5. The Inescapable Calling
Chapter 5
The Inescapable Calling
Exactly the sort of place I should have chosen if I had been asked to choose!” That was how Amy described the place where she was living later in the year 1889. An old friend of the family, Jacob Wakefield MacGill, had asked her to come to Manchester, England, to begin a work similar to that of The Welcome. Her mother was invited to be superintendent for the women of a rescue home there, so the move was made. Amy lived in a slum, teeming with people—tough, hardworking, hard-drinking people. At night she heard the yells and screams of fights. In the morning it was factory sirens and the clatter of wooden clogs as people went to work in the dark and cold. “But what I remember most vividly is that the most loathly sort of ‘puchie’ used to crawl through the thin walls.”
It was good missionary training. If one is preparing to storm the bastions of heathendom, it won’t do to blench at creepie-crawlies. Another lesson Amy learned was to do at a moment’s notice whatever was required—Uncle Jacob had no patience with those who wouldn’t. She learned to do without things most precious—privacy and quiet. The neighborhood was not what her family would have thought “safe,” and once, walking to the railway station, she was mobbed by hooligans. She walked on unafraid, cheered by the story of a brave ancestor who had marched through a hostile crowd. In Amy Carmichael the faith of her fathers was living still.
Amy was happy in the work with factory girls, but sickness brought it to a halt. “What asses bodies are!” she said.
Eighteen-eighty-eight was the year of the fourteenth Keswick convention, and Amy’s friend Mr. Wilson, cofounder of Keswick, whom she had met in Belfast, invited her to attend. Having heard Keswick teaching in Belfast and Glasgow, she was eager to go to the tent in Keswick. Since its beginning the movement had suffered from various “winds of doctrine,” but by 1888 had been corrected and steadied, largely under the leadership of Bishop Handley Moule, who wrote in 1890 or thereabouts:
Keswick stands for the great and eternal truths, some of which, so to speak, it takes for granted but never forgets: the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ His death for us upon the Cross: Keswick is firm as a rock upon the sacrifice of the death of Christ, and the benefit of pardon, utterly unmerited by us, which we have because Jesus died.
Sanctity was the great emphasis of Keswick, which Moule defined thus:
To be like Christ. To displace self from the inner throne, and to enthrone Him; to make not the slightest compromise with the smallest sin. We aim at nothing less than to walk with God all day long, to abide every hour in Christ and He and His words in us, to love God with all the heart and our neighbor as ourselves. . . . It is possible to cast every care on Him daily, and to be at peace amidst pressure, to see the will of God in everything, to put away all bitterness and clamor and evil speaking, daily and hourly. It is possible by unreserved resort to divine power under divine conditions to become strongest through and through at our weakest point.1
What Keswick stood for Amy Carmichael stood for. The great principles enunciated in the tent described precisely what she most longed for and were echoed in her writings for the rest of her life. Before the convention she had been pondering the agonizing question of the fate of those who had never heard of Jesus Christ. It was as though she heard “the cry of the heathen,” and could not rest because she could not gladly stay at home and do nothing about them. During that week she prayed specifically for rest from that “cry,” though the thought that God might actually call her to go to them did not cross her mind. The convention was “an unforgettable time,” and resulted in “a new committal of one’s whole life.”
Mr. Wilson, a widower whose only daughter had died when she was just Amy’s age, had by this time become a close friend of the Carmichael family. The children, who called him “the D.O.M.,” for Dear Old Man, visited him often in his home, Broughton Grange. He was a lonely man in a bleak household with two bachelor sons in their late thirties. Amy’s visits became more and more indispensable to him, until he asked her mother if Amy might become his “daughter.” She consented, and so it was that the “corner” she had turned at the Belfast convention in 1887—her meeting Mr. Wilson when he called at their home—led to a new and important phase of her missionary training.
In 1890 she moved to Broughton Grange, God’s “appointed school,” in a beautiful setting in England’s Lake District, above the river Derwent, with a glorious view of the Cumbrian Range from Skiddaw to Scafell.
Wilson was a Friend (Quaker), but for years superintended the Baptist Sunday school and later attended the Anglican church on Sunday evenings. Amy, the Irish Presbyterian, learned to value the silence of the Quaker meetings and the beauty of the Anglican service. The varied ways in which Christian worship found expression illuminated for her the Keswick motto, chosen by Wilson, “All one in Christ Jesus.”
One day as the two were driving a gig along a country road they came upon a stone breaker. Pulling up the old horse, Charlie, the D.O.M. turned to Amy. “Which blow breaks the stone?” he asked. Then, pointing with his whip he said, “Thee must never say, thee must never even let thyself think, ‘I won that soul for Christ.’ It is the first blow and the last, and every one in between.”
It was he who told her of the three inscriptions over the doors of the Milan Cathedral. One, with a carving of roses, says, “All that pleases is but for a moment”; another, with a carving of a cross, says, “All that grieves is but for a moment”; and over the great central door are only the words, “Nothing is important but that which is eternal.”
It is not surprising that the Wilson sons found Amy’s presence in the house disturbing. Her relationship with their father was at least unusual, probably an interference with whatever communication they had had with him, and certainly an interruption to the routines they were used to. They did not welcome her, and she knew it, but years later, when missionary work thrust her into close quarters with others whose styles differed from hers and whose approval she did not win, she saw that this aspect of Broughton Grange had also been a part of her necessary training.
Amy helped in meetings of the Scripture Union on Tuesday evenings, where the Wilson sons participated. The fact that she was the one who usually gave the address and was immensely popular with the children who attended may not have enhanced the fellowship she had with the two men, any more than did her inviting a number of girls to the Grange on Saturdays. They would take over the library, play games, have a Bible class, tour the garden, and devour milk and gingerbread.
The year 1890 marks the first publication (unless we count Scraps) of a piece by Amy B. Carmichael. She made a tour of the villages of the Clyde with Miss Hannah Govan of the Faith Mission. Bright Words, the organ of the mission, carried Amy’s story about a shawlie, “Fightin’ Sail,” converted at The Welcome.
Amy always took note of spiritual milestones, keeping records of the dates on which God had met her in some special way. None marks a greater crisis than January 13, 1892. It was on that snowy Wednesday evening that the categorical imperative came, not just once but again and again: Go ye. The “rest from the cry of the heathen” for which she had prayed at Keswick four years before had been “only half answered,” and now it was clear that she was to go. But how could she? The D.O.M. needed her. She had taken it for granted that she would stay with him until he went to heaven, but “crashing through that thought came a word I could not escape and dare not resist.” How did the word come? Was it audible? Visible, like the handwriting on Belshazzar’s wall? Was it a deep impression on her impressionable mind? She had had a talk with her “Fatherie” that afternoon. She went back to her own room, and, as clearly as a human voice, she heard God say, GO YE. It was inescapable, irresistible.
Amy at Broughton Grange, about twenty-four.
The next day she sat down at the writing table in the beautiful old house. The house she could relinquish. The gorgeous view of the river and the gentle mountains she could do without. But the Dear Old Man? Yes, she could get along, by the grace of God, without his fatherly love. But could she break his heart? Simply walk out on the old man to whom she was light and comfort and joy? What of her mother?
“My Precious Mother,” she wrote, “Have you given your child unreservedly to the Lord for whatever He wills? . . . O may He strengthen you to say YES to Him if He asks something which costs.”
She wrote of “those dying in the dark, 50,000 of them every day,” of her own longing to tell them of Jesus, and her misgivings because of the claims of home, and of how, only a few days before, she had written down for herself the reasons for not going: her mother’s need of her, her “second father’s” need, the possibility that by staying she might facilitate others’ going, her poor health. Examining those reasons she wondered how God saw them. Were they good enough?
She could not finish the letter. It was too excruciating. Next day she tried again.
“I feel as though I had been stabbing someone I loved. . . . Through all the keen sharp pain which has come since Wednesday, the certainty that it was His voice I heard has never wavered, though all my heart has shrunk from what it means, though I seem torn in two.”
She quoted the words of Jesus, which cut deeply: “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it, and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.”2 He that loveth father or mother more than me is unworthy of me.”3 “To obey is better than sacrifice.”4
Faith does not eliminate questions. But faith knows where to take them. Amy must have spent many hours kneeling in that room, poring over her Bible, looking up to God with the questions: Who of her friends would understand? What if she should make a mistake and thus dishonor Him? Was the call mere fancy? What about leaving the D.O.M.? Might he die? But if she stayed would she not rob him of the greatest blessing? Her brothers and sisters—had she still some responsibility to help her mother with them? Health—was it foolhardy of her to imagine she could “take it” on the mission field? And money. Lord, what about money? And her widowed “Motherie.” What about her, Lord?
On January 16, in firm, clear handwriting, Mrs. Carmichael wrote, “My own Precious Child,
He who hath led will lead
All through the wilderness,
He who hath fed will surely feed. . . .
He who hath heard thy cry
Will never close His ear,
He who hath marked thy faintest sigh
Will not forget thy tear.
He loveth always, faileth never,
So rest on Him today—forever.
“Yes, dearest Amy, He has lent you to me all these years. He only knows what a strength, comfort and joy you have been to me. In sorrow He made you my staff and solace, in loneliness my more than child companion, and in gladness my bright and merry-hearted sympathizer. So, darling, when He asks you now to go away from within my reach, can I say nay? No, no, Amy, He is yours—you are His—to take you where He pleases and to use you as He pleases. I can trust you to Him and I do. . . . All day He has helped me, and my heart unfailingly says, ‘Go ye.’”
She wrote more—of the sufficient grace she could count on, of the everlasting love, of the smallness of life, of her willingness to give her child into the loving arms of God. As for Mr. Wilson, “God has his happiness in His keeping.”
Mr. Wilson wrote to comfort Mrs. Carmichael in the giving up of her “dear Child for the Lord’s work amongst the heathen. I know something of what it must cost you. . . . It hardly seems a case for anything but bowing the head in thankful acquiescence when the Lord speaks thus to one so dear. . . . The future seems changed to me. . . . She has been and is more than I can tell you to me, but not too sweet or too loving to present to Him who gave Himself for us.”
Sometimes Wilson comforted himself with the words about the colt Jesus had asked His disciples to fetch: “If any man say unto you, Why do ye this? say ye that the Lord hath need of him.”5 He needed Amy far more desperately, surely, than the man needed the colt. But it was the same Lord who asked for her. Who could say no?
1. Bishop Handley Moule, Thoughts on Christian Sanctity.
2. Matthew 16:24, 25.
3. Matthew 10:37.
4. 1 Samuel 15:22.
5. Mark 11:3.