44. Broken by the Waves
Chapter 44
Broken by the Waves
By the middle of the 1930s it had become fairly evident that Amy Carmichael was not likely to be healed unless God gave a miracle. She was almost never out of pain, yet she maintained daily touch with the Family, seeing different ones every half hour all day, writing long letters to some, tiny scraps to others (“Welcome home, my child. Lovingest of welcomes. Your Amma”). Everybody got notes on special occasions: birthdays, holidays, return from a journey, Tamil exams. When Dr. Nancy Robbins was left for five days with the entire responsibility of the hospital, Amma wrote promising special prayer. To John Risk on his birthday in 1936 she wrote:
“My own David,” using the name of the Bible character he reminded her of. “Did you think I had forgotten? Not a bit of it. Last night at midnight I longed to write (as I hadn’t had time to do so all day) but if I had, there would have been protestations from my little nurse, so I didn’t and then, alas, I woke too late for an early note.
But He whom thy soul loveth, He has blessed thee already, my John, and His birthday morning blessings are like the dew and like His compassions, ever new, beautiful, heart-reviving.
“This has been a year of battle, but thank God, of victory, and we are nearer the Crowning Day this morning than ever we were before.
“‘And having done all to stand.’ God keep us standing. ‘When I said, “my foot slippeth, Thy Mercy, O Lord, held me up.’ ”
It had indeed been a year of battle. There was never any other kind of year. The Family continued rapidly to increase. One member reported that there was a “crop of very naughty girls” about that time. Some of the older ones were a great disappointment to Amma. She sometimes had them come to her as nurses, which caused raised eyebrows—why should Amma choose such a one for her nurse? Someone who had thought at first that one of them was a poor choice, told herself that she must be “a nice, quiet girl who ‘fit’ Amma.” Later she asked about her. “No,” said Amy, “I saw the weakness in her from the first. I had her with me to strengthen her.” Some responded. Some did not.
The same motive that inspired Amy to choose a girl who was not naturally appealing applied to her choice of a girl who was—she wanted always to encourage and strengthen. “Give all you ve got to helping them.” Eyebrows were raised in either case. “Never mind,” she told one of the teachers. “Never be afraid of appearing to have favorites, provided you are truly seeking to help them for the Lord and not for yourself.”
She sternly warned against “mushy” friendships. They are pernicious anywhere, but on the mission field just deadly. She quoted 1 Samuel 20:42, “We have sworn both of us in the name of the Lord, saying, The Lord be between me and thee.”
Kohila was a girl who had come to Dohnavur when she was four years old. She responded most eagerly to both the love and the discipline of the place, and was trained as a nurse. Vineetha, the accal in charge, needed Kohila’s room for another nurse. Kohila “clung to her own small room as a cat clings to its home, Amy wrote in Kohila: The Shaping of an Indian Nurse.
In a case like this you who are responsible to God for such a soul stand for a moment at the parting of the ways. You may say, “I wish the thing to be done,” and it will be done. There is no travail if you take that way; but it leads nowhere. It never leads to spiritual victory farther on. Or you may put the responsibility for decision upon the one concerned, and then you will travail indeed. But in the end, if your hands be steady until the going down of the sun, eternal gain will be the outcome of that prayer and that travail.
Vineetha said little and prayed much. When she felt the time was ripe she said, “Look, my child, give this room to the Lord Jesus and you will receive hundreds of rooms in heaven.”
“Kohila went to her cherished little room for . . . one last precious minute. Then she went straight to the girl for whom the room was required, to whom she had spoken ungraciously, and she asked her pardon and ‘willingly with joy I give you my room,’ she said.”
In September 1936, Kohila was in the forest. She wrote to her sittie, proposing that she share the new little room she had been given with a younger nurse who needed a helping hand. “It was the dearest thing she had to give—her privacy.” Then one morning she climbed a steep rock to pick flowers for some of her friends. She slipped, fell, and was killed.
Three months before, Amy had reminded one of the DFs of the Scripture, “When I said, ‘My foot slippeth, Thy mercy, O Lord, held me up.’” Amy did not put such items in juxtaposition. The mystery of the sovereign purpose of God she left with Him, never calling attention to seeming incongruities. She declared her certainties, not her questions. She shied away from any statement which might be taken as a complaint or a doubt, or anything which could make her Master look hard. When a little girl named Pungaja had her eye pecked out by a heron, Amma took her on her lap and said, “Darling, you must never ask God why.” She comforted the child and urged her to trust His never-failing love. “I was often tempted by that ‘why,’ but I have found power in the blood of Jesus,” says Pungaja. One day she went to Amma with a burdened heart. “But when she hugged me all my sorrow went.”
Amma asked about the work Pungaja was doing, caring for children. “Do you find your work hard?” she asked. Yes, said Pungaja. “These are soldiership years,” Amma told her, and gave her a medal inscribed “Saved to serve.” Pungaja responded to the soldier training, and later was placed in charge of the place of correction, a separate compound where the most difficult members of the Family live, some mentally ill, some merely intractable and rebellious. Once an outsider, who happened to be a doctor, remarked that it seemed strange to have such a place in Dohnavur. The only answer that could be offered was that if he knew the whole history, if he had come over the same road, he would understand. The conviction held that the light God had given for dealing with these problem people was sufficient. An outside opinion could not supersede that. It was still a family, but a very large and sometimes unwieldy family, and those whose behavior destroyed peace and unity had somehow to be sequestered. Pungaja, a gentle, quiet woman, is still in charge. “It is my joy to serve them,” she says simply.
Amma’s birthday letter to John had called 1936 “a year of battle.” She went on to say, “Now as we look forward we see great stones and many of them. ‘Who shall roll away the stone?’ More and more I delight in that word that says, ‘The angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone and sat upon it.’ We shall see the angel of the Lord sitting upon many a stone during the coming year.”
The next year brought “Adria.” It was an experience Amy likened to the voyage of the apostle Paul to Rome in Acts 27, where they were “driven up and down in Adria,” even to the point of desperation, “and falling into a place where two seas met, they ran the ship aground.”
“Where the Will of God and the will of the flesh are in conflict there will be rough water, and if the flesh does not yield to the Spirit there must follow the painful breaking up of hopes and expectations, even as the timbers of that ship were broken up with the violence of the waves.”1
“The flesh” in this case refers to two trusted workers who had to be dismissed for deception and disobedience continued over a long period of time. The peremptory manner in which they were dismissed was anything but delicate, and others objected. Some of them left or were asked to leave. There was misunderstanding in correspondence to other parts of the world, resulting in deep wounds to those who were disciplined and those (principally Godfrey Webb-Peploe) who administered the discipline. This was a “crashing sorrow” to Amy, for it “undid the work of years. Our white Dohnavur is being besmirched,” she said, but declared she would rather be deceived a hundred times than distrust and misjudge once. She refused to publish abroad the truth of the matter. Vindication must rest in the hands of God.
One worker who did not know the details of what had happened wrote to Amy, “We are with you utterly . . . God grant it be stainless steel that comes out of this furnace.”
When one matter “blew over” or was laid to rest, there was always another. At this same time the hospital was in full swing, which brought all kinds of people into contact with those who had been safely cloistered before. Rumors began to fly that Dohnavur children were bastards, which greatly upset the children, and some turned hostile. There were in fact some who had been born out of wedlock. If the mother was high caste, the child had to be got rid of. The children’s genetic history was never divulged. All who asked questions about their origin received the same answer: You are where you are first because God brought you, and then because we loved you very much.
Amy found comfort in Samuel Rutherford’s words, “O if my faith could ride out against the high and proud winds and waves when my sea seemeth all to be on fire!”
“There is no promise of calm waters for any mariner,” Amy added. “But our Lord can give the faith that can ride out against any high and proud winds and waves. And He can come to our succor though our sea seemeth all to be on fire.”2
1. Amy Carmichael, Though the Mountains Shake, p. 13.
2. Ibid, p. 17.