27. The Lesson of the Weaned Child
Chapter 27
The Lesson of the Weaned Child
The year 1912 was a year of stripping. The power allowed to the enemy seemed at times far beyond the limits the love of God might set.
On August 13 Amy Carmichael’s spiritual mother in India, Mrs. Hopwood, died. She was the hostess at Ooty, the place of cool refreshment in the hills where Amy had spent every hot spell for fifteen years. To know that Mrs. Hopwood was there was strength and cheer to Amy. She counted on her continual prayers. She looked to her for sympathy, understanding, and godly, motherly counsel. The road was going to be steeper without that support.
On August 17 little Lulla, leader of kindergarten games and “all nursery joys,” died. She had always been delicate, so Ponnammal had kept her in her own nursery. Her breathing seemed strange one evening, then there was a sore throat and low fever. In two days she smiled such a smile as none of them had seen before, kissed Mabel Wade, her nurse, flung her arms round Amy’s neck, and was gone. “She was the sort of child who nestles into the heart and we could not help her slipping into that innermost place, which perhaps should never be given to any little child. And yet He said ‘Love . . . as I have loved you.’ We cannot love too much.”
Nor could they help wondering about the possibility of some-thing especially satanic in the “selection” of those who died and those who were left. Several retarded and other “utterly unsuitable” children rarely gave any anxiety and survived every illness. The real “temple child,” on the other hand, the child who was their reason for being, “no sooner reaches us than something almost inevitably happens, sometimes an accident, sometimes an illness. Often, so often, the newly ransomed little one is snatched away by death. It cannot be a mere chance happening. It occurs too frequently for us to think so now. But if the devil has anything to do with it, thank God—after that there is no more that he can do, and his worst only sends the little life far out of his reach forever. It is a mystery, a secret thing, and the secret things belong unto the Lord.”
Exactly a week after Lulla’s death came the master stroke. Thomas Walker, leader, strong tower of courage and comfort, father and brother to all, died of ptomaine poisoning. Mrs. Walker was in England because of illness. He was holding a mission when the sickness struck, and so was “crowned upon the battlefield.” Kind people, wanting to console, made the usual observation: “It is very hard to see how this can be for the best.”
“We are not asked to SEE,” said Amy. “Why need we when we KNOW?” We know—not the answer to the inevitable Why, but the incontestable fact that it is for the best. “It is an irreparable loss, but is it faith at all if it is ‘hard to trust’ when things are entirely bewildering?”
Others, with a sigh and a shake of the head, observed that it is difficult for us human beings to escape bitterness, even dumb rage, when such things happen.
“It is indeed not only difficult, it is impossible,” Amy wrote. “There is only one way of victory over the bitterness and rage that come naturally to us—To will what God wills brings peace.”
“But are such things the will of God at all?” Amy herself raised the question, and answered it:
The honest heart cannot be content with platitudes. “An enemy hath done this” is a word that reaches far and touches more than tares. If an enemy has done it, how can it be called the will of God? We do not know the answer to that question now. But we have sidelights upon it, such as the vision in Revelation: They overcame him by the Blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony (victory through apparent defeat). . . . And as we rest our hearts upon what we know (the certainty of the ultimate triumph of good) leaving what we do not know to the Love that has led us all our life long, the peace of God enters into us and abides.
Just before Walker left for his mission, a group of them had been sitting under the stars in deck chairs. Amy was seized suddenly with the thought of how it would be if she did not have Walker’s strong arm to lean on in the work. She could not do without it, she said. “Well, you are not asked to!” said Walker with a laugh. But hers was still the soldier spirit, and when the wire came she was still under the same Captain. Her orders had not changed: Give up your right to yourself, take up the cross, follow. The Captain had been over the course before. Would she refuse to obey now? It was a lesson that had to be reviewed many times, for her as for any soldier. She wrote of that lesson in a prayer-poem:
From prayer that asks that I may be
Sheltered from winds that beat on Thee,
From fearing when I should aspire,
From faltering when I should climb higher,
From silken self, O Captain, free
Thy soldier who would follow Thee.
From subtle love of softening things,
From easy choices, weakenings,
(Not thus are spirits fortified,
Not this way went the Crucified,)
From all that dims Thy Calvary,
O Lamb of God, deliver me.
Give me the love that leads the way,
The faith that nothing can dismay
The hope no disappointments tire
The passion that will burn like fire,
Let me not sink to be a clod:
Make me Thy fuel, Flame of God.
“The searching forces of bereavement” were not abated. One week after Walker’s death a little girl of eight died, and within a few months it was found that the beloved Ponnammal had cancer. Amy knew and fully believed that the touch of Christ still had its ancient power. She had seen it often, and had herself been given, for a short time, the gift of a healing touch. But for Ponnammal she had no liberty to “claim” a healing.
Ponnammal, with Preetha and Tara.
“We hardly understand the use of that phrase; we know too little to ‘claim’ where temporal blessings are concerned.” But they prayed. Amy prayed. The accals and sitties prayed. The children, one of whose songs told the story of the little girl who wanted blue eyes, prayed. Was the answer to be yes or no?
“We knew our Father. There was no need for persuasion. Would not His Fatherliness be longing to give us our hearts’ desire (if I may put it so)? How could we press Him as though He were not our own most loving Father?”
Amy spent three months in the Salvation Army hospital at Nagercoil with Ponnammal, nursing her through two operations while she herself suffered from neuralgia and seventy children in Dohnavur (of the Family which by then numbered a hundred and forty) came down with malaria. In July of the same year, 1913, Amy’s mother died. The Daily Light reading for the day the cable came was from the Song of Solomon: “Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out.” If the life of a man or woman on earth is to bear the fragrance of heaven the winds of God must blow on that life, winds not always balmy from the south, but fierce winds from the north that chill the very marrow. It seemed a howling gale that had been let loose on Amy that year.
How was she to go on? She was an orphan. Her own parents gone, her spiritual father and mother gone. She had not known life without such support. Nor has the child, when weaning time comes, known life without its unfailing source of nourishment. Like the weaned child, Amy knew that the lesson assigned now was to learn to do without. She wrote another prayer:
And shall I pray Thee change Thy will, my Father,
Until it be according unto mine?
But, no, Lord, no, that never shall be, rather
I pray Thee blend my human will with Thine.
I pray Thee hush the hurrying, eager longing,
I pray Thee soothe the pangs of keen desire—
See in my quiet places, wishes thronging—
Forbid them, Lord, purge, though it be with fire.
And work in me to will and do Thy pleasure
Let all within me, peaceful, reconciled,
Tarry content my Well-Beloved’s leisure,
At last, at last, even as a weaned child.