2. The Miner: (1867-1888, Ireland, England, Japan)
“Mining means digging into the earth for treasures that have been hidden from man since the world began. A world without sunlight … a world of tunnels and passageways … crevices … pits and hiding places.”
A mining engineer
“So you are going to India? How romantic!”
A friend
2
The Miner
1867-1888, Ireland, England, Japan
The village of Perungulam where Pearleyes lived was just across a shallow river from Pannaivilai, where Amy lived, but Pearleyes knew nothing of this. She had decided to go home to Tuticorin twenty miles away, find her mother, throw her arms around her neck, and say, “Mother, mother, do not give me back to the temple! Oh, my own mother, keep me safe!”
She actually did walk almost twenty miles on bare, brown feet. Twice she was given a short ride in a bandy. But the temple woman followed, for no child is unwanted in India; each one is valuable to someone. The mother feared the gods, tore the child’s arms from her neck, and gave her back to the temple woman.
“You are seven years old now,” the evil woman said when they returned to Perungulam. “You shall be married to the god as soon as possible.”
Never in her most awful dreams could the child imagine all that was meant, but she was terrified. One evening she ran across the temple courtyard and into the dark inner shrine where the ugly idol sat in a recess in the wall, a dim oil lamp flickering before him.
Bowing herself on to her face, she prayed to die. “O great and strong god, let me die!”
Seven years old, and she prayed to die.
Amy Carmichael was born December 16, 1867, in Northern Ireland, in the village of Millisle, facing the Irish Sea. She was the oldest of seven children.
The Carmichael flour mills, owned by her father, David, and her uncle William, gave employment to the people in town. Some of the mill profit helped build a school, provided night classes for employees, and sponsored evangelistic services on Sunday nights.
As a child, Amy learned to love the sounds and ever-changing colors of the sea, the flowers in the garden, all living things. In fact, she rearranged her doll house by sweeping out all the miniature furniture and little mannequins and moving in beetles, mice, moss, froglets, and pretty stones.
She was the leader in all sorts of mischief, harmless and otherwise. One day when she and her two brothers were swinging on the garden gate, Amy looked at the laburnum tree and remembered that the pods were poisonous.
“Let’s see how many we can eat before we die,” she said. The little boys happily agreed. The children stuffed themselves, but fortunately Mother found them in time and administered an abominable medicine guaranteed to bring up the pods.
When Amy was three years old she prayed earnestly that her brown eyes would turn to blue, her favorite color. She fell asleep confidently. Her mother had said, “God always answers prayer.”
In the morning she ran to the mirror, never doubting the miracle, but the God who could see far down the years to her adventurous excursions into the underworld of India, had answered for her best good. He said no.
Born into a Christian family, growing up with a background of two-hour church services, long prayer meetings, a strict atmosphere in which only psalms were sung on Sundays, Amy developed a strong faith but also a rebellious will against any formalized religion that did not encourage a child-Father relationship with the Almighty. When she stood alone in India, especially in the early days of the Dohnavur Fellowship, her Christian life was stripped of entanglements and utterly simple—a child depending upon a heavenly Father.
Until age ten, Amy studied at home with a governess and was free to swim, ride, and visit neighbors, taking them great pots of homemade soup from her mother’s kitchen. Next to the minister’s house lived a missionary on furlough from India, and Amy often begged to hear stories of that land, never dreaming she would someday become a mother to almost a thousand Indian children.
Soldanella, age ten, was one of those children. She was a child-wife with a malicious mother-in-law who schemed to use the beautiful little girl to win promotion for her son. She dressed the child in light green silk, with a darker green spun with gold thread for the border of her sari, decorated her with jewels and bangles, a tiny gem by one nostril to draw attention to the delicate nose.
A carriage conveyed her, a captive bird, to the office of her husband’s boss. Fearful, her heart-sounds making her feel faint and light-headed, Soldanella climbed the stairs and passed a glass window. “If he tries to touch me, I will break that window and eat the glass,” she vowed.
She knew nothing of God, nor did she believe in the old gods. A Power she had never heard of protected her that hour, and she did not eat glass.
Though only ten years old, she was an intelligent child. She knew enough to ask a lawyer how long she would have to wait before she could escape to the place called Dohnavur where they protected children.
“Six years,” the lawyer said. She must resist evil, resist and resist and suffer and wait for six years. And she was only ten years old!
When Amy was eleven years old, in 1880, she was sent to a Wesleyan Methodist boarding school in Yorkshire. She began to write poems then.
She was considered a rebellious, wild, Irish girl, often in trouble with the headmistress, but “there wasn’t a teacher I didn’t love.” A staunch Presbyterian, attending a Methodist school, later greatly influenced by her Quaker friend, Robert Wilson, helping in his Baptist Sunday school, yet appreciating the Church of England liturgy, Amy came at last to drop labels and to accept all born-again ones as part of God’s family.
When Amy was thirteen a visiting speaker gave his message to the assembled girls, then asked them to bow their heads and sing “Jesus Loves Me.” During the quiet minutes that followed something happened to Amy. She had always known the gospel story, but this time it was personal, and she invited the Lord Jesus into her life. Some years afterward she found words to describe her experience.
Upon a life I did not live,
Upon a death I did not die,
Another’s life, Another’s death,
I stake my whole eternity.
When her father died in 1885, the family was living in Belfast, and Amy was called upon to be her mother’s companion and almost a second mother to the younger children. There was a great famine in China at the time, and Amy remembered that her mother, a widow with seven children, yearned to go as a missionary.
One rainy Sunday morning Amy and her two brothers were returning home from church when they passed an elderly woman struggling with a heavy package. On an impulse, Amy turned to help her. This meant facing all the proper church people walking in prim rows home to Sunday dinner. Eyebrows lifted and knowing looks passed across faces. Didn’t this constitute working on Sunday?
Amy, red-faced and very embarrassed, held onto one elbow of the poor old woman and helped her carry the bundle. As she helped her across the street and up the curb, a verse came alive like a flash of light:
“Gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble; every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is. If any man’s work abide …” (1 Corinthians 3:12-14).
She could have sworn a voice shouted the last part, “If any man’s work abide,” and she stopped and looked around. There was no one in the street now. But she knew something had happened that had changed her values. Nothing would ever matter again but the things that were eternal.
She was seventeen years old. That afternoon she kept to her room in prayer. After that, everyone saw the change. She threw herself into service for God, visited homes, held children’s meetings, taught night school in slums, organized a morning watch of prayer and Bible reading, started a schoolgirl’s prayer meeting, and volunteered at the YWCA.
In September 1886, she visited Glasgow, Scotland, and attended a deeper-life convention. The atmosphere was foggy—fog inside the auditorium, fog across the rows of people, and a bit of fog in her own heart. For months she had been struggling to live a “good” Christian life and be holy. Had she not many excellent works to recommend her?
It was all demolished in the last line of the speaker’s prayer, the only part she remembered: “Now unto Him Who is able to keep us from falling” (Jude 24). He does the keeping! He keeps from falling!
She and her friend dined in a restaurant, and the mutton chops were served quite rare. Her friend complained. All Amy could think of was, “He is able to keep us from falling!”
Back home in Belfast, the time of mourning and wearing black for her father was over, and her mother took her shopping for new clothes and party dresses. Amy needed clothes, but—party dresses? She shook her head. Life was short, and she didn’t want to waste any of it.
In Belfast there lived thousands of girls and women who worked in factories and were nicknamed “shawlies” since they could not afford coats or hats but bundled up in big plaid shawls through all kinds of weather.
“Go to church? Who, me? And what’d the smart toffs say if they found a ‘shawlie’ in their seat?”
Amy paid a visit to the minister of Rosemary Street Presbyterian Church and asked permission to hold a meeting for shawlies only. It was a daring, new idea, but he agreed.
“That Amy Carmichael is a headstrong one, she is,” the church folks said. “Those dirty, rough mill girls weren’t made for church-going. They wouldn’t understand sermons or hymns.” And the officials of the church were most uneasy over the very thought of such goings-on.
Amy had already been visiting in the slums and made friends with the girls. Her brother Ernest worked in a railroad shop in that very area and told her the details of crime and poverty the shawlies had to face.
Amy led the shawlies’ church service, and it grew until it overflowed the church, and she realized they needed a hall that would seat at least 500. An iron hall could be erected for 500 pounds provided they had a piece of land to put it on. They had neither money nor land. Amy visited a businessman, one of the biggest mill owners, and asked the price of his land. He gladly gave the land, charging a token yearly rental sum of less than one dollar.
“Shall we ask the minister to take a special offering for the money to buy the hall?” asked one of Amy’s co-workers. “There are many wealthy people in the church who could give that amount and never miss it.”
Amy thought it over, then said, “Don’t you think God could make His own people want to give without being asked? The Bible tells us to ask Him, and not to beg. It would be safer just to pray. If he answers, we will know it is His will to build the hall.”
No one had set a precedent for Amy. She had never heard of anyone who secretly prayed for money and received it. With her friends she prayed every day, kneeling in a church pew, while one elder stood in the doorway, keeping an anxious eye on “that Carmichael girl” and her queer escapades.
Shortly after, Amy was invited to dine with a Miss Kate Mitchell, whom she had never met. Miss Mitchell wanted to hear all about the shawlies and Amy’s work. Two days later, Amy received the 500 pounds for the hall from the lady. “The Welcome” hall was built and dedicated, and evangelistic services begun by two of D. L. Moody’s students.
“That in all things He may have the preeminence” was the motto hanging on the front wall. Every night souls were saved. “The Welcome” was open seven days a week as Amy planned services, sewing clubs, choir practice, reading lessons, and mothers’ meetings for the girls.
When Amy was twenty-one she was asked to begin another mission work in Ancoats, Manchester, among factory girls. Since “The Welcome” was thriving under the leadership of Miss Mitchell, Amy agreed. Her mother accompanied her and took a position as lady superintendent of a rescue mission. All the money left by Amy’s father had been lost. Amy herself rented a room in the slums, a filthy room crawling with little creatures. Her meals were oranges and tomatoes eaten while reading a book to save time.
One night a gang of men followed her, surrounded her, and she was saved from being molested by a woman who ran out from her home and dragged Amy inside. But the front door hung on a broken hinge, and only a white sheet hastily hung in the doorway stood between Amy and danger.
Only a sheet! It might well have been a stone wall thirty feet thick, for Amy enjoyed divine protection.
God had given Amy a pattern upon which to build a Christian work, as she studied the book of Ezra.
“The adversaries … said, Let us build with you” (Ezra 4:1-2).
“We ourselves together will build” (Ezra 4:3).
“Then ceased the work of the house of God” (Ezra 4:24).
Later, “Who commanded you to build this house?” (Ezra 5:9).
“We are the servants of the God of heaven and earth” (Ezra 5:11).
“Let the house be builded …” (Ezra 6:3).
“And let the expenses be given out of the king’s house” (Ezra 6:4).
“Unpractical!” was the cry of many of God’s people to this type of building, but Amy held fast to the pattern to the end of her life.
“It is enough to ask the Father only for money for His work.” And she added that only those determined to build in gold, silver, and precious stones should be allowed to help.
Amy plunged right into the mission work in An-coats, but she learned a hard lesson that caused her to write in later years, “The secret of going on is getting away.” She skimped on sleep and nourishing food, and finally her health broke down, and she was obliged to give up all work.
Just at this time, a sixty-year-old Christian gentleman, Robert Wilson, whose wife and only daughter had died, invited Amy to Broughton Grange for a rest. He was one of the founders of the Keswick Convention and a speaker at such meetings. Broughton Grange was a chosen school, Amy said, in which great spiritual lessons were to be learned before she could be used as God planned.
She learned to “be a deep well, a deep well doesn’t talk,” since she took care of Mr. Wilson’s correspondence and knew the secrets and problems of many people. Listening to his teaching, she learned how to illustrate a talk with a vivid anecdote. She learned to live under disapproval and remain quiet, since Mr. Wilson’s sons did not welcome her at Broughton Grange.
During this time D. L. Moody spoke at the Keswick Convention, and afterward he and Mr. Wilson strolled down the street together. Suddenly Mr. Moody stopped talking, for his voice was breaking. He repeated the text he had just preached on. “Son, thou art ever with Me, and all that I have is thine.”
“I never saw it before,” he said. “Oh, the love! God’s love!”
Tears rained down his cheeks, and Amy never forgot that spiritual truth, “All that I have is thine.” It reinforced her faith that God knew her needs before she asked and wanted to supply them by faith. Not in any other way.
At Keswick she had prayed for rest from the knowledge that thousands of souls every day died without Christ, and that God would make her glad to stay at home and send others. Not once did it occur to her that God might send her.
“Come over and help us” became a cry to her personally on a snowy evening in 1892. “He says Go—I cannot stay,” she wrote to her mother. Still, she felt as though she stabbed to death the dear old man who was her second father. Amy, frail in health, subject to neuralgia and headaches, the financial support of her widowed mother who was left with seven children, the least likely to pioneer in a pagan land, was called by God. An old, oft-repeated story. God uses nobodies, foolish things, things that are nothing. For so she considered herself.
And her brave mother’s reply was to go. Her heart echoed God’s command.
Was it not cruel and a betrayal of trust to desert dear Mr. Wilson? Amy said nothing to the storm of misunderstanding from his relatives, but it hurt. Was this storm sent to prepare her for greater storms later? She would need the preparation.
Her own aunts misunderstood. They thought she was drawn by love of travel and adventure, yearning for a change. People in general considered it a terrible mistake.
“It will mean Mr. Wilson’s death,” said leaders in the Keswick movement, renowned Bible teachers, and their words tore her heart. After many years she realized that one must expect to be misjudged—Christ was.
In 1888 the Keswick Mission Committee was organized, and Amy was its first missionary. She had applied to the China Inland Mission, but its doctor rejected her. A year passed. The way seemed open for Japan, and Amy worked hard there but after fifteen months broke down with brain exhaustion, fever, and pain.
She tormented herself with questions: Had she made a mistake? Couldn’t she have done so much more in the same time at home?