha, one of her “Lotus Buds.”

The Book of Proverbs speaks of the need of the rod in the training of children. The parent who does not use it hates the child. Love, therefore, requires self-discipline, self-denial, and courage. It took all of those for Amy to use a cane or a leather strap on a child’s wrists. Like her own mother, she expected the child to hold out her arm without flinching. Often the spanking was followed by a kiss and a piece of candy. Amy took the responsibility of administering these punishments herself rather than asking it of the accals (older sisters) or sitties (mother’s younger sisters, the name used for European workers). She, after all, was the mother. If a sittie or accal felt that a caning was called for, she would send the child to Amma with a note. Those notes, it is reported, did not always reach their destination. At least one child arrived with a bright smile and the candid admission that sittie had sent her with a note. But where was the note? “I swallowed it!” was the answer.

Other punishments were more imaginative. A child who lied might have quinine put on her tongue or a sign that said LIE hung round her neck for half a day. One little girl who lied habitually had her mouth inked and was kept out of school for a day or so. After the second or third time she was taken to Amma’s room. “I was shaking. She sent me to the bathroom for the strap, took me on her lap in front of a mirror, and read to me from Isaiah 53—‘He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities. . . . All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.’ Then she beat her own arm instead of mine and explained salvation to me. Without understanding I said ‘Yes, Amma,’ but I had not changed a whit. When