23. The Impress of the Signet Ring
Chapter 23
The Impress of the Signet Ring
Dates had particular significance for Amy Carmichael—time was a creature of God, to be noted and served with prayer and care. Like the Israelites who, at the command of God, set up piles of stones to remind them of places where God had met them in a particular way, Amy established certain days to remind the Family of His providences. Because Preena arrived on the sixth of March (1901), and Indraneela died on the sixth of January (1905), a day of prayer was instituted on the sixth day of every month to intercede for children in danger. It is still kept. The Family gathers and kneels, one of the members reads out the names of villages, and the whole group responds, “Lord, save the children there.” Amy made a Praise Box into which slips of paper giving reasons for thanksgiving were dropped. This was opened on the Day of Prayer and the Family gave thanks together.
The Indian workers were steadily deepened in their love for the children and consecration to work which was “not naturally easy to the flesh, especially Indian flesh.” The nursery emptied by the epidemic was filled again, “but these tiny things’ hold on life is very light, and I fear to say much about them.” Even Mrs. Carmichael, who had reared seven babies, was at a loss to know what to do for some of the pitiful little scraps that came to them. She knew how to sew and embroider, however, and could teach English, so the older girls sat at her feet and learned whenever they found time between helping to care for younger children and babies. As a family, all were given to understand that each must share in what it takes to make a home.
One day in 1905 “Jesus came to Dohnavur.” That was how Amy described what happened in the little village church next to the compound. All were together—school children, workers, bungalow servants, some of the Village Christians. What started out to be an ordinary meeting turned into “a hurricane of prayer” which went on for four hours. Amy saw it as a revival, a great answer to her constant prayer for a building made of gold, silver, and precious stones rather than wood, hay, and stubble. She was disappointed, however, that only the Family seemed to be revived while the church members went on as usual. When would the Spirit of God sweep over the nominal Christians of South India? She struggled to avoid criticism, yet she could not suspend the faculty of judgment. The church was not as living and vital an organism as it should be, and the impact of the little company that lived alongside was so far very weak. God chooses the foolish to confound the wise, the weak to confound the mighty, but nobody seemed to be confounded at all.
The need for medical attention for the babies led to the opening of a branch nursery in Neyoor, a journey of a day and a half from Dohnavur by bullock bandy, where there was a London Missionary Society medical station. Soon there were fifteen Dohnavur babies there. Ponnammal (“God’s golden gift to the work”) was put in charge, though she could ill be spared from Dohnavur since Mrs. Carmichael had gone home. At first the women under her, young nurses and older women who were recent converts, objected to doing work which was beneath their caste. Ponnammal had learned from Amy that “motherwork,” like any other honest labor, is God’s work—not to be despised, but offered up to Him. Amma had taught her the aim of the Keswick people: nothing less than to walk with God all day long. The nature of the work itself made no difference whatever. This was a shocking notion to those indoctrinated in caste, but Ponnammal set the example for the others by quietly doing what they did not care to do. Her spirit created a new climate in the place, and the time came when there was not one nurse who would refuse to do whatever needed to be done.
Amy arrived one day for a visit, finding the babies “out to air” while the nurses did their morning work. Some were laid on mats, some swung in hammocks hung from a tree, some were in swings. “They seemed to understand it was useless to demand attention just then, and were very patient and contented. But the moment the nurses reappeared, each little infant began to protest. . . . They considered being put out to air a tiresome proceeding, only to be put up with when nothing better was in prospect.”
The Family could not live without money. Where was it to come from? Other missions had their ways of raising it. But such methods were not a part of the Pattern Shewn in the Mount, as Amy called the principles she believed God had given her for the Family. He had given her money for The Welcome and for every need since. Why not expect Him to go right on doing it? Amounts were nothing to Him. Nor did He lack methods. If it took ravens to feed the prophet Elijah, God sent ravens. Why shouldn’t He send ravens to Dohnavur if He wanted to? If He feeds birds and clothes grass and flowers, why not look for the same provision?
We do not tell when we are in need unless definitely asked, and even then not always; for often the leading seems to be silent, except towards God, and we fear lest our little children should seem to crowd in among the many claims to help which must press so heavily upon the hearts of givers at home, and intercept anything which should be sent elsewhere. We rely upon the verses which assure us that our Father knows our needs, and we take it that with such a Father, to know is to supply.
We remember a time of threatened famine, when prices were suddenly rising and £20 was needed to lay in a stock of paddy (unshelled rice). That week brought us a single gift of £20 from a friend in England, whose very name up to that time was unknown to us. So the paddy was poured out in a great heap on the ground, and measured, and we paid for it with light and happy hearts. Again we remember a day when a letter came telling us of a child in danger far away. Sufficient money to meet necessary expenses must be sent off that same afternoon, or she would be otherwise appropriated, and from that appropriation there would be no release. We had not enough money in hand to pay for the chief charge, the long journey of those who would bring her to us; and no money could possibly reach us, even if we sent a coolie with a cheque to cash, for two days from that time. While we were reading the letter, our good postman, who is a sort of visible Raven, came up joyfully with a roll of rupees in his hand. The older children, who are in our confidence, know the look and the meaning of such a roll of rupees, and there was a glad call of “Money order!” It was from Canada, enough to cover all the expenses connected with that little child’s deliverance. We piled the silver on the floor and knelt down round it and thanked God. It meant the redemption of our dear little Puck.
This and other incidents showing God’s supply were recounted in a little book called The Beginning of a Story, published in 1908. Here and elsewhere Amy wrote that no appeals for money were ever made or ever authorized to be made. On page 19, however, she did allow herself to say, “Naturally, our greatest need, next to prayer, is just the simple straightforward need of money—to feed our little ones and clothe them, and to provide for the long journeys connected with their redemption and all other expenses bearing upon the salvation of Temple children.” It was a mere statement of fact, so obvious it hardly needed stating. Yet Amy later withdrew the book from circulation, fearing that that line might be taken as an appeal for funds. She did not mind listing other needs in her letters home: prayer first, last, and always; then sewing and writing materials, colored pencils, rattles for the babies, pink or white vests, yardage of sateen (“blue, white, mossy green, terra cotta, or bright golden, not orange or lemon—we have no use for ugly colors. They are not necessarily cheaper than pretty colors. If they were I would pray for grace. . . . I say very humbly, send us something pretty”).
The Family was rapidly outgrowing the buildings, but to plan and finance expansion was a serious business. “Expenditure leads out into expenditure,” she wrote a few years later. “The only expenditure, and all its outworkings, for which God can be held to be responsible is that which He directs.” Questions about finances were asked again and again. Again and again Amy stated her position: Our Heavenly Father knows what we need and gives it to us.
There is no myth, no imagination about it: God does hear when we speak to Him; God does answer us. For money is a tangible, unmistakable thing; you cannot act when you have not got it as you would if you had it. It is not a case of “Believe that you have it, and you have it’’—a kind of faith which has puzzled me from a child. Believe it will come, yes, if you are sure your order is to go forward and buy land or build buildings or save children. But woe unto you if you imagine you have been told to do such things and then find the order has not been signed above. But the sign, the very impress of the signet ring . . . is a solemn thing to see.1
The Cottage Nursery.
Early in 1906 when it seemed that they must expand, they asked for “the impress of the signet ring” in the form of three signs:
1. possession of an adjoining field,
2. money for two nurseries, a kindergarten, and workers’ rooms,
3. a marked increase in the Family.
Two answers came in a short time. The field was purchased. Seventeen children arrived between spring and fall of 1906. The money was not yet in hand, but because of the rains, building could not begin anyway.
No matter how crowded her days and nights, how many demands were made on her time, how impossible privacy or time for reflection might seem to be, Amy Carmichael managed to write. It was a necessity laid upon her. While itinerating and evangelizing and teaching and mothering, any one of which tasks might have exhausted an ordinary woman, she somehow contrived to make time and reserve energy for writing. By this time she had a typewriter, so that was the end of handwritten letters home. Although no Scrap letter survives from 1904 (it is not hard to suppose she was literally too busy to write), and only two from 1905, she wrote Overweights of Joy, a three-hundred page sequel to Things as They Are. It was published in 1906 with the hope that some whose spirits had sunk on learning the terrible facts of the first book would find “something of a cordial” here, although there was no attempt to tone down the facts of Things. Overweights was meant to be a song of praise out of the darkness which was the background of the work. In addition to many more stories of the powers of heathendom and its indifference to the message of Christ, the book contains happy stories and photographs of the children brought out of that darkness into light. Leela was one of those children. She had absorbed a good deal of theology.
“In the beginning,” began Leela in unctuous tones, “the bad devil was good. He was an angel. He lived in heaven. One day all the angels came to sing to God. Then the devil was angry. He got angrier and angrier. He was very rude to God.” Here Leela seemed to freeze all over, and her voice sounded quite deep and awful. Irreverence was far from her intention. “That bad, bad devil said, ‘I won’t stand before God’s chair anymore, and I won’t sing to God anymore. I want to sit in God’s chair, and make God sing to me!’” There was a perfectly horrified pause, as the enormity of the transgression became evident. “So God took him and tumbled him down out of heaven, and he was turned into the devil.”2
One night in a little crowded house in Dohnavur village in 1900 Amy had been asked to nurse a boy with pneumonia. It was her first experience of being in charge of one so ill and although she distrusted the method of treatment (hot oil poultices) she felt she could not add to the family’s distress by suggesting any other. “By the kindness of the Lord, the Healer, he recovered, and so did all others nursed in the same primitive way, but I looked up [i.e. prayed] that first night and asked for a trained nurse.” Nearly seven years later a young woman, believing God had called her to this work, arrived in Dohnavur. She was loving and unselfish, but stayed only a few months before leaving to marry a man she had met on board ship.
Cholera struck the village in December 1906. “Night after night we were in the little stricken huts, day after day, too . . . and what cholera can be no one can begin to understand who has not fought it alone, without a doctor, without modern weapons.”3
The doctor and the modern weapons were a long time in coming. The work of God is done on God’s timetable. His answers to our prayers come always in time—His time. His thoughts are far higher than ours, His wisdom past understanding.
Although cholera prowled around the Dohnavur Family many times, never once did it enter the gates, even though it was often necessary for Amma and her helpers to come straight back from the stricken village to the compound, stopping only long enough to change clothes. While God sent no miraculous medical assistance He seemed to put a hedge around His helpless children.
1. The Continuation of a Story, pp. 35ff.
2. Overweights of Joy, p. 264.
3. Gold Cord, p. 56.