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

now? Arulai, a woman who had been learning for years to breathe the same heavenly air Amy breathed, seemed to Amy to be the one on whom God had laid His hand.

In one of his letters Murray called Amy the “skipper.” There was no question of her authority. “Under God there was only one boss and that was Amma,” wrote Hugh Evan-Hopkins, who joined the Fellowship later. “She wouldn’t proceed with any course of action until everyone had agreed, but who dare oppose her? We were awed—perhaps excessively so—-by her wisdom and experience. She was a remarkable woman, alarming to a raw recruit, with a sort of aura about her.”1 To another there was nothing of the sort. He spoke of her “absolute humility. You never felt she was someone superior.”

When Murray decided to stay, Amy asked May Powell, who had been with her for several years before his arrival, whether she preferred medicine or surgery. Surgery, was her answer. “I’m so sorry,” said the skipper, “because Murray will do the surgery.” Case closed.

Then there were the babies. Dr. Powell had cared for them up to this time. Amy decided that would be not hers but Murray’s job from now on.

“When Amma had seen a thing very clearly she expected the rest of us to see it as clearly. It was all wrong,” says Dr. Powell now. “He lived outside the compound—they couldn’t get at him. But I broke Amma’s rule by not going to her. I was all wrong—be sure to put that in!” So I have put it in.

During the next two decades some interesting and capable men joined the Dohnavur Fellowship. Alec Arnot, the first foreign man to join, put in years of solid work in agriculture and building. His contribution seems, however, to have been undervalued, or perhaps he was outshone by his successors. When he left for furlough he was not invited back, even though his wife, Gwen, whom he had acquired in Dohnavur, would be greatly missed as a teacher.

A young Anglican priest from Australia, took what Amy warned him would be “a big step from the cathedral to the missionary scrap heap.” Like other clergy before him, Hugh Evan-Hopkins and Bertie Berdoe, he found himself, ecclesiastically, in an awkward limbo. He was put to live with small boys, teach handcrafts, and train a choir. It was what he bargained for. In one of her earliest letters to him, before he had been accepted, she wrote, “I think of you in all the beauty and dignity of cathedral life, and with opportunities to broadcast and so on, and then I think of you as a buried seed. Is the contrast too tremendous? No, because the called and chosen can by God’s grace be faithful, and to follow the Crucified is all that matters to the true lover and disciple. I magnify your office, I magnify your calling, only it does mean, for it must, death, that life may abound.” She had tried scrupulously to give him an honest preview.

He came. The difficulties were as real as predicted. uShe gave me a thorough scolding because I was not pulling my weight,” he said, “told me my heart was divided between the work I had left behind (I was precentor at St. Paul’s, Melbourne) and this work. We prayed together. She had a very special care for single people. Always thought of others, wanted to know if their experience spoke of the love of the Lord.” After much hesitation he reluctantly returned to Australia.

The necessity of working under women put a severe strain on some of the men who came. One, at least, a man with military experience, did not have to work under women—except, of course, under Amy herself. She appointed Ronald Taylor medical superintendent over the heads of three doctors, Angus Kinnear, Christian Rogan, and Nancy Robbins. Taylor’s authoritarian approach, particularly to the Indians, was a bit overwhelming. Totally unable to conform to the Dohnavur way of working, he could not stay.

I inquired of an Indian who had spent many years in Dohnavur if most of the men found it difficult to work under female authority. “One hundred percent of them,” was his reply. “But the women? Never, in all my wanderings, have I seen thirty or forty women live together in such harmony as I saw in the DF.”

Sex complicates things. It complicated things enormously for the DF. In the early days of the work things were freer for the boys and girls of the DF than for Indians. Mixed bathing was allowed in the Forest, and as late as 1936 boys and girls went together for bird walks with Godfrey Webb-Peploe, starting out as two separate groups, returning home boy and girl hand in hand.

Later, because of her knowledge of the Indian mind rather than because of any Victorian notions, Amy felt that the rules must be tightened. Their Indian neighbors could not bring themselves to believe that men and women, boys and girls, could live and work in the same area and not indulge in sexual relations.

“We would gladly have had boys and girls study together in our school,” Amy wrote in Roots (an unpublished paper giving the principles of the DF and what underlay them), “but though by this time this was beginning to be possible even in this very orthodox part of India (though sometimes with grievous results) such children had parents who had probably arranged their future partners already, or at any rate soon would. Family connections, Caste, Clan, and certain Caste rules decide Indian marriages. We were outside Caste and Clan and had no family connections. It would take too long to explain why and how this affected the question of co-education, and the free life of the West. . . . We had to be careful to give no cause of offence or lead any into temptation in this as in all else.”

One of the bizarre rumors which was circulated in spite of all precautions was that Dr. Robbins,