13. Working Through Pain

13.

WORKING THROUGH PAIN

Amy writhed in the freshly dug earth.

She was at the bottom of a pit, which had been dug where she hadn’t expected it. Her hands clutched the sandy soil to fight the pain in her ankle. It was severely sprained, perhaps broken. But where was help? Where were the Sitties? Where was her driver? Where were the villagers, who had always scrutinized the activity at the house since the Fellowship began renovating it? She clawed up the walls of her pit to get upright, taking care to keep weight off the injured ankle. Upright, she felt joy. Praise God she had not broken her neck. Hands suddenly lifted her from the pit and gently stretched her out.

“Thank you,” she said in Tamil.

“The demon struck you down, memsahib,” said a man in awe.

Why argue? Maybe it was true. She spotted her driver among the faces. “Please get word to Dohnavur I’ve had an accident,” she groaned.

“Right away!”

Tears streamed down the faces of Amy’s Sitties. “Praise God this did not happen to May Parker,” she comforted them.

The pain grew. Two hours later, May Powell arrived in a truck. Now Amy understood as never before what the appearance of medical help meant to these Indians. Medical people seemed absolutely angelic. And how the Lord must love these willing workers. By now her ankle felt like a great melon, the skin about to burst.

After a few minutes of examination, May Powell said, “We must take you to Neyyoor. The ankle must be X-rayed at the London Mission Society Hospital.”

So off into the black night they rumbled the forty-six miles to Neyyoor on a “road” built up between rice paddies. Ronald Proctor drove the truck. May Powell and Mary Mills, a nurse, comforted Amy during the bumpy ride. Rain was making the road even more treacherous. Once the truck shot across a washout, hurling every passenger into the air as it struck the other side. Amy’s injuries were battered even more. Yet it seemed a miracle the truck did not overturn into a flooded field. It was Sunday evening by the time the ankle was X-rayed in Neyyoor. Howard Somervell, the fearless missionary who had helped Amy rescue a girl more than thirty years before, was one of the doctors who attended her. Amy was being prepared for surgery. The anesthesiologist was holding the ether mask. Amy had learned her leg was broken above the ankle.

“How long before I’m walking about again?” asked Amy.

Doctor Somervell said, “The ankle must be in splints for eight weeks. Let us pray: ‘Oh, Lord, make this ankle strong enough to bear burdens again.’”

Oh yes. Amy prayed, too. The mask for the ether was put on her face. Psalm 6 expressed her concern perfectly: “Have mercy upon me, O LORD; for I am weak: O LORD, heal me; for my bones are vexed.” But wait. Had the good doctor evaded her question? He hadn’t actually said she would be walking, had he?

The next day, Amy groaned involuntarily as the pain-numbing morphine wore off. “If only I could take your pain from you,” sighed Mary Mills.

GOD’S WORDS FROM SCRIPTURE HAD JUST COME TO HER, AS THEY SO OFTEN DID.

Amy blurted, “Your joy no man taketh from you.”

God’s words from scripture had just come to her, as they so often did. With Mary’s help, the passage was found in the sixteenth chapter of the book of John:

A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow, because her hour is come: but as soon as she is delivered of the child, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world. And ye now therefore have sorrow: but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you.

So there it was. This agony was the birth of some joy.

Back in Dohnavur, on November 3, the pain subsided, which allowed her doctors to wean Amy off the morphine. Too much use was habit-forming. But then the pain returned. And it grew in intensity. The ache remained day after day. Then week after week. Was the ankle not mending properly? Was it infected? In any event the pain robbed her of her sleep. Amy spent her sixty-fourth birthday in her room, quite unable to do anything but lie in bed and try to read, though her mind was befuddled and exhausted from lack of sleep. Her visitors were allowed a mere fifteen seconds to wish her well. The others began to sense that the injuries were much worse than voiced by the doctors.

On Christmas Day, carols were sung outside her room. On January 4, 1932, the council requested three solid hours of prayer by the Fellowship. Amy actually did seem to improve. She was well enough to be transported about in the automobile to survey various projects. When Dr. Somervell visited in February, he seemed satisfied with her progress. But sometimes she felt she was not mending well at all. Had inactivity allowed the years of unceasing toil to catch up with the Musal?

In July she confessed in a letter, “Sometimes I think the kind of tiredness that comes after such years as those that lie behind could never be rested anywhere but There.”¹ What an admission. No real rest until Paradise!

But usually she was as convinced as everyone else she was on the mend. Every advance was noted. Six steps one day. Ten steps another day. Went for a drive in the automobile. Walked out on the verandah. Walked down the steps to the prayer room. This great accomplishment was just before her sixty-fifth birthday. She certainly didn’t waste her time, even though she had not one night of real sleep since the accident. For a long time, friends had urged her to write a history of Dohnavur. Besides being an artist with words, only Amy had the knowledge to readily synthesize such an enormous amount of activity. Yes, it was all recorded but scattered in eighteen books and thousands of letters.

“So I will weave all the stories together as the Gold Cord,” she promised.

As if Amy didn’t have enough to do, she now pecked out on the typewriter the Daily Manna for distribution within the Fellowship. The creation of this daily spiritual aid was of course spurred by the fact that she could not circulate to mother her flock as she had done for so many years. She expressed her lament once to Murray. “I do pray to be out of bonds at least so as to be able to be at meals and about the house. I think many trials of various kinds could be avoided if only the Family could be a bit more ‘mothered.’ After all, it’s a mere matter of ‘buffering,’ spiritual ‘buffering.’”²

An example of her spiritual buffering in the Daily Manna read:

Have we any prayer like “use me, O Lord” in the Bible?…[No] I could not find any such prayer…[I] find every other verb occurring in prayer—teach me, lead me, bless me, and so on—but not this verb which we would naturally expect.…The Captain will use the soldier if he be prepared for use; words of beseeching on the soldier’s part are not required.…³

The next day in the Daily Manna she expanded her thoughts:

I have three pens, one for ordinary writing, one a little finer, and one for fine work like corrections.…The pens are always ready for use, “very usable.” Even so, just as a fountain pen is all the better for being sometimes left under water, so our souls do often need to be bathed afresh in the love of God…And we are given one day in seven for something of this sort.…⁴

The Daily Manna by no means replaced the very personal letters she sent to individuals in the compound. About this time she wrote:

All our love flows from His heart of love. We are like little pools on the rocks of Joppa. You know how we have watched the great sea washing over them and flooding them till they overflow. That is what the love of God does for us. We have no love ourselves.…⁵

The year 1932 also saw the Indian struggle against British domination continue. Gandhi—now called the Mahatma, or “great soul”—and thirty-five thousand others of the National Congress were imprisoned. Confusing nearly everyone, Gandhi protested the British announcement that they would allow the Untouchable caste to hold their own separate elections so that they could have representatives in the provincial legislatures. Gandhi said if this were done, he would starve himself to death in prison!

“Gandhi believes the British will institutionalize the Untouchables with this supposedly generous gesture,” some-one explained.

In fact, Gandhi railed against discrimination of Untouchables by Hindus. Still, one could never be sure what Gandhi would do next. He seemed utterly original. In his unpredictable way, he said he didn’t care a whit for what he had said twenty years before; he cared only for truth. He knew the Sermon on the Mount by heart. He would startle onlookers by leading them in his favorite Christian hymn, “Lead Kindly Light.” He anguished that Hindus were so hidebound they would prevent someone from killing a rabid dog. Yet Gandhi, himself of the Vaisya caste, defended much of Hinduism. He fathomed the complexities of Hindu society, and he didn’t want India to collapse into chaos. Most Indians knew little of his actual politics. The only thing everyone knew about him was that when he was free, he drew immense crowds. Tens of thousands. Indians believed he was the one authority who cared if they lived or died. The only thing the British knew was that if he starved himself to death in prison, the Indians might rebel. And no matter how repressive and brutal the British were, outnumbered one thousand to one, they could not withstand a full rebellion!

Although Amy’s pain and sleepless nights continued, she seemed to improve. How could she dare think otherwise? She even took trips to the Gray Jungle. She felt so invigorated on one trip that she tried to run on the verandah of the Forest House. But then she began to get worse. Her left hand numbed into a useless thing.

HOW SHE THOUGHT SHE WOULD DIE IN HARNESS. BUT NO, HER FATE SEEMED THE WORST POSSIBLE.

The sight in one eye deteriorated. Arthritis stung her with every breath, especially in her back. Oh, how she thought she would die in harness. But no, her fate seemed the worst possible.

“Do not, I beseech Thee, let me be disabled by pain or inability and live on as a burden to others,” she had written after a nightmare many years previous.

Now the nightmare was all true. She began to hate her spacious room, which had a sign over one door that said “Room of Peace.” It was originally intended to be a room where several of the Fellowship might sleep. It was never intended to be the sumptuous room of the pampered queen bee. It even had a teakwood partition, deemed important now that she was almost invalid. When visitors entered the room through blue curtains—what other color would Amy choose?—they saw no bed, only the partition on the right and bookcases on the left. Straight ahead were large windows onto the wide verandah. On the best of days blue kingfishers could be seen knifing down into huge vessels full of minnows.

There was a desk there, too, with a wicker-backed chair. Amy had her reminders posted. Most prominent was “God hath not given us the spirit of fear.” The bookcases were filled with all of her favorites. Besides writing the Gold Cord at the desk and her normal correspondence, Amy was also writing about her illness. Many letters were to other invalids, a group eventually deemed the “Dohnavur Invalids’ League.” Some letters were cranky, all were seeking the why of sickness. Eventually she decided she might collect all these letters into a book for sick people. As a metaphor for getting good from the birthing pain, she titled it Rose from Brier. It would be unique in that it was written by a sick person to other sick people. She composed the sentiment in four lines:

The toad beneath the harrow knows

Exactly where each tooth-point goes;

The butterfly upon the road

Preaches contentment to that toad.⁶

No, this book was not written by the unaffected butterfly but by the battle-weary toad. Oh, if only her little Rose from Brier could be to one person what The Pilgrim’s Progress was to her:

There are books…that we could not do without. (How glad I would be if the little “Rose” might be that, even to only one.) Among mine I name very gratefully The Pilgrim’s Progress. I do not think that we find the gathered wealth of truth and power and beauty in that book till we read it after life has had time to explain it.…⁷

Amy became more pensive, more meditative than ever. Her Bible study led her to resolve to enter into this torture heart and soul. Yet she was reluctant to admit illness made prayer easier. Still, one night “after neuritis had taken possession” of her “from shoulder blade to finger tips,” a “prayer, so simple, so easy for a tired heart, had a delivering power.”⁸ She thought much about prayer. She noted “the gates of access into the Father’s presence are open continually. There is no need to push—perhaps ‘trying to pray’ is sometimes a sort of pushing.”⁹ She was startled by the thought that at times she might be working more in the Lord’s will as an invalid than she did as Amy the Musal. And she wrote:

“THE GATES OF ACCESS INTO THE FATHER’S PRESENCE ARE OPEN CONTINUALLY. THERE IS NO NEED TO PUSH.”

Is it not worth our while to call a halt and ask the question? Are we so busy with our multiform labours of philanthropy and love that we have no time to stop and think? India can show a missionary army of hard-working men and women. Go where you will throughout this land, you will find the Christian workers incessantly busy at their work…No charge of idleness can be made against us, as a whole. But how is it that so much of our busy energy appears to be expended in vain? Holy Scripture, personal experience, the voice of conscience, all these alike suggest one answer—we have neglected largely the means which God Himself has ordained for anointing from on High.…¹⁰

Prayer!

Amy was certain that the weakness of their prayers was the reason heathenism still enslaved the Indians. How could missionaries neglect the greatest source of help from God? The Lord certainly had not neglected prayer in the Gospels. So Amy formulated discourses on prayer, noting that it all meant nothing unless put into practice:

Another time she noted three more things about prayer:

Of a group prayer meeting in her room at the Forest House in October 1933, Amy said, “There are many in our family who come to prayer meetings because it is the custom to do so, but who are not urged by a great desire. It is the lack of prayer-hunger that often makes a big united meeting difficult.”¹³ Soon after she expressed the opinion her pain became so great she could no longer be present in group prayer meetings. Her unrelieved agony was too great a distraction for the others.

Oh, Lord, had that meeting in the Forest House been her last?

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