11. Japanese Head
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 woman “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.
“To any whom the Hand Divine is beckoning: count the cost, for He tells us to, but take your slate to the foot of the Cross and add up the figures there.”
The temperature was in the nineties, but the mission house was cool with punkahs (huge fans suspended from the ceiling and operated by a coolie with a rope) waving continuously and cups of hot tea, the Englishman’s cooler, always available. Amy’s “brain oppression” lessened, and as she saw others who were far more in need of a change than she, she felt ashamed that she had given in to tiredness. But, she hastened to explain, her giving in was only because of the fear that she might give trouble to others. She assured her friends that she was not thin—she was, in fact, the “opposite of a shadow —and that “promotion” (to heaven) was not imminent.
Amy had been in Shanghai only a week when, feeling refreshed and without excuse for indulging herself any longer in such comfort, she asked God what was next. The answer came as it had when she went to Japan.
“On the eighteenth of July the word of the Lord came unto me saying, Go to Ceylon. The CIM people were horrified. Was she well enough to go? Did she know what she was doing? Why Ceylon? How could she go alone? Only the last question was settled. Another missionary was making the voyage and would look after her. Forthwith Amy booked a passage for Colombo. Off she sailed on July 28, sure of one thing: He goeth before. “Only whoso has felt the Spirit of the Highest in this most solemn way will understand at all, she wrote pages and pages of explanations to the homefolk who would worry about their “Keswick Child.” It never once crossed her mind that she needed counsel, let alone permission, from those who had sent her. She felt one in spirit with Abraham, “not knowing whither,” and with Luther, “Here I stand—I can do no other.”
“I am prepared for much blame, or at best misunderstanding, but I cannot help it. One dare not do anything but obey when that Voice speaks.” How did it speak? In three ways: through the Word, with unanswerable force, through the inward leading of the Spirit, and (often but not always) through circumstances. She felt confirmed by all of these, although her friends found no confirmation for the last, nor was Amy herself sure there was any infallible warrant for that one in the Bible. The old saints appeared to have gone often in what seemed direct opposition to existing facts. She could see, however, that circumstances, which are all of God’s ordering, might be confirmatory witnesses.
She reviewed the circumstances of this move: She had not wasted much strength in learning Japanese, had had no house or settled station, and few responsibilities in Matsuye, hence would not be missed. Fellow-workers had helped by prayer and by mending and packing her things. The passage to Ceylon cost only ten pounds. When she stopped in Colombo en route to Japan, friends there had remarked that the Lord might send her back to them. God had brought helpful people all along the way. Could there be any doubt that He was in charge? She pleaded all these proofs to her worried loved ones.
“All life’s training is just exactly what is needed for the true Life-work, still out of view but far away from none of us. Don’t grudge me the learning of a new lesson.”
In Hong Kong she caught a chill. On August 2 she wrote in the margin of her Daily Light, “Very ill—fever—alone—kept—comforted.” She was brought (she admitted it) to the very end of herself, of self-strength, self-energy, everything. “What if I never reach Ceylon at all?” she wondered during a turbulent, fevered night. “What if God’s work for me is to give all up and go home by the next boat?” It would certainly look as though her call was false, her faith misplaced, her Master’s voice misunderstood.
When she recounted the journey years later, selective memory had obliterated all but the faithfulness of God. Every one of the imagined (and, as she found, real) objections people had raised was gone. She told her “children” that it had never occurred to her that anyone might misunderstand. The need for explanations had faded from memory, along with the battles fought all the way to Ceylon. She had not reread the shipboard letters describing the wrestlings of mind and soul—“Oh, just awfully the Devil came with doubts and fears!”
1. See 2 Corinthians 12:9.