11. Crown Jewels: (1900-1935, The Father’s silence)
“And they shall be mine, saith the Lord of Hosts, in that day when I make up my jewels.”
Malachi 3:17
“Our Heavenly Father never takes any earthly thing from His children except He means to give them something better instead.”
George Mueller
11
Crown Jewels
1900-1935, The Father’s silence
“Why this waste?” Over and over the question came to Amy, her co-workers, to other Christians watching, who saw babies and children sicken and die after their rescue or saw other converts mature spiritually, then die just when they reached the point of being most usable. Was it all as water spilled on the ground?
A co-worker of Amy’s traveled over 1,000 miles to save a baby boy who died a week later of diabetes. She had left on a Monday morning, traveled by bandy, bus, and train, changing twelve times before she reached Dohnavur late on Thursday. The best part of a week spent—for what?
“We never refuse a baby, and we can never stop hoping,” Amy said. Children were lost by as little as a one-half hour delay. There was no time for questions such as “Was the mother healthy? Who was the father? Is the baby intelligent? What is the background?” Temple women did not ask questions, and they never refused a baby.
One three-day-old baby came as a complete surprise to Amy when the faithful Devai arrived in the middle of a night in a jingling bandy. Devai moved so quickly in the rescue that there hadn’t been time to pray. The baby was beautiful with fair skin, and the mother had hidden her in a clay pot when Devai came to visit. “But earthen pots cannot hide from the eyes of the Lord,” explained Devai, and she pleaded until God broke through caste and cruelty, and the mother finally said, “Let the Christians have the babe.” She was healthy-looking but in a few days was gone from them.
Why? Amy could only try and gather comfort from the thought She died with us and not with them. “Given,” she wrote the word alongside a date; then “taken,” and another date. Her book was full of such recordings. “We live in the twilight of short knowledge,” she wrote, and when one does not understand, one who trusts God is content to wait.
One of the merriest little persons who ever lived, Heart’s Joy, starved to death because a special nutrient she took ran short, and the fresh supply was one day too late. “The torture of second causes is as the blackness of darkness,” wrote Amy of that time.
Sometimes death was an answer to prayer. Death saved the child from sin. Lala was such a child. Five years old, with tiny hands and feet, elbows softly rounded like a conch shell, she was sent by friends to Dohnavur. Then her father, up to no good, demanded her back. Amy sent for a bandy, packed a bag of clothes for Lala, put a doll and a few candies into her hand, and parted with her.
Lala, gentle and trusting, would never be able to withstand pressure. Amy feared for her. She prayed that the child would either return safe to Dohnavur or be taken away from the evil her father planned for her.
Lala left in excellent health, but when she returned to the cold air of the hills she developed pneumonia. She died suddenly, after only a few days’ illness. A pagan woman later meeting Amy told what she heard.
Lala said just before she died, “I am Jesus’ child. I see three Shining Ones in my room. I am not afraid.”
When the day came that Amy knew she must turn from ordinary missionary work to “carve a path through the jungle” of the secret trade in children, Ponnammal was her loyal stay. Ponnammal, too, saw the perishing children. A three-page official letter of criticism had come from England. Did they actually think Amy could stop praying that children be saved or refuse them when they were saved?
The three greatest losses of her life (after Walker Iyer, who died in 1912) were Ponnammal, her dearest companion in the faith; Arulai, whom she had trained to take over the women’s work after she was gone; and Kohila, a young nurse whose wonderful rescue in childhood had foretold a great future for the Lord’s work.
Ponnammal, her companion for eight years with the Starry Cluster, stood by her loyally. When Amy’s health broke down it was Ponnammal who worked along in the Neyyoor nursery, through epidemics of smallpox and bacillary dysentery. “If another baby dies, we shall know the blessing of God is not on this work,” said the only two women helping, and they prepared to leave.
Babies died, sometimes two in a day. Ponnammal was left with all the responsibility of mixing a different formula for each baby, besides the routine nursing. Can anyone who has had a sick, crying child in the home imagine what it was to have seventy such children all with fevers of 106°?
Just then two evil men who lived next to the nursery began to tempt the young convert girls and made Ponnammal’s life a nightmare. Finally, after two and a half years at Neyyoor, Ponnammal returned to Dohnavur, bringing the babies. In her absence, a new nursery had been built. Still, apart from Mabel Wade, a trained nurse, they had no help and seldom enjoyed a full night’s sleep. And this was the tropics! Amy sent letters to all the Christian pastors of South India: “Do you know of any Christian women who will help us, for love of God, living by faith?”
No such women exist anywhere in the church,” the replies came back.
Amy and Ponnammal neared the breaking point again, worn by heat and worry, made worse every time Ponnammal left on a trip to save a child. She would return exhausted and weakened, her tiredness spilling out after hours in the noisy trains, sometimes traveling all night long in the aching, suffocating heat.
“Let us work until we drop,” she told Amy, “but let us not lower our standards.”
One Indian Christian who stayed with them a short time took care of the babies for six days, but when Sunday came, with her Bible under her arm she marched off to church leaving five screaming infants unfed, while a dozen others demanded diaper changes. “I go to do God’s work,” she said, as though the babies could be stored on shelves and left by themselves until Monday.
Other women stayed only a few days when they realized the work was “holy drudgery.”
Ponnammal, being highly organized, took over the baffling details connected with housekeeping in India, in addition to all her other work. Dohnavur was not near stores or market places. Rice, coconut, salt, sugar, oil, rope, and many other things must be purchased in quantity, after much haggling, all governed by petty, unreasonable laws and customs.
Her day began before dawn, after being up part of the night, when she mixed the food for the more delicate babies. “Oh, Lord, You know the insides of this little one. Guide my hand.” More than one very sick child was brought back from the door of death because Ponnammal followed divine instruction rather than the directions on the label.
Five-thirty A.M. was prayer time with the convert girls who were learning to care for babies. Next, the milk sellers arrived, and she tested and measured milk, keeping a sharp eye open for trickery. One baby died two hours after drinking milk accidentally poisoned by a careless seller.
Medicines for ailing babies were worked out in great precision by Ponnammal as well as medicine for the village people who asked for help.
The only time she disagreed with Amy was over fresh air. Any Indian knew night air was poisonous, that it was best to board up every door and window at night. When her own daughter came home from boarding school with tubercular trouble, Ponnammal tried the open-air theory. Purripu recovered, grew strong and healthy, and Ponnammal no longer worried about the babies breathing night air.
Bible class with the young girls followed around noon, then an hour’s rest in the hot part of the afternoon, provided there was no ill baby to claim her attention. Twilight, cow-dust time. The evening milk sellers reappeared, and the whole tiring routine must be patiently endured again.
Ponnammal had the ability to get workmen to work. One morning Amy eavesdropped and heard her bargaining with the head carpenter, a young man of weedy arms and legs.
“I cannot work without an advance of money,” he said pitifully, lower lip drooping. “I have a large family.” Heart-rending words, like oil wrung from the olive.
“Very well, I will pay you fifty annas now and fifty when the work is done.”
The feather of a smile touched his eyes. He took the money and gulped water from a tin dipper. “O worthy one, I will begin as soon as I return from my grandmother’s funeral.”
“You gave that excuse last month!”
“Pardon, O speaker of truth. This is the other grandmother.”
“Two months ago, you told me she—”
The carpenter made a polite little bow and prudently changed his story. “Pardon, I have forgotten. I must attend my niece’s wedding tamasha (celebration). I will be back promptly, so speedily, knowing one, that you will never miss me.”
Two weeks passed. No carpenter. Ponnammal paid three coolies to fan out and look for him in all the nearest villages. By the time he was found, the money that was to have been his wages had been paid to the coolies who found him.
He worked two full days in a row, taking only six naps. Then “O wise and discerning one, my elder brother’s wife’s sister has eaten a fever—”
Amy was more than glad to leave the hiring to Ponnammal.
Ponnammal shared Amy’s attitude toward money; it had no power over her. God had authorized the work, so they looked to God alone. It was easier for them to have faith than to worry.
There was, however, anxiety about the continual additions to the family, especially after the death of Walker Iyer. He knew India as other Englishmen could not. His sympathy and wisdom had bolstered Amy’s courage countless times. But how could they stop growing when God added to their number almost daily?
Seven months after Walker Iyer’s death from ptomaine poisoning, Ponnammal was stricken down by cancer. For two years and five months she suffered. Operations, treatment, and medicine gave only temporary relief.
The aspirin supply ran out one day in May in the worst of the hot season when the other workers were taking a much-needed rest at the Forest House high in the mountains. Amy substituted another medicine, which proved worthless. She wired immediately to a supply place, but five long days passed before it arrived. Ponnammal was without medicine in the last stages of cancer. She lay in torment, not even able to speak. Afterward, she described the experience. “When the pain was at its worst the Lord Himself stood by me and set a boundary for the pain.”
She dreamed one night that she was sinking in a river, snagged in weeds. When she called out, instantly the Lord Himself lifted her, and she began to sing praise and hosannas along with a heavenly choir.
She soon needed larger doses of drugs, as the pain increased. During her last weeks her room was kept darkened and quiet. Three of the noisiest, most active little tots—Tara, Evu, and Lullitha—came one at a time and sat for an hour in perfect silence by Ponnammal’s bed, such was the peace that reigned in the room.
One day Ponnammal’s father and the village barber visited. “How long has she to live?” demanded the old father in a loud voice.
Ponnammal’s sense of humor rose above her pain, and she burst out laughing.
The two men stared. They had never seen a dying person who had no fear. The barber was most disapproving. The proper treatment, in his opinion, would have been a poultice of wild pig tusk, rhinoceros horn, tiger claw, and a little pulverized silver. Ponnammal spoke a few words of the One in Whom she had confidence, but the words were unnecessary. The men had seen “the sermon written in her face.”
On August 26, 1915, it was night on earth, but for Ponnammal it was day. And the night was filled with voices singing, “Her warfare is accomplished.”
Arulai was ten years old when she first heard of a God who could change a person’s disposition. She was a child with a bad temper who often prayed, “Great Siva, change me.”
Nature was smiling that day, an azure sky overhead, when Arulai on her way to draw water heard Walker Iyer preaching by the roadside. “There is a living God! He turned me, a lion, into a lamb!” he cried, and Arulai stopped dead. Who could he mean? Listening further she heard of Jesus Lord, then she noticed Amy in Indian dress. She felt strongly drawn to her.
“If only she knew how much I want to learn about the living God she would ask me to live with her and be her little girl.”
Arulai eventually was permitted to stay with Amy, and after much personal suffering caused by family problems and the loss of Supu, whom she might have married, Arulai traveled with Amy.
Arulai’s name meant Star of Grace. Stars shine forever. Arulai never looked back or regretted, once she set her hand to the plow. God’s grace kept her steady.
When she was only fifteen years old she spoke to an audience of thousands of people at a gathering of the Syrian Church in South India. Forty years of service were poured out upon the children’s work, and Amy felt sure Arulai was to be the leader of the women after her own passing. It was not to be.
Arulai fell ill in 1935, and though she was able to translate a few of Amy’s books into Tamil, she could not leave her bed.
Amy called May 24, 1936, “Arulai’s Celestial Birthday.” There was no other Indian Christian woman to take Arulai’s place, and Amy had been looking forward to Indian leadership. And she was gone. But Amy had to remember Dohnavur was built by God.
Satan seemed to say, “You see, you have had to fall back.”
Amy replied, “Then we fall back upon God.”
In December 1942, four-year-old Kohila, described by Amy as “a small brown Skye terrier with curls,” arrived at Dohnavur after some frightening experiences. A few days of love and petting made a difference, and she settled easily into nursery life with 200 other children. The spiritual training of another child for soldiership began.
Kohila went with Amy and the other children to sing in nearby villages and helped distribute Bible verse cards. A few weeks later her guardians demanded her return. When Amy refused to send the child back to the destruction waiting for her, they brought a criminal case against Amy.
Amy called the workers together and said bluntly, “I really do not expect to be with you a week from now.” A conviction of the kidnapping charge meant seven years’ imprisonment. A faithful worker at Dohnavur, Arul Dasan, offered to help “disappear” Kohila and hurriedly took her hundreds of miles away to missionaries who sheltered her for the next five months.
The law of the land was good, it deterred crime, but Amy knew the law had not been framed with the knowledge of children in moral danger. No laws existed at all for their protection. She recognized a higher Law against which she dared not sin.
Amy was sure they all faced prison because of little Kohila’s case. But, “There arose a great storm … and he arose” (Mark 4:37,39). The very day after she wrote those words, a telegram arrived. “Criminal case dismissed.”
Kohila grew up and became a schoolgirl. Lessons did not come easy to her, but she studied hard until she mastered every difficulty. She accepted Christ as Savior when she was eleven.
When she was seventeen she became an accal in the nursery prior to training as a hospital nurse.
“Next to helping people, what do you think was her greatest pleasure?” Amy asked a friend of Kohila’s.
“I think it was singing.”
Kohila became head nurse at Dohnavur. “Love for others was her last thought,” wrote a sittie who worked with her. Kohila always took on the difficult cases or offered to work with a difficult nurse. Kohila always volunteered to miss the treat, if a substitute was needed.
Kohila had set her heart on gathering purple flowers to decorate another nurse’s room on her Coming Day, and she hiked up a mountain ravine and climbed a steep rock slope. Halfway up, her foot slipped, and she fell headlong. Shortly after the accident, she died.
A faithful head nurse gone. An overworked, short-handed hospital staff. “Carried by angels,” was all Amy had the heart to write in her diary, alongside the date.
Gone, four of the finest—Walker Iyer, Ponnammal, Arulai, Kohila. There could be no futile crying of “Why?" for Amy. She had learned to accept the silence of God.