After some hours of which Amy said only that they were solemn, the two went to the house. Stretched on the floor, fastened crosswise on two beams, bound and strapped hand and foot, his body covered with burns and wounds, lay the man. Little cones of powdered medicine had been set on his skin and lighted. They burned slowly, with a red glow. Nothing had so far daunted the fox spirits, but Amy called to mind that the power of God had conquered a demon whose name was Legion. She told the crowd in the room that her mighty Lord Jesus could cast out the six spirits. At the name of Christ a fearful paroxysm took hold of the man, hellish power was loosed, and blasphemies which even she could recognize as blasphemies poured from the man’s mouth. He struggled, was forcibly held down, the women knelt and prayed, the struggle increased. Satan seemed to be mocking them. “Can you think how I felt then?” Amy wrote. “The Lord’s name dishonored among the heathen, and I had done it! Far, far better never to have come!” But she heard the Shepherd answer: My sheep hear My voice and I know them and they follow Me. All power is given unto Me. These signs shall follow them that believe: in My name shall they cast out devils. Fear thou not for I am with thee.2
Amy assured the wife that God would answer, and the two went home. An hour later a message came—the foxes had gone, the cords were off, the man was himself again. Next morning he asked to see Amy and Misaki San. Unrecognizable except for the burns, he offered them a spray of scarlet pomegranate blossom and sugared ice water. He and his wife gladly knelt with the women as they prayed, joining in with “Hai! Hai!” (yes, yes).
Amy’s letters to the Keswick magazine, The Life of Faith, are full of stories of prayer answered. One tells of a man and a boy who often discussed the Christians claim that God answers prayer. No, it could not be. But one day the boy was in charge of delivering the cakes to a wedding. He carried them very carefully, but as he stepped from a sampan a fear crossed his mind something would happen to the delicate little cakes. A few minutes later he stumbled and dropped them. There was no time to go back for more, no time even to open the fragile boxes. What should he do? He thought of the Christians’ God, and there on the road prayed his first prayer, “Please let none of the cakes be broken.” It was not until the marriage ceremony was over that the guests were given their boxes of pink and white fan-shaped cakes. Not one was so much as cracked. Back went the boy to his friend. “Now I know that God hears prayer, for God heard me.”
One day Amy gave a New Testament to a student who took it and said, “It will be a seed.” Seeds need to be watered. Prayer was that water, and Amy prayed. On the other side of the world another student, reading a letter from Amy asking for prayer for the Japanese student, “put in five solid minutes’ prayer.” He was Paget Wilkes, an Oxford undergraduate then, who went to Japan, worked in Matsuye, and led to Christ that student for whom he had prayed.
An insight into Amy Carmichael’s understanding of the nature of prayer is given us in her story of what happened at Hirosi. This was a large Buddhist village where only eight or nine Christians shone “like stars in the night.” Amy planned to visit the village, but wanted to prepare herself by praying along the lines of whatever God intended to do there. If she could be sure of that, she could pray with faith. Years later she discovered that Julian of Norwich had held a similar view of prayer: “I am the Ground of thy beseeching: first it is My will that thou have it; and after, I make thee to will it; and after, I make thee to beseech it and thou beseechest it. How should it then be that thou shouldst not have thy beseeching?” As she prayed, Amy felt “pressed in spirit” to ask for a soul, one soul. Next day she went to Hirosi with Misaki San, and a young silk weaver crossed the line”—became a Christian—that evening. A month later they went again. It was two souls she prayed for this time. The silk weaver brought a friend who “found peace,” and an old woman also turned to the Lord. Two weeks passed. Again they went, again they asked God what He wanted to do, and the answer was that four souls were to cross the line. By this time other missionaries in Matsuye had joined in prayer. One of the men felt it was a bit much to ask for four souls, but agreed to ask for two. Things looked anything but encouraging when the women arrived. The Hirosi Christians balked at asking for four. Nobody in town seemed in the least interested. The devil fired his usual darts of doubt: “You can’t expect conversions every time. It’s quite presumptuous. Fancy going back to Matsuye empty-handed! etc.”
Matters were enormously complicated by Amy’s having dropped what she thought an unarguable suggestion, that new converts should burn their idols. Burn their idols? Impossible to let it be known that Christians must do this—it would turn back all inquirers. Amy was adamant, facing what she termed “the Calvary side of the work, a thing to be lived through alone with Calvary’s Christ.” They prayer-meetinged her, asking the Lord to open her eyes, show her the foolishness of transgressing Japanese custom. Then they besought her not to mention idols again. But truth was dearer than success. “I could not buy a soul at the cost of sacrificing truth. The fact that many might and probably would be turned back could not be a proof that this course was wrong, because in John 6:66 we read ‘From that time [speaking of the “hard saying”] many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him.’ The servant is not greater than his Lord.” In the meeting that afternoon the people gazed and smiled and felt nothing. It seemed a prison of mocking spirits. Amy was about to close when a woman said, “I want to believe.” Then her son came and knelt. On the way back from the meeting Amy stopped at the home of Christians who had a friend waiting to ask her the way of salvation. That friend was number three. Where was number four? “Why,” said a man, “It must be my wife. She wants to be a Jesus-person, but she is away at her own village.” She came back early the next morning and confessed before her relatives her desire to be a Christian.
For weeks afterwards Amy felt an irresistible divine pressure to ask and receive according to 1 John 5:14, 15: “This is the confidence that we have in him, that, if we ask anything according to his will, he heareth us: And if we know that he hear us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of him.” The petition this time? Eight souls from Hirosi. Again there was resistance from the Christians there. To ask for something they did not receive would be “a very bad happening.” Amy had no doubt God wanted to give the eight, and offered to stay longer to give Him time. No, they could not possibly arrange more meetings. So Amy, not about to capitulate, read prayer promises. The dear old undershepherd, a man of “perfectly Gladstonian ambiguity and circumlocution,” had locked horns with Amy over every issue that arose, his whole soul protesting against her categorical imperatives. This time he saw that protest would be futile. Slowly he rose, slowly spoke, “You are a Jesus-walking one; if His voice speaks to you, though it speaks not to us, we will believe.” Their trust, greater perhaps in Amy than in God, was rewarded. In His mercy (He knows the measure of faith He has given to each), eight more “stars” now shone in Hirosi. Later in India, bearing very great responsibilities for decision making, Amy remembered the undershepherd’s words and was strengthened in her resolve when Indian fellow-workers questioned her judgment.
And what about the next visit? Sixteen? No. No number at all was “laid on” Amy’s heart. They went to Hirosi, they had the usual meetings, they prayed together with all the Christians there, some came to Jesus, but Amy did not know how many. “We parted in a sort of singing silence.”
When she wrote the Hirosi story for her “children” she acknowledged, in a veiled way, that she had suffered pain because of those Christians. She did not elaborate. “I do not think that is a thing to talk about.”
Fourteen years later Barclay Buxton’s nephew joined him in Matsuye. He often visited Hirosi, and found that the converts from Amy’s time were still firmly rooted in faith.
Utter holiness, crystal pure, was Amy Carmichael’s desire. She did not see how any true Christian could have a lesser. “If we are not clean when we bear the vessels of the Lord,�
�� she wrote in May of 1894, we may profane His holy name in the things which we hallow. Our very service a defiling thing! . . . The need of Japan: prophets of her own who can and will dare, Elijah-like, to stand alone for God, speaking His word faithfully, be that Word like as a fire, like a hammer, marking out, for lifelong loneliness, the man who is ‘the Voice.’”
She herself set the example and paid the price, sometimes in conflict with fellow-believers both European and Japanese. The matter of using pictures of Christ, a common practice among missionaries, was unthinkable to Amy. No one, she felt, had a right to presume to imagine God the Son. Who could possibly separate manhood from Godhead? She shrank in dread from such holy ground, and reminded those who disagreed that the apostles had avoided all appeal to the senses, trusting in the power of the Word alone. The Church, she said, resorted to pictures only when her power had gone.
The merest suggestion of anyone’s choosing missionary work because it was noble and grand, or a mission field because it was pleasant, horrified her. How could people at home write of a “delightful missionary meeting? Had they absorbed nothing of needs unmet, cries unheeded, griefs uncomforted? Did they attend for nothing but the tea and cake, the conversation, the chance to examine exotic curios, and then tell themselves that they were doing all that could be expected of them? “Missionary work is a grain of sand, the work untouched is a pyramid. . . . Face it. Look and listen, alone with God. Then go, let go, help go. But never, never, never think that anything short of this is being ‘interested in missions.’ Never, until this point is reached and passed, delude yourself into believing that you care at all.” Her own experience at Keswick was anything but “delightful.” The tent, thronged and still. Wave after wave of silent prayer, rising solemnly to God. Brief, burning “soldier-words” from soldier-souls. Silent battles raging within. A long hush. A cry as of pain, unavoidable, demanding an answer. She had given her answer, and on countless occasions in the field had had to reexamine her motives. A young missionary once said to her, I would go home tomorrow if I could. It is all a miserable disappointment, and I thought it would be so nice.” She besought her friends, girl friends, and cousins at home to consider the cry and the call, to welcome all tests of whatever sort before they crossed the seas, and to learn to die to self in any shape or form. Experience had quickly taught her that she could not survive the storms without the anchor of the constraining love of Christ and what she called the Rock-consciousness” of the promise given her, He goeth before.
1. Mark 9:18 (Phillips).
2. John 10:27; Matthew 28:18; Mark 16:17; Isaiah 41:10.
Chapter 11
Japanese Head
The first missionary, a tough man named Paul, found that his apostolic duties entailed some stormy bufferings. He was hard pressed, bewildered, hunted, struck down; he was starved, imprisoned, beaten, shipwrecked; he was afflicted with something that needled his flesh. During Amy Carmichael’s first fourteen months as a missionary she was “buffeted” in other ways. She was hard pressed, sometimes bewildered, and finally struck down. Her experiences caused her to meditate on the great vulnerability of the physical body, the same body in which the Life of Christ is mysteriously revealed.
Writing from Imaichi, a town to which she had gone because the only missionary had had to take sick leave and Amy could not think of leaving it alone, she quoted the hard-pressed apostle, “We glory in our weakness that the power of Christ may rest upon us.”1 The text was followed by an ellipsis, then:
Back again, and now on reading over the last few lines they seem perfectly prophetical! On Sunday I collapsed. . . . A touch of fever, then a fainting fit. . . . a terrible comedown, for I always declared nothing could make me faint. All such weakminded nonsense I quite scorned. The only time I ever lost consciousness for a moment was through the agony of sympathy experienced for Alfred [her brother] when he gashed himself and had to get sewn up But this time, over I went and before I came back all the humiliating attentions attendant upon such departures had been showered upon me and they left me very wet.
She had an explanation, albeit a feeble one. She had lost her umbrella overboard. While sun helmets were not worn by missionaries in Japan, it was taken for granted that European heads could not tolerate sunshine. Umbrellas were a must.
It was a hot day. When she got to the hotel a hot bath, as always, was waiting. It was the last straw. There had been mention in letters to her mother of divers afflictions. In January when the eight converts were given in Hirosi she wrote that she could hardly think because of acute neuralgia. In May she told her mother she might be going to China for a “change of thought,” as the climate of Japan was “dreadful upon brains and eyes.” A Keswick letter written early in June assured everyone that she was feeling fit again, having allowed herself the luxuries of butter on her bread and milk in her tea. These dainties were supposed to do what the unidentified black liquids and sea-slugs did not seem to be doing—put muscle on her. So her troubles were due to more than the loss of an umbrella.
When she came to after the fainting fit she found herself “environed by wet towels, doleful faces, and a general sense of blurs.” Then she remembered she was expected at a meeting. No “weak-minded nonsense” must interfere with that. The power of Christ, while it did not exempt her from a momentary lapse, would enable her to carry on. She banked everything on the promise of Isaiah 40:31, “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength . . . they shall walk, and not faint,” took herself by the scruff of the neck, marched herself to the meeting, and spoke. It was a late meeting, followed by a long talk with a woman who came to Christ. There was no doubt in Amy’s mind it was worth it. Later she acknowledged that she had given Isaiah’s word the meaning she wanted it to have, not a good thing to do.
“Japanese head” was the doctor’s diagnosis. No one seemed to be very clear as to exactly what sort of head this was, but it was extremely painful, foreigners were susceptible to it, Amy had succumbed, and was ordered to take a long rest. This was a terrible interruption of her plans, but the threat of telltale letters to her loved ones persuaded her to submit. “I am getting meek in my old age, you see.”
Before she left she had the thrill of attending the baptism of the first believers in Hirosi. Afterwards the church group was photographed, along with Amy and her co-workers. “I wish it were possible to keep from this mode of embalmment,” she wrote, “but one can’t without hurting kind feelings and making a fuss.” For the rest of her life she resisted being photographed, giving in only rarely under pressure from people she loved. She could not understand why anyone should wish to be preserved as he is when Christians have the sublime hope of being some day like Christ.
Misaki San and Amy .
Saying good-bye was agony. The Japanese were kindness personified, and of course expected her to return within six weeks or so, but how would it look to them? Would they know she couldn’t help having to leave, or might they take her for another of the many quitters? “You are going to China for your weakness, one of them wrote. “Please come back.” Something told her that she might not be back as soon as they expected.
On board ship for Shanghai she found a note from her beloved Misaki San: “I know you will miss me, but Christ is sitting by you now, so please talk with Him to forget me.” Sleep was hard to come by in the crowded and smoke-filled hold, so she lay on her plaid on deck amid the noise and funnel dust. For the second leg of the journey she succumbed to what, on principle, she had set herself firmly against—she took first class. “I don’t believe the Lord Jesus or His disciples would go in for it. It does not seem to me honoring to our Master, this missionary habit of going by the easier rather than the harder way, when He chose the harder. It is as if we put ourselves a little above Him.” First class on such a steamer might be compared to third class on a British ship, though a bit less comfortable, and she couldn’t help being thankful for cleanliness, privacy, quiet, and, in place of the cabin boys on the coastal steamer, a woma
n “who wore clothes!!” Amy suffered the usual woes of storms and seasickness, heat and headaches. Nevertheless she found some sailors she could speak to of Christ. “Well, miss,” one of them said, “we thought the sea’d beat you this time.” She had asked for strength, and it came, amid the howling and clashing, roar and rush, but it gave out at the end of her talk and she had to be helped back to her cabin. She learned next day that several had trusted Him who is “mighty to save” and had signed a pledge to abstain from alcohol.
By July 10 she was comfortably ensconced in a room of the China Inland Mission in Shanghai. She made it her own by hanging family photos and the mottoes she cherished: FAITH IS THE VICTORY, CHRIST IS CONQUEROR, NOT I BUT CHRIST, JUST FOR TODAY, and a single embroidered word, RABBONI, Mary’s word when she saw the risen Christ: My Master! On the table lay a calendar with the words, “The Lord thinketh upon me.” She reminded her correspondents of the million a month dying without Christ in China, and the eighty thousand dead of plague in Hong Kong in the previous few weeks.
A Chance to Die Page 8