A Chance to Die

by Elisabeth Elliot

  Treasure was a girl apparently divinely prepared for the Seed of the Word. It fell into her heart as into “good ground,” sprang up, was tended and watered and brought forth fruit. Then suddenly she refused even to look at Amy or the others. An awful change had come over her in a night, and she was beyond their reach. Prayers, embraces, Scripture reading, all the love she had received like a famished soul she now rejected, coldly, finally. There were only two possible explanations, Amy believed: She had been poisoned (mind-destroying drugs were well-known there) or she had sinned in such a way as to shut herself away from God.

  Amy was like the sower in the Psalms: She went forth weeping, bearing precious seed. She prayed and she begged her friends at home to pray, pray, pray. “Oh, will you pray? Stop now and pray, lest desire turn to feeling and feeling evaporate.”

  Often she ministered to the professing Christians. But, they said, the kind of Christianity she presented would cost too much. To be consistent one must not quarrel, and they loved a good fight. “We know what it means now, and it is very inconvenient, said one, and another said, “If I am to be converted I shall have to forgive her, and I can’t do that at present—so—!”

  In addition to the crushing pressure of such work, she faced again the agony which she thought had been laid to rest: The D.O.M. asked her to come back to him. He quoted Paul s poignant words to Timothy, “Do thy diligence to come to me before winter,”1 and sent money for her passage. There was no doubt in his heart that his child would come. “It was agonia (I use the word with care) not to fly to him. And yet I could not. Something held me fast.” At last Wilson wrote to her, “The Master’s word was brought to me this morning early: ‘He that loveth son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me,’ ‘Bind the sacrifice with cords even unto the horns of the altar.’ No drawing back. May it be so in the strength He gives. It is well to have some gift of value to present to Him who gave His all for our redemption. Praise Him.”

  “From that day on till the end,” Amy told her children, “there was no drawing back. The date of that letter was July 1899. It comforts me even now to know that after that early morning time with his Lord and Master, that beloved old man must have read very tender words, for a small Daily Light always lived beside his little old Bible which is mine now: ‘As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you,’ and his mind would run on to the end of that promise, ‘and ye shall be comforted’ For six long years he waited in patience and then, on July 19, 1905, the last words on the page of that book were fulfilled, and his God wiped away all tears from his eyes.”

  1. 2 Timothy 4:21.

  Chapter 19

  The Uninteresting, Unromantic Truth

  Amy was relentless in her effort to describe precisely how things were, without artificial sweeteners or colors—“The God of Truth, it seems to us, does not ask for paint when the word comes to His servant. ‘Write the things thou hast seen.’” How else could people know how to pray for the work? How could they begin to fathom what heathendom meant?

  Toward the close of the nineteenth century a mission society asked Amy to write of her experiences. She wrote as she had always written in her Scrap letters—the straight truth. It would not do. The committee returned the manuscript as too discouraging. Could she make it a bit more palatable? She could not. It went into a drawer. In 1900 two friends from England visited her for several months, itinerating with the Band, seeing what Amy saw. When they learned of the rejected manuscript, they asked to take it home and try to find a publisher. They succeeded, and Things as They Are appeared, enhanced by photographs taken by one of the friends. Although the writer of the preface called them “thrilling chapters,” many readers in England found them anything but thrilling. Could things be so terrible? Where were the dramatic conversion stories needed to draw crowds to missionary meetings? Years later Amy learned that a committee of Christians had met in India to ask that she be sent back to England because of the disturbance her book had created.

  Because missionary reports generally included more about successes than about failures, Amy tried to shift the weight to the other side. It is more important that you should know about the reverses than about the successes of the war. We shall have all eternity to celebrate the victories, but we have only the few hours before sunset in which to win them. We are not winning them as we should, because the fact of the reverses is so little realized, and the needed reinforcements are not forthcoming, as they would be if the position were thoroughly understood. . . . So we have tried to tell you the truth—the uninteresting, unromantic truth.”1

  In order to strengthen the credibility of the book the publishers felt it necessary to include in the second edition letters from missionaries certifying the facts.

  “I am not surprised that anyone unacquainted with mission work in India should be staggered at the facts narrated in Things as They Are” wrote one. “But as one who has worked for nearly thirty years in the heart of heathenism, away from the haunts of civilization, I can bear testimony that the reality of things far exceeds anything it would be possible to put into print.”

  Indians also testified to the authenticity of what Amy had written. “I fancied I was living my old life among Hindus over again. I can honestly corroborate everything said in regard to the religious and social life of the Hindus,” wrote Pandita Ramabai. An editor from Madras, Krishna Ram, added, “The question is often asked whether a high-caste Hindu convert can live with his own people after his baptism. It is only those who know nothing of the conditions of life in India, and of the power of caste as it exists in this country, who raise the question.”

  The incredulity of the mission-minded public did not alter Amy’s resolve to present the unsweetened truth. After Things had gone to press the following story appeared in Scraps:

  In the Flower Village there is an old Brahman widow who is dying of consumption. I took her cough mixture and stuff to rub on her head to ease the pain, and visited her again and again, trying new remedies (suggested by a medical missionary who is staying with us) and doing all I could think of, so far as she would let me, to help her.

  As a rule a Brahman is very suspicious about anything given, and many a struggle this old widow had bet ween her desire to get all she could out of us and her fear of being given anything which would, as she put it, “draw her into the pit of pollution,” our religion. I knew we could give her nothing which would cure her, and told her so; at first she did not believe me, and most greedily grabbed at everything, haggling over the bottles and corks (we don’t give bottles as a rule, we give medicine, the people bring their own bottles) and trying to “do” me in every possible way, only always guarding herself from danger by refusing anything which looked powdery, for we are supposed to delude the unwary by getting them to eat, drink, or inhale some sort of powder. We put it into plantains for children (so we never can give plantains or indeed any eatables to children—often I want to give sweets to the dear little mites, but I never do). We put it in milk or medicine or simply sprinkle it on the pages of our Bibles; all this is believed except by those who know us well. So the old Brahman was careful. She would take a pill and crumble it in her fingers, “this is nothing but solid powder, I want a liquid!” She would hold the cough mixture up to the light—“There is powder floating in it. I want a clear mixture”—or else it would be, “I want nothing which has to be taken internally. I want external remedies. Give me something to rub on.”

  She was quite sure that if only she went on changing the remedies often enough I would get tired of bringing wrong ones, and would produce the one genuine article which she was certain would cure her. “Why don’t you bring it?” she would say, after every fresh trial. “Don’t you know that by helping a Brahman you will acquire great merit?” She never dreamed of being in the least grateful for what we were trying to do. She was condescending a long way down to let us do anything for her.

  At last it seemed to dawn on her that if we could we would have cured her, an
d that as we had not, it was evident we could not. So she had no more use for us. But though she must have made up her mind about this before I went yesterday, she did not show it at first. I was allowed to sit humbly at her feet on the outside verandah, while she sat up on the doorstep. “Be very careful not to touch me,” she reminded me as usual, and then let me read to her. “For ten rupees could one buy such a story?” This was about the parable of the Good Samaritan. Then, “As you have no medicine for my body, have you got a medicine for my soul?” and I gladly told her yes. “By means of this soul medicine will my soul regain its health?” Oh how gladly one said yes! “And how may one drink this soul medicine?” So I told her. “Then by listening to the Words of God and believing them one receives this soul medicine? So the medicine is received through the ear instead of the mouth, and absorbed by the heart, instead of by the digestive organs?” She seemed to have got it very clearly. “There is nothing else to do? One has only to listen and let the words ‘catch’? Then one understands them and one’s heart believes them and so to the soul comes health. It is not difficult,” she said.

  Then she turned with a sudden twist and flung the two medicine bottles into my lap. “So that is how you delude us!” she said, but the words came with a sort of hiss. “First you tried to get me to eat your powder done up in a pill, then you tried to get me to listen to your Book’s words which, it appears, by entering the ear, affect the mind and the heart!” Then, raising herself up and glaring at me like an old tiger cat at a mouse, she pointed with her skinny old hand to the street. “Go! Do you think I will allow your medicine to get to my heart? Go! You have no medicine that will cure my body. I want none to cure my soul. Did you ever know a Brahman drink your medicine? Go!”

  She used the word used in speaking to a servant and then, addressing the onlookers, went on, pointing to me in a very disdainful fashion. “Does she think I bore the contamination of her presence—she who eats flesh and mingles with low-caste people—for the sake of her soul-deluding Book medicine? Let her go. I have no use for her. I have no use for her Lord Jesus. Let them both go!”

  Were the Scraps accomplishing anything? Amy wondered. “Do not say, ‘Oh, they interest us.’ I do not care about ‘interesting’ you. One’s being in India is costing too much to make it worthwhile to spend a day in a month, ten months in the year, in merely interesting you. . . . Nothing is worth doing at all, nothing is worth writing, which does not do something which will last.”

  A few lines from On the Threshold of Central Africa, by M. Coillard, 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 ashamed 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 evangelization of the world are but a bitter irony so long as we only give of our superfluity and draw back before the sacrifice of ourselves.”

  1. Amy Carmichael, Things as They Are, p. 158.

  Chapter 20

  A Small and Desolate Mite

  On March 7, 1901, something happened which “caused a new thing to begin and I was rooted for life.”

  Amy and the Starry Cluster had been itinerating in Tinnevelly District for about a year. One of the villages where they camped was Dohnavur (“Rhyme Doh with No, na with Ah, vur with Poor”). Dohnavur had been established in 1827 by Charles Theophilus Ewart Rhenius, a man of powerful influence in the missionary history of Tinnevelly. Although a Prussian Lutheran with pietist leanings, Rhenius had been sent to India by the (Anglican) Church Missionary Society in 1811 when English volunteers were few and far between. He has been called one of the ablest, most clear-sighted, practical, and zealous missionaries India has ever seen. He was the first to promote the education of women, establish Christian societies for charitable purposes, assemble the people of every Christian village for morning and evening prayer.

  Wary of encouraging a merely nominal Christianity, Rhenius saw to it that every individual was drilled in doctrine, memorized Scripture, and was examined before being baptized. He helped to found organizations such as the Native Bible and Tract Society and the Native Missionary Society which sent local people to villages where there were no Christians. Congregations developed independence and a thoroughly Tamil, as distinct from colonial or European, cultural idiom. Perhaps most significant of all, he saw the caste system, on which India’s entire culture and economy rested, as incompatible with Christianity and tried to influence believers to break it. Wherever the Gospel of Christ is preached, believed, and scrupulously obeyed, there is trouble. Rhenius’s stand caused trouble. Christians were (quite justly) accused of intolerance, and became themselves simply intolerable. Persecution reached such a pitch that Villages of Refuge were needed. Some of Rhenius’s friends in Europe sent funds to support such villages.

  Suddenly, twelve years after his arrival, the CMS dismissed Rhenius and took over his work. The reasons for such a drastic step lay in his being a Lutheran who ordained Indians in violation of apostolic succession as defined by Anglicans. Not wanting to hinder in any way the work of God, he bowed out. Later, at his people’s urgent request, he returned and struggled on, attempting to complete his Tamil grammar and his Bible translation, but died six years later before he was fifty.

  Dohnavur was one of the Villages of Refuge. Rhenius named it in honor of a certain Count Dohna who had sent money for the persecuted Christians.

  When Amy and her Band came upon it, it was “a bare sunburnt spot out on the plains under the mountains to the west, a huddle of huts and small houses round a fairly big, whitewashed church with, beyond low mud walls, an old ramshackle bungalow built of mud bricks and visibly falling to pieces.” Many of the Christians there were nominal ones, descendants of those who had “gone over” during the sweeping Christian movements early in the previous century. This was not the sort of Christian Amy and her Band, any more than Rhenius, wanted to multiply. They were laying down their lives to see true faith born—in mere churchgoers as well as in Hindus, some of whom seemed to be earnest inquirers.

  On March 4 the Band had left Dohnavur, traveling by night as usual, to return to their old “battlefield” in the east, the village of Pannaivilai. Not far from there, in Great Lake, was a Hindu temple. They had often tried to speak to the devadasis, women who served in the temples. Swami Harshananda, in All About Hindu Temples,1 describes their function: “This system was opposed by the brahmanas. However, due to the pressure of the kings and noblemen it came to stay. The girls chosen to become devadasis would be married to the deity in the temple in a ceremonial way. Their main duties consisted of cleaning the temple, fanning the image, carrying lights, singing and dancing before the deity and devotees and so on.

  “The system might have started some time during the third century A.D. It soon degenerated into prostitution, thanks to the notorious human weaknesses.”

  Sometimes the Band had seen little girls, bought as infants from their mothers and reared in the temple-women’s house where, by precept and example, they learned the “trade.” These children were “gracious little maidens, winsome in their ways, almost always more refined in manner than ordinary children, and beautiful.”2 Amy and her comrades longed to reach over the wall, but the procuring of these children was always a hole-and-corner operation, heavily guarded, and they could only pray that He to whom no wall is an obstacle would somehow show them a way.

  The bullock bandies carrying Amy and her Indian friends rumbled up to the old bungalow in Pannaivilai on the evening of March 6. That very evening in the village nearby a strange thing took place.

  Preena was a child of seven who lived in the temple house. Her father was dead. Her mother had been persuaded to devote her to the gods. Once she had managed to slip out and return to her mother, a twenty-mile walk to Tuticorin, “one of the Sodom
s of the province.” The temple women traced her, and the mother, threatened with the wrath of the gods, tore the child’s arms from around her neck and gave her back to them. They branded her hands with hot irons, effectively burning into her young mind the heinousness of her crime. She had run away from a sacred calling.

  One day Preena overheard a conversation about “tying her to the god.” She imagined being bound with ropes to the idol in the dark recesses of the temple. Anything would be preferable to that, so she resolved to escape, no matter what the cost. Like the other little girls, she was under constant surveillance. She could think of only one way out. In desperation she went to the idol, threw herself down before it, and prayed that she might die.

  On the same evening that Amy’s bandy reached the bungalow in Pannaivilai, God sent an angel to the temple house. So Amy interpreted it. If He could send an angel to the prison in Jerusalem to deliver the apostle Peter, why not to a temple house in an Indian village to deliver a little girl? Amy wrote that the angel simply took her by the hand, led her out, across a stream, through the woods. There seemed no other possible explanation for her having eluded the all-seeing eyes and finding her way to safety. Preena’s version was that she had heard the temple women call Amy “the childstealing ammal,” hoping to frighten her. The child made up her mind instead that that was the very ammal she wanted to find. The late afternoon of March 6 was the time she chose. (Was it God’s angel who chose? Or perhaps both? For God works often through human choices.) A Christian woman named Servant of Jesus came upon the “very small and desolate mite with tumbled hair and troubled eyes” standing in front of the church in Pannaivilai. It was late, so instead of taking the child back where she belonged the woman kept her for the night, intending to return her next morning. But Preena insisted that she wanted to go to the child-stealing ammal.