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

Cheerful and helpful and firm. . . .

Languor is not in your heart,

Weakness is not in your word,

Weariness not on your brow.

We are allowed to see a good many of the stones that wounded Amy’s feet, but we hardly hear her say “Ouch!” The power of her passions breathes in every word she writes, but because her aim was always to tell only that part of the truth which in her view mattered, that is, would edify and strengthen, she often sidestepped a description of what today’s reader would find most fascinating. Walker’s death was without question a stunning blow. Even if it had not come in succession with so many other blows, she would have reeled under it. If she succumbed to as much as a few moments of self-pity, she did not permit herself the luxury of wallowing in it. She knew where to turn to regain a firm footing: first to her God, and then to the thought of others—Mrs. Walker, for example, whose loss, Amy told herself, was infinitely greater than her own. The lesson of the weaned child was learned far more quickly than it might have been because she set about at once writing Walker’s biography, a task which would transform her own loss by giving to the world the story of a hidden life.

Although at their first meeting she was impressed with the jetblack hair, the earnest eyes, the wisdom and learning and, most of all, the utter absence of narrow -mindedness, she had decided that she did not like him. He seemed to take with less than proper seriousness her desire to burn out rather than rust out. Could he possibly understand such a motive? Later she knew how perfectly he understood. He understood as no one else in India could understand.

And Amy loved him. To read the biography is to know that she loved him. Her love had never been half-hearted for anyone. She was all that a sister could be for her own brothers and sisters, devoted to each. But Walker was what she had not had at home, an older brother, and far more. She was brilliant, personable, charming—more so, it is said, than his wife. The scenario could have been explosive if all three had not been soldiers under orders. Walker loved his wife. Amy loved and respected her, worked closely with her, although it was not easy for her to live with a couple so obviously in love.

By the time World War I began Amy had finished writing the biography, Walker of Tinnevelly. She held it back from publication until 1916, feeling that people would not want to read anything other than war news.

With the war came increased anxiety for the children. The thought of their future had always been of paramount concern. “What are you going to do with them all in the future?” people had repeatedly asked, sometimes with a tone which implied she had not given the matter a thought. ‘She lives in a Utopia,” said one. “I pity her, I pity her with all my heart when I think of all that is before her when her children grow up!”

“Neither of these sanguine sympathizers nor one out of a hundred questioners has any idea of how their doubts appeal to the anxious part of us, for—-

Far in the future Lieth a fear,

Across the Will of Nature

Like a long, low mist of grey,

Gathering to fall in a dreary rain,

Thus doth thy heart within thee complain;

And even now thou art afraid, for round thy dwelling

The flying winds are ever telling

Of the fear that lieth grey,

Like a gloom of brooding mist upon the way.

But the Lord is always kind,

Be not blind,

Be not blind

To the shining of His face,

To the comforts of His grace.

Hath He ever failed thee yet?

Never, never: wherefor fret? . . .”1

There was not only the question about what the children were to do when they grew up but also the question of how their thousands of needs (there were nine nurseries now) were to be met in the process. The temptation to fear became very strong in the early years, “a gloom of brooding mist upon the way,” and Amy was “allowed to taste of the cup which would be poured out for me if the money did not come.” She recalled Allan Gardiner, missionary to South America, who was allowed to starve to death. As usual, her hyperactive imagination went to work on that one. “Suppose the children die and we all (of course) die with them, and the Christian world cries shame on the one responsible, what will it matter, after all? The children will be in heaven, and is that not better than the temple?” She took her questions as usual to the faithful Master who pointed her to the story of the feeding of the five thousand.

“And, as I believed, the promise was given to me then that there should be baskets over and above our daily supplies, and that, just as those men and women and their children were free to use the pieces of the loaves over from that great meal if they needed them before they reached home, so we should be free to use ours, should need arise before we too reached Home, we and our children.”

More money than was needed then began to come in, so that by the time the British pound fell and the price of rice rose during the war (sending the cost of bringing a child from the nearest station to fifteen times its former cost), the “baskets” were ready. “Standing on sure ground we can affirm just this: we have never lacked any good thing; and during the years of War, people in the towns and villages began to say, ‘God is there,’ for they could not account for what they saw except by saying that.”

Life in Dohnavur was very like that of a cloister in many ways, and it is hard to see how it could have been otherwise,