"Chance to Die" - Elisabeth Elliot. The biography of Amy Carmichael

I just finished reading Elisabeth Elliot's biography of Amy Carmichael. I love to read the faith stories of people who lived before the 21st century; people who lived in another time and context where today's christian culture hasn't been mixed into their faith. Not that today's christian culture is bad, but there are probably contextual influences that shape our ideas of God and inform the way we live out our christianity ... influencing us in ways that we aren't even aware of since we are living in it. So I love to read about people who lived before all this and in another time. Most of all, I love to read about people who ran their race well until the very end of their lives, people who died as servants of Christ without any major moral or faith failures.

So Amy Carmichael it was. She was a girl from Northern Ireland who felt called to be a missionary in the late 1800's. She moved to Japan, then India preaching the gospel until one day a little orphan girl came to her house to live. Soon after, a few girls were rescued from prostitution and Amy and her colleagues looked after the children in between evangelising. However, God soon began to shift her focus as hundreds of little girls rescued from prostitution began to fill the orphanage, and Amy began a new ministry. She was to become 'mother' to at one stage, over 900 little girls. Invest in the book, you will learn alot!!

Here are some highlighted quotes:

One day as the two were driving a gig along a country road they came upon a stone breaker. Pulling up the old horse, Charlie, the D.O.M. turned to Amy, "Which blow breaks the stone?" he asked. Then, pointing with his whip he said, "Thee must never say, thee must never even let thyself thin, 'I won that soul for Christ.' It is the first blow and the last, and ever one in between."

It was Charlie who told her of the three inscriptions over the doors of the Milan Cathedral. One, with a carving of roses, says "All that pleases is but for a moment"; another, with a carving of a cross, says, "All that grieves is but for a moment"; and over the great central door are the only words, "Nothing is important but that which is eternal."

From Mrs Carmichael to Amy:

He who hath lead

All through the wilderness,

He who hath fed will surely feed...

He who hath heard thy cry

Will never close His ear,

He who hath marked thy faintest sigh

Will not forget thy tear.

He loveth always, faileth never,

So rest on Him today - forever. 

The great passion of Amy Carmichael's life was uttermost love, which meant uttermost obedience. The prater of Jeremy Taylor was always hers: Lord, do Thou turn me all into love, and all my love into obedience, and let my obedience be without interruption. 

A few lines from On the Threshold of Central Africa, by M. Collard, spoke for Amy: "If those friends who blame ... could see what we see, and feel what we feel, they would be the first to wonder that those redeemed by Christ should be so backward in devotion, and know so little of the spirit of self-sacrifice. They would be ashsamed of the hesitations that hinder us. But we must remember that it was not by interceding for the world in glory that Jesus saved it. He gave Himself. Our prayers for the evangelisation of the world are but a bitter irony so long as we only give of our superfluity and draw back before the sacrifices of ourselves."

At this time someone sent Pere Didon's Spiritual Letters, a book which was not mere paper and ink to Amy "but force - wind and fire and dew." 

"The roads are rugged" he wrote, "the precices are steep, there may be a feeling of dizziness on the heights, gusts of wind, peals of thunder, nights of awful gloom - fear them not. These are also the joys of the sunlight, flowers such as are not in the plain, the purest of air, restful nooks; and the stars smile thence like the eyes of God."

"Let those parents that desire Holy Children learn to make them possessors of Heaven and Earth betimes." wrote Traherne, "to remove silly objects from before them, to magnify nothing but what is great indeed, and to talk of God to them, and of His works and ways before they can either speak or go."
Holy Children. That describes what Amy Carmichael as mother desired from the very beginning of the children's work.

[When several of the children in the orphanage died]

Kind people, wanting to console, made the usual observation: 'It is very hard to see how this can be for the best.'

"We are not asked to see,' said Amy. "Why need we when we know?' We know--not the answer to the inevitable Why, but the incontestable fact that it is for the best. "It is an irreparable loss, but is it faith at all if it is 'hard to trust' when things are entirely bewildering?"

Others, with a sigh and a shake of the head, observed that it is difficult for us human beings to escape bitterness, even dumb rage, when such things happen.

'It is indeed not only difficult, it is impossible,' Amy wrote. "There is only one way of victory over the bitterness and rage that come naturally to us---to will what God wills brings peace." 

The honest heart cannot be content with platitudes. "An enemy hath done this" is a word that reaches far and touches more than tares. If an enemy has done it, how can it be called the will of God? We do not know the answer to that question now. But we have sidelights upon it, such as the vision in Revelation: They overcame him by the Blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony (victory through apparent defeat) ...And as we rest our hearts upon what we know *the certainty of the ultimate triumph of good) leaving what we do not know to the Love that has led us all our life long, the peace of God enters into us and abides."

A prayer by Amy Carmichael:

And shall I pray Thee change Thy will, my Father

Until it be according to mine?

But, no, Lord, no, that never shall be, rather

I pray Thee blend my human will with Thine.

I pray Thee hush the hurrying, eager longing,

I pray Thee soothe the pangs of keen desire-

See in my quiet places, wishes thronging -

Forbid them, Lord, purge, though it be with fire.

And work in me to will and do Thy pleasure

Let all within me, peaceful, reconciled,

Tarry content my Well-Beloved's leisure,

At last, at last, even as a weaned child.  

Poems by Amy Carmichael:

Like a long, low mist of grey,

Gath'ring 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?

Thou art the Lord who slept upon the pillow

Thou art the Lord who soothed the furious sea,

What matter beating wind and tossing billow

If we are in the boat with Thee?

Hold us in the quiet through the age-long minute

While Thou art silent and the wind is shrill:
Can the boat sink while Thou, dear Lord, art in it?

Can the heart faint that waiteth on Thy will?

To a new recruit who tempted to impatience at the long period of preparation needed before going to India, Amy wrote to her:

"It is worth anything to be able for the more delicate, difficult things of life and warfare. So, darling, we shall think of these two or three years as given to forging the blade for what only a blade of that temper can do."

 For Amy, truth, loyalty and honour were put first. " 'Truth once given form becomes imperishable', but let the edges of truth be blurred, adn that pure form is very difficult to recover."

"The training of a missionary should begin in the nursery; school should continue it; home should nourish it. All influences should be bent one way. That training should not be perplexed by a mixture of thoughtd, but expressed in a single line of conduct, clearly recognised for what it is. In other words, till the life of a child has had time to root, it should not be exposed to various winds (confused or conflicting examples and ideals, different ways of making t's). After it has rooted, let the winds blow as they will. Then they will only cause the roots to take a firmer grip."

Amy quoted the Dean Church on manliness:
"Manliness is not mere courage, it is the quality of soul which frankly accepts all conditions in human life, and makes it a point of honor not to be dismayed or wearied by them". 

On her singleness:
"There is a secret discipline appointed for every man and woman whose life is lived for others. No one escapes that discipline, nor would wish to escape it; nor can any shelter another from it. And just as we have seen the bud of a flower close round the treasure within, folding its secret up, petal by petal, so we have seen the soul that is chosen to serve, fold round its secret and hold it fast and cover it from the eyes of man. The petals of the soul are silence."

Amy's defenese to criticism that her abstinance was abnormal:
Ponder a large, heavy metal aeroplane made to fly like a bird. What makes it possible? The presence of a Power within which enables it to fly "by its speed and pressure against the air" So with us. "It is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure."

"The devil does not care about how many hospitals we build, any more than he cares how many schools and colleges we put up, if only he can pull our ideals down, and sidetrack us on to anything of any sort except the living of holy, humble lives, and the bringing of men, women and children to know our Lord Jesus Christ not only as Savior but as Sovereign Lord."

In her letter to a new recruit:

"We follow a stripped and crucified Savior. Those words go very deep. They touch everything - motives, purposes, decisions, everything. Let them be with you as you prepare your spirit for the new life. Dear, you are coming to a battlefield. You cannot spend too much time with Him alone. The keys of the powers of te world to come are not earned by careless fingers. So few are willing to pay the price of the knowledge of God. They play through life, even christian life, even missionary life."

In her letter to a girl who desperately wanted to work with Amy in the orphanage, but was required by her father to wait 3 years before she could come. 

"Home, with all its prohibitions and opportunities to die daily - offer training far greater than any Bible school curriculum".

"Every work undertaken in obedienced to a divine command, whether the work be that form of conflict with the powers of darkness that we call prayer, or whether it be the action that follows, leads sooner or later to a new demand on personal devotion to our Lord Jesus Christ."

Murray Webb-Peploe expressed the purpose of the hospital: "a place where people may come, not to be preached at, dosed, and dealt with as cases, but to feel at home, to watch, to thaw, to allow those who take their names, and wash their bandages, and dress their wounds, to share with them what the Lord Jesus Christ has done and can do for them."