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

dear friend Dr. Somervell wrote so horrified her she told him she wanted to throw a soup plate at him. A plaster saint? Hardly. She was much more interesting than that.

Today’s mind, preoccupied with “self-image,” would worry about Amy Carmichael’s. She needed help. Her self-portrait: “I am a cross between a potato and a vegetable marrow.”

Chapter 44

Broken by the Waves

By the middle of the 1930s it had become fairly evident that Amy Carmichael was not likely to be healed unless God gave a miracle. She was almost never out of pain, yet she maintained daily touch with the Family, seeing different ones every half hour all day, writing long letters to some, tiny scraps to others (“Welcome home, my child. Lovingest of welcomes. Your Amma”). Everybody got notes on special occasions: birthdays, holidays, return from a journey, Tamil exams. When Dr. Nancy Robbins was left for five days with the entire responsibility of the hospital, Amma wrote promising special prayer. To John Risk on his birthday in 1936 she wrote:

“My own David,” using the name of the Bible character he reminded her of. “Did you think I had forgotten? Not a bit of it. Last night at midnight I longed to write (as I hadn’t had time to do so all day) but if I had, there would have been protestations from my little nurse, so I didn’t and then, alas, I woke too late for an early note.

But He whom thy soul loveth, He has blessed thee already, my John, and His birthday morning blessings are like the dew and like His compassions, ever new, beautiful, heart-reviving.

“This has been a year of battle, but thank God, of victory, and we are nearer the Crowning Day this morning than ever we were before.

“‘And having done all to stand.’ God keep us standing. ‘When I said, “my foot slippeth, Thy Mercy, O Lord, held me up.’ ”

It had indeed been a year of battle. There was never any other kind of year. The Family continued rapidly to increase. One member reported that there was a “crop of very naughty girls” about that time. Some of the older ones were a great disappointment to Amma. She sometimes had them come to her as nurses, which caused raised eyebrows—why should Amma choose such a one for her nurse? Someone who had thought at first that one of them was a poor choice, told herself that she must be “a nice, quiet girl who ‘fit’ Amma.” Later she asked about her. “No,” said Amy, “I saw the weakness in her from the first. I had her with me to strengthen her.” Some responded. Some did not.

The same motive that inspired Amy to choose a girl who was not naturally appealing applied to her choice of a girl who was—she wanted always to encourage and strengthen. “Give all you ve got to helping them.” Eyebrows were raised in either case. “Never mind,” she told one of the teachers. “Never be afraid of appearing to have favorites, provided you are truly seeking to help them for the Lord and not for yourself.”

She sternly warned against “mushy” friendships. They are pernicious anywhere, but on the mission field just deadly. She quoted 1 Samuel 20:42, “We have sworn both of us in the name of the Lord, saying, The Lord be between me and thee.”

Kohila was a girl who had come to Dohnavur when she was four years old. She responded most eagerly to both the love and the discipline of the place, and was trained as a nurse. Vineetha, the accal in charge, needed Kohila’s room for another nurse. Kohila “clung to her own small room as a cat clings to its home, Amy wrote in Kohila: The Shaping of an Indian Nurse.

In a case like this you who are responsible to God for such a soul stand for a moment at the parting of the ways. You may say, “I wish the thing to be done,” and it will be done. There is no travail if you take that way; but it leads nowhere. It never leads to spiritual victory farther on. Or you may put the responsibility for decision upon the one concerned, and then you will travail indeed. But in the end, if your hands be steady until the going down of the sun, eternal gain will be the outcome of that prayer and that travail.

Vineetha said little and prayed much. When she felt the time was ripe she said, “Look, my child, give this room to the Lord Jesus and you will receive hundreds of rooms in heaven.”

“Kohila went to her cherished little room for . . . one last precious minute. Then she went straight to the girl for whom the room was required, to whom she had spoken ungraciously, and she asked her pardon and ‘willingly with joy I give you my room,’ she said.”

In September 1936, Kohila was in the forest. She wrote to her sittie, proposing that she share the new little room she had been given with a younger nurse who needed a helping hand. “It was the dearest thing she had to give—her privacy.” Then one morning she climbed a steep rock to pick flowers for some of her friends. She slipped, fell, and was killed.

Three months before, Amy had reminded one of the DFs of the Scripture, “When I said, ‘My foot slippeth, Thy mercy, O Lord, held me up.’” Amy did not put such items in juxtaposition. The mystery of the sovereign purpose of God she left with Him, never calling attention to seeming incongruities. She declared her certainties, not her questions. She shied away from any statement which might be taken as a complaint or a doubt, or anything which could make her Master look hard. When a little girl named Pungaja had her eye pecked out by a heron, Amma took her on her lap and said, “Darling, you must never ask God why.” She comforted the child and urged