7. The Rending
Chapter 7
The Rending
On January 13, 1893 “the thought came” to Amy that Japan was the place for her to go. She had been praying and waiting for months, sure that she was not to “nestle down,” that God in His time would make things plain. The battle with her feelings for the Dear Old Man was not finished. The words of Matthew 10:37 were always with her: “He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.”
If it was in fact God’s leading, it was not by any miracle such as a pillar of fire, an audible voice, an angelic visit, a star, or handwriting on the wall. It was not by the ordinary methods by which, in combination, God seems to nudge us in the path of righteousness: circumstances, common sense, godly counsel, biblical principles. It was a thought. We may believe that God can impress such a thought on a mind surrendered to Him, and leave it at that. The pitfalls are many, however, and the story of Amy’s next year or two may illustrate this.
She knew no one in Japan, but the D.O.M. did. Barclay Buxton, a missionary with the Church Missionary Society, was the leader of the Japan Evangelistic Band, a group of young people not necessarily associated with the CMS. Wilson wrote to tell him of Amy’s “strange feeling” (her words) that she was to go to Japan, and asked if he had a place for her. Instead of expecting that Buxton’s reply, negative or affirmative, might be an indication of the will of God, they were so confident of the validity of their first feeling that they followed another one. Both “felt” she should head for Japan at the earliest possible moment. A party of CIM women was to sail on March 3 for Shanghai. Why not go with them? Buxton could send his reply there. Amy confidently booked a passage.
The few weeks that remained before she was to part with her beloved “Fatherie” were filled with anguish. Mr. Wilson believed God had given her to him as if she were his own lost daughter brought back from the dead, and his “flesh and his heart failed” at the prospect of Broughton Grange without Amy. No doubt she kept her sunny disposition with him, and they comforted each other with the promises of Scripture—anyone who relinquishes anything for the Lord’s sake will not go unrewarded. But there were times alone in her room when all the waves and billows washed over her.
“Never, I think, not even in Heaven shall I forget that parting,” Amy wrote fifty-two years later. “It was such a rending thing that I never wanted to repeat it. . . . Even now my heart winces at the thought of it.” At about the same time she told a friend what she had never told anyone: “The night I sailed for China, March 3, 1893, my life, on the human side, was broken, and it never was mended again. But He has been enough.”
The steamship Valetta of the Peninsula and Orient Lines left the dock in Tilbury where many friends of the four women had gathered to say good-bye. Farewells to those leaving nowadays by jet plane are nothing compared to the protracted agonies of dockside partings. Now the traveler simply disappears into the jetway. It is a mere walking into another room. Then it was gangplanks, hours of visiting on board, the “All ashore!” the deep-throated whistles, the throwing off of moorings, the slow glide away from the dock, the almost imperceptible widening of the great gulf between voyager and loved ones, the straining to discern till the last possible moment the diminishing face. When Amy sailed, friends stood on the wharf and sang, “Crown Him with Many Crowns, the Lamb upon His Throne,” and “Like a River Glorious is God’s Perfect Peace,” one of the Keswick hymns. The ship was within a stone’s throw for an hour, so the singing went on and on, the same hymns sung again and again, the words taking on an ever more poignant significance:
Crown Him the Son of Man
Who every grief hath known
That wrings the human breast,
And takes and bears them for His own
That all in Him may rest.
MATTHEW BRIDGES
Amy stood by the rail, watching intently the dear wrinkled face of the old man. Each, “on the human side,” was broken. When, many years later, she held up before prospective missionary recruits the standard of the Cross of Jesus, no one could say she knew not whereof she spoke. If there was peace in her heart at that moment, it was nothing less than Jesus’ last gift to His own—“My own peace, such as the world cannot give. Set your troubled hearts at rest, and banish your fears.”1 It was the peace her friends were singing about, “like a river glorious.” But it did not utterly cancel the pain. As the ship rounded the last corner there stood the Dear Old Man again, having hiked a half-mile down the docks for a last glimpse. They were close enough to call out Bible verses to each other and a phrase Amy remembered from the farewell meeting, “Jesus has two nail-pierced hands. He lays one upon each and parts us so—He does the parting.”
When the speck that was the dearest face finally disappeared, did she rush to her cabin and throw herself on the bunk sobbing? Not likely. Perhaps she waited by the rail until England dropped from sight, reviewing all the way the Lord had led her. Like Abraham, she did not know where she was going, and found comfort in the words of Genesis 12:1, “unto a land that I will show thee.” Like Abraham, she had by faith obeyed what she believed to be the voice of God.
How would she spend the weeks between England and Colombo where she would transship? She considered the options. There were games. She loved games. But she was a missionary now, and a missionary hasn’t time for games. She prayed for opportunities to speak of Christ to the sailors and fellow passengers. The captain himself asked her to put up Bible verses in his cabin “as a witness to all” that he had come to know the Lord Jesus Christ.
She wrote to the Keswick friends that she was “peacefully miserable,” that is, seasick. She paraphrased a hymn:
Peace, perfect peace, though seasick we can sing,
For even so we are beneath His wing.
On the first Sunday a service was held in the salon. Rough weather took the starch out of most of the passengers—“we sang hymns somewhat faintly”—and the congregation dwindled until a gentleman from first class suggested that the “Salvation Army ladies” (he had heard them singing hymns when they embarked—they must be Salvation Army) should address what Amy called the “survivors.” She and a German missionary gladly complied. She also held a Bible study down below the main hatchway each morning, “a little ‘All-One-in-Christ’ picture, a native Indian gentleman who is searching the records of the world’s religions to find the true one; a poor simple Lascar who once met a missionary who told him about Jesus and who clings to Him very wistfully as his ‘own One,’ a Chinaman, comical and eager who loves Him ‘muchly,’ and a nice old Ayah . . . met with us to read His book together.”
In the Bay of Biscay they sang another Keswick hymn, one stanza of which reads, “O how great Thy lovingkindness, vaster, broader than the sea.”2
Behind us lay the calm, dark waters stretching away and away, before us they shimmered in a glory of color and gold, above was the glow of eventide, underneath were the everlasting arms of a Love limitless as the encompassing ocean. . . . As we entered the Mediterranean He commanded His stormy wind to lash the quiet waters into a glorious fury. . . . Through the mighty rush and roar the old psalm sung itself chorus-fashion over and over, “The floods have lifted up, O Lord, the floods have lifted up their voice. . . . The Lord on High is mightier than the noise of many waters.”3
As they steamed past the coast of “Darkest Africa” Amy saw one tiny light which typified for her how few spiritual light-bearers there were, and begged her correspondents not to go on leaving “the voiceless silence of despair” unanswered.
While traversing the Suez Canal they passed caravans of camels, pacing through the sand, followed by blue-robed, white-turbaned Arabs. As they passed camps, small boys rushed out and called for “baksheesh,” a handout of money. Seeing the “solemn Sinai ridge” with its bare red peaks and rolling desert, Amy thought of the people of Israel standing far off while Moses went up the mountain and into the thick darkness where God was. At Aden she saw for the first time “the great Need, face to face”—swarms of curio vendors and diving boys, clad in chocolate brown and little else, “without Christ, without hope, without God in the world.” Ceylon, a wonderland of rest to their sea-weary eyes, seemed like “a great peopled hothouse minus the glass.” In Colombo the missionaries were “taken possession of by brothers and sisters in Jesus,” driven over red sand roads to a bungalow where breakfast waited. Amy sat down to the little organ—glad of one that remained steady after the stormy passage—and played Samuel Rutherford’s hymn, “The Sands of Time are Sinking,” a Keswick favorite, as well as Frances Ridley Havergal’s “Like a River Glorious.” In Colombo as in Penang, Singapore, and Hong Kong, Amy asked to see the mission work, and seemed to have Old Home Week with many who had been to Keswick, knew the Keswick songs, read the Keswick magazine, The Life of Faith.
When they boarded the SS Sutlej, they found their cabin already occupied by rats and cockroaches. This was a matter for prayer first (“We went and told Jesus”), followed by action (“then we spoke to the steward”). Amy printed a card with the words In everything give thanks, decorated the corners with the initials of their chief woes, and hung it in the cabin.
On the back of her last shipboard letter, dated April 13, there is a note, “Friday, April 14th—Arrived safely at Shanghai. ‘So He bringeth them into their desired haven.’ Found letters welcoming me to Japan. ‘He goeth before.’”
After a brief stay she was put on board the SS Yokohama Maru bound for Shimonoseki where she was to be met, and “off I went without a fear.” The ship was caught in the tail end of a typhoon, making landing impossible, so the captain put her into a madly tossing steam tug full of very seasick Japanese. The tiny tug was buffeted and flung about till everybody was finally “tumbled together out onto the shore.”
Amy was surrounded by a crowd of shouting, gesticulating people, not a white face anywhere. She did her best to explain her predicament. The crowd was friendly, it was certainly interested—it was, in fact, transfixed at the sight—but it was helpless. As she told the story later, she said she laughed till she was positively aching at the absurdity of the whole affair. A foreign port. Nobody to meet her. Not a word of any language she could understand. The girl from the Irish village on the North Sea, standing in the pouring rain beside her pile of luggage on the shore of Japan, laughing. “All this was part of the going forth unto a land I knew not, and everything was just right, and if things went wrong it was so much the more fun. I knew they would come right in the end. And they always did.” So with the charming lightheartedness of faith she only wondered, What next?
There was a sudden rush of Japanese from all quarters. “They carried my boxes and me off to a hotel (made of paper as it seemed to me) and I sat down tranquilly on the mats and waited to see what the angels would do.” They were on the job. Somebody beckoned and she followed. A rickshaw was waiting, in she got, and off she went into the unknown again. “It seems unbelievable but it felt quite natural to me.” The rickshaw bounced through many streets and stopped at a house where a white man appeared. He turned out to be an American trader, thoroughly stunned to find this cheerful diminutive foreigner at his door. He was able to direct her to the home of missionaries, an American girl and an old lady, who had been expecting not Amy but the missionary who was to have met her, who had been delayed because of the storm. “Perfect saints they were, and that evening I was safe with them.”
During the few days’ wait for the lady who was to meet her Amy walked one day along the seashore, talking with one of the Shimonoseki missionaries. A casual remark was dropped which elicited an astonished question from Amy. “You don’t mean to say, the missionary replied, “you think all missionaries love one another?” Precisely what she had thought. How could it be otherwise? “No faintest foreshadowing of the purposes of God was mine that morning,” she wrote, “but I remember the thoughts that rushed through me then. What of ‘See that ye love one another with a pure heart fervently’?4 Was such a life of love lived nowhere?” It was a gray day, with a gray sea, a gray drizzle, and gray thoughts. But it spurred her to prayer, to an earnest beseeching that the Lord would enable her to love as He commanded us to love.
1. John 14:27(neb).
2. J. Mountain, “Jesus, I am Resting, Resting.”
3. Psalms 93:3, 4.
4. 1 Peter 1:22.