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

I was thirty-three I was rude to one of the workers and was sent to my room without food to think. When I came out the worker was there. I kissed his hand, he kissed my forehead. That was heaven to me.”

When two little girls quarreled, Amy tied their pigtails together so that they might be obliged to walk in harmony. A child of seven who could not stop biting her nails went to Amy with flowers one day. “Darling, I want to talk to you,” she said, and took the child’s hands. “You have beautiful fingers. What have you been doing to them? Aren’t these the Lord’s hands?” The child was terrified. “Don’t be afraid,” said Amy, and kissed the hands. “Promise me and the Lord Jesus you will stop. Then come and see me again next week.” It worked. The child kept her promise.

“I am reminded of how she suffered for her dear children in pointing out Nature as the Second Bible,” wrote one of them. “I remember her rushing out of her house when she heard that someone was killing a beetle with a stone. She got hold of my tiny hand and hit me with the same stone, stating that the beetle had all freedom to live unless it came inside the house. I was only ten then, so I remember crying, but the lesson learnt was forever to be kind to any creature.”

Amy’s partiality to certain children could not be disguised. Of a five-year-old who died she wrote, “Lulla was perhaps the only child we had who would quite have satisfied the most critical taste. There was a delicacy of feature and c reaminess of coloring which is rare in southern India, and her sweetness of disposition combined with a bright intelligence added something which made her peculiarly precious to us all.” The most critical taste, of course, meant the most critical European taste. Indians with Aryan blood, of fair skin and silky hair, were, naturally enough, most appealing to the European in Amy, as indeed to the upper-caste Indian. The black Dravidians of the south find less place in the photographs she included in her books, though this may have been the photographer’s choice.

“Because I was dark I was always put at the back,” said one. She loved the fair ones. I was caned. Tara, who was fair, was only put in the corner. When years later I asked Amma why, her answer was, ‘You needed the cane. Tara needed the corner.’” To another who taxed her with favoritism she said, “Oh darling—I did not mean it!” and it was forgotten.

“Chellalu and Seela were clever and mischievous,” said another of the older women. “Amma liked them for that. But I was a crybaby. I was dull and did not like lessons. I liked hard work. Even now I like it. 1 had no troubles with Amma. I always did things properly. But she did not love me much. She did not want a sulky child in front of guests. When I was ten years old I went to work in the nursery as a tungachie, a younger sister. Amma did get angry if she found a baby wet. ‘But I have thirteen babies under eighteen months to care for!’ I said. Oh, she was a dear, loving person.”

Amy admitted that they were sometimes so shorthanded that the children who became “little helping nurses” were pressed into service before they were really old enough. But they learned “all manner of useful things,” their devotion to the babies was remarkably constant, considering their immaturity, and they were “trained to look upon it as the most honorable as well as the happiest work.”

When a child came to Dohnavur the date was recorded and celebrated yearly as her Coming Day, since exact birth dates were hard to determine. On that day, in the years before the size of the Family made it impossible, the child was allowed to go early in the morning to Amy’s room and have chota with her in bed. Each child received a tiny piece of scented soap and a card as Coming Day presents, and then there was the wonderful gift cupboard from which she could select something else. Amy would talk to her of what she had been saved from—“a wicked, wicked place”—and of the story of how she came to Dohnavur. One baby, Piratha, arrived while a group were actually on their knees in Amy’s room, praying for the salvation of babies.

Once Amy took a girl to the temple in order to show her what she had been saved from. The lesson was lost on the child. She saw how happy the temple girls were, what beautiful jewels they wore. But years later a temple woman who came as a patient to the Dohnavur hospital described to her the real life. “I was a rebel before,” she said, “but I was grateful after that.”

Tarahai remembers the earnestness with which Amy reminded them, year after year, of the meaning of the name she had given them. “Amma took hold of my hand and said, ‘I gave you your name Star that you might be a shining star for the Lord Jesus.’” Karima meant “Singing Bird,” Dayala “Grace.”

As the children grew up she spoke of her hopes for them. Would they be willing to do what others had done for them—care for babies, wash bottles and diapers, lay down their lives in the nurseries? “I pray that you will be a warrior, and look after children,” she said to Dayala. Amy was quick to see other potentialities. “She was a prophet” was the testimony of several. She encouraged some to be hospital nurses, teachers, bookkeepers, and evangelists. If, as often happened, a girl’s ambitions were quite other than what Amy envisioned for her, the girl would be reminded of the “easy yoke” Christ offers, “but if we make our own yoke we shall be miserable.”

“Amma wanted me to nurse babies,” said one whose