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

strictly enforced routine.” After an illuminating twenty minutes the interruption was discovered. An angry man rushed in like a whirlwind, sent the boys off to their lessons, and, “too confounded for speech,” returned Amy’s calm salaam as she departed.

She bought a ticket for the drama, and found that the boy who had invited her into the house was the star of the show—a little queen, “robed in a shimmer of pink and gold jewels, playing a musical instrument, which showed to perfection the delicate sensitive hands. As he played, he turned his little head slowly from side to side and bowed in the approved fashion of beautiful queens.” The crowd, boisterous before, was suddenly hushed, transfixed by the beauty of the child.

When she spoke to her comrades of the plight of the boys, they pointed out the impossibility of her doing anything about it—her hands were already more than full. Boys were more difficult to rear than girls. Boys’ and girls’ work should be kept separate in India. Where were the men they must have to help them? What about a doctor? No, it was unthinkable. Surely God would raise up someone else for the job. She listened politely. She did not settle for that verdict. Unthinkable? Not to God. She prayed and kept on praying, the face of the little queen indelible in memory, for years.

One day she knelt by a rock in the forest. There was a quiet pool beside the rock, on the floor of which lay sodden leaves. It was one of those “figures of the true,” a visible sign of an invisible reality—life out of death. “Broken, battered, sodden leaves—these that were ready to sink out of sight and be dealt with in any way, all choices gone, they were near to becoming life to the forest. ‘Learn to obey, thou dust, learn to meek thyself, thou earth and clay.’” She asked that God would either take away the burden for the little boys, or show her what to do about them.

Forbodings such as we had never known when we began to save the girls oppressed us. We knew more now than we did then of the inwardness of this to which we must set our hand. The fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is. Were we ready for that? Was our reputation ashes to us? This was a curious question that came again and again. What if our hopes fell in ruins about us like a child’s castle of cards?2

The matter of where the needed men would come from was settled finally, in the forest again, this time not by the quiet pool but by a waterfall. Watching the ceaseless cataract pouring down from above she “heard a voice from heaven, the voice of many waters, Can I who do this, not do that? Spiritually, in that hour, the work for boys began.”

Prayer and travail had to go on for a long time to come. She, “dust and ashes,” was learning to “meek” herself. A doctor finally arrived, to Amy’s joy and relief. She lasted only a short time. Health was the reason given for her return home. Dass, a friend from another town, made journeys in search of boys he had heard of. He was foiled again and again. One woman gave Dass her child, only to follow them to the bazaar and reclaim him. Later when he went to see her she said, “Take him, he’s yours,” and pointed to a bundle in the corner. He found the four-year-old, covered with smallpox, and blind. Back he went a few weeks later. There was no trace of him.

Late evening, January 14, 1918. A bandy jingles up to the bungalow in Dohnavur. A tired woman hands out a weary child who smiles and cuddles down on Amy’s shoulder. Someone takes it to the nursery, and in five minutes Mabel Wade rushes back breathless: “It’s a boy!”

They named him Arul. He was “the first fruits of seven years’ travail.’’

Amy swung into action—surveyed a field next to the girls’ compound, “received the pattern” for the buildings, asked for a sign: one hundred pounds as a seal on the new endeavor, told the Family. On the next mail day it came—a legacy of exactly one hundred pounds.

Another boy arrived in June of that year, and by 1926 there were between seventy and eighty. Although Amy was not by nature suspicious, she had had to learn some lessons the hard way. Nevertheless she was duped by some who brought the boys to her. A trusted friend brought several, one of them a handsome Brahman whom he claimed to have “found.” No doubt her eagerness to see the vision in the forest fulfilled caused her to lower her guard.

One prospective donor made it clear that his money would go for evangelistic work, not for buildings. The line between the secular and the sacred, long since obliterated in Amy’s mind, in his was bold and black. “Well,” sighed Amy, “one can’t save and then pitchfork souls into heaven. There are times when I heartily wish we could. And as for buildings, souls (in India, at least) are more or less securely fastened into bodies. Bodies can’t be left to lie about in the open, and as you can’t get the souls out and deal with them separately, you have to take them both together. What then is to be done?”

It was a new mold of man required to train these boys, “so that the type of character evolved may be different from that which for so long has been the grief of every man and woman missionary who thinks deep thoughts.” Where were these men? Amy knew they existed—somewhere. She had seen them. Her father, for instance: hard worker, a man of incorruptible integrity, generosity, zeal for the glory of God. Barclay Buxton. Thomas Walker.

But in India? There was Arul Dasan, faithful and true, though not endowed with the gift of strong leadership. Were there any