12. The Jeweler: (1931-1951, The Father’s plan)
“He shall sit like a refiner and purifier of silver.”
Malachi 3:3
“How very beautiful these gems are! It is strange how deeply colors seem to penetrate one like scent. I suppose that is the reason why gems are used as spiritual emblems in Revelations. They look like fragments of heaven.”
George Eliot
12
The Jeweler
1931-1951, The Father’s plan
God works with souls like a jeweler works with gems. Once He finds and brings them to the Light, they are cut, polished, and placed in a setting of His choice.
In the natural state, diamonds appear as hard, irregular lumps that shine only with a greasy luster and not all with their finished brilliance. Their beauty is given them by the skill of the stonecutter, who grinds and polishes their surfaces so that they sparkle.
Not the size of a diamond, but the light reflected gives the stone its value. The Tiffany diamond, now valued at $2,000,000, was cut from 287.42 carets to 128.51 carets, with 90 facets, making it into a gemmy sun. When displayed in the Fifth Avenue store window it could be seen all the way across the avenue.
The only way the value of a diamond can be increased is by cutting. Experts in Paris studied the Tiffany diamond for one year before a single blow was struck in the cutting.
In the cutting of the Regent diamond, the most treasured of the French crown jewels, size was sacrificed for brilliancy. The standard fifty-eight facet cut sets off this most brilliant of stones, but the size decreased from 410 carets to 140.5 carets.
Diamond—crystalized carbon, the hardest substance in existence. It has been through the fire. The diamonds that reflect the most light have received the roughest treatment. Yet the greatest care is taken by the jeweler not to damage the stone in any way. Every flaw must be cut out, even a microscopic flaw.
From 1901 to 1931, Amy had been active and in “spare” time wrote twenty-two books. Then, in September 1931, she went to the Hindu town of Kalakadu, about four miles north of Dohnavur, to inspect a house called haunted, which was offered to them as an outpost for some of their workers. In her quiet time with the Lord that morning she had prayed, “Do with me as Thou wilt. Do anything, Lord, that will fit me to serve Thee and help my beloveds.”
That evening, while walking around the house at Kalakadu, God began to answer her prayer. She slipped and fell into a pit dug by coolies in the wrong spot. Her leg was broken, and her ankle dislocated. Acute neuritis later disabled one arm. Arthritic pain of the spine set in, and for twenty years she rarely left her room and was never without pain. Another fall in her room broke her hip and arm. The last two years of her life she could not get out of bed. The slightest moving was almost impossible, and drugs no longer controlled the constant pain.
Answered prayer? Amy had prayed, “Do anything, Lord.” And He continued to facet the diamond.
Her family, who had been used to seeing her hurry about her work like a hare, found it hard to accept the situation. Amy was still active, but her activity was confined to one room, and it was activity of the inner life.
“I think it is true to say that God used her pen for more widespread and deeper spiritual blessing during the post-accident period than in all the preceding years,” wrote Bishop Frank Houghton, an earlier biographer.
Her two books written “by the ill to the ill,” Rose From Briar and Gold by Moonlight, are classics in their field. In them she points out that God, our captain, does not shelve His soldiers as though they were cracked pottery. Soldiers are simply assigned to other tasks, some to suffer for His sake, some to wage war in a field of prayer.
Thirteen books were written after her accident, making a total of thirty-five. Her books were never “popular” in the sense that popular books are easy to read, titillating to the senses, with happy predictable endings. When she first saw them described in a catalogue as “popular,” “she was horrified. Popular? The books were written on a battlefield—are they being read only to satisfy curiosity and titillate imagination? She prayed that every book and letter that was sent out from Dohnavur would have blood and iron in it. Some people speak of ‘enjoying’ missions. Would they ‘enjoy’ watching a shipwreck?”
It was not easy to find publishers who would publish the truth. Amy never asked what the public wanted.
There were days when she worked on her writing thirteen hours straight, sometimes after sleepless nights. The “fellowship of His suffering” gave her later books great depth and beauty. Twelve of the books were put into Braille in England and eight for the Braille Circulating Library in the United States.
Always a lover of good books, Amy found plenty of time to read. She was familiar not only with the church Fathers and pioneers of all ages and nationalities, and great literature of all countries, but also with the Tamil authors and other Hindu literature.
She wrote poems and songs for her family, many of which were set to music.
“Which is harder?” she asked herself during those twenty years of confinement. “To be well and doing things? Or, to be ill and bearing things?” To fret and demand healing was foreign to her. Nor did she think of illness as a punishment for sin for a Christian who was walking in the light. Yet she longed to be done with weakness and pain forever.
Always observant and artistic, her love of color and nature appear in all her books. Nothing was too small to be noticed. Her sharp eye once saw and described in botanist’s language a miniature fugus, pale gold, with rings of deepening brown and fluted edges. She compared the pattern to that of a moth’s wing and found to her delight that they matched. Carefully she recorded the descriptions for the pleasure of the children.
For six years Amy had prayed for a house to rent in the Brahmin town of Kalakadu, and the prayer was finally answered. Then she prayed for just the right Christian man to live there and be a witness. The day she received the key to the house (the day of her fall), an old man, worn with travel, asked to spend the night at Dohnavur. The next day he told them he was a Christian, a Brahmin. His name was Triumph.
For seven years he had searched for peace, studying with a famous guru of Benares. One day he found the guru with an open Bible in his lap, reading the fourteenth chapter of John, tears streaming down his cheeks.
The guru turned to his pupil. “Have you found peace the seven years you read the Vedas?”
“No,” Triumph replied.
“You will never find it there,” said the guru. “I have found peace in the gospel of Jesus Christ, but I am afraid to confess Him before men.”
For many months the two men, teacher and pupil, read together from the Bible until the scales fell completely from their eyes. God led Triumph to travel until he stopped overnight at Dohnavur.
Surely he is the answer to our prayer, thought Amy. She gave him the key to the house in Kalakadu, and he lived there a few months. Then diabetes seized him, the dry heat making him worse. He was subject to delusions and could no longer witness. He returned to his own town, and Kalakadu was left without a witness.
Months passed, and a sick man was brought in to the Dohnavur hospital from Kalakadu. He told how he had been won to Christ by Triumph. Surely the answer to our prayer this time, Amy thought.
Before he could even begin a ministry, a mind-destroying drug was slipped into his drink, and he went mad. The recovery room of the hospital was only fifty yards from Amy’s room, and she could hear his terrible cries night and day, like “the powers of darkness shouting in triumph.” At last the noise stopped; the man was dead.
Amy had prayed that God would enable her to do more for her family—then the fall into the pit. She prayed six years for a convert to work in Kalakadu—then came the disabling of the only man who could have done this. A convert from Kalakadu was finally found—then came his death.
She ran from the thought that the Father did anything that needed to be explained. “Faith never wonders why,” she often quoted, and now she was called upon to practice what she told others.
One day Amy asked the nurse who cared for her what were the chief trials of sick people. “Monotony; the same room, the same routine, the same food, the same faces, the same sounds, the same pain.” And Amy remembered the Lord Jesus Christ hanging helpless on His cross, when a day seemed as a thousand. “In all points tempted like as we are” (Hebrews 4:15). She often read this verse and commented: “Unrecorded experiences of suffering lie there.”
Thousands of years ago there was a battle fought whose outcome was determined by the prayer of one who could not fight, but could only lift his hands in prayer (Exodus 17:8-16). Victory was given by God, not because of valiant soldiers, excellent weapons, nourishing food and drink, or favoring weather, but because of one who prayed.
The priesthood of the believer had always been active in Amy’s life, but now she could give herself to it unreservedly. Prayer provides laborers for the harvest, the Bible teaches (Matthew 9:37-38), and more and more workers were added to Dohnavur as Amy prayed. Prayer throws light on the problem of pointless pain. Some Scripture can be understood only by identical experience with it.
On one of her worst days, Amy imagined the Lord’s saying to her, “It is finished.” Though aching to hear such words, she borrowed a few lines from an old poem and told of the regret that would flood her soul.
“Thou wouldst say, ‘So soon?
Let me go back and suffer yet a while
More patiently; I have not yet praised God.’”
To the very end, on January 18, 1951, the radiating diamond that was her life reflected the Light that lights the world.