Under the obedience of Christ (part 1 of 3)

Chapter 15

Under the obedience of Christ

‘Yes Lord’ in practice

In following her Lord, ‘obedience’ was a word written across her life. In renouncing marriage, in following the call, in taking decisions: in everything she wanted to be obedient to her Master. Amy reminds us that obedience is obedience, even if what God says seems queer to us. ‘Obedience – even to the point of doing when it seems foolish and wrong if God says “Do It”.’1645

To be Amma in Dohnavur – was this the work for which the Lord had called her? She had often wrestled with this question. The question came to her afresh after Neela asked her if, looking back, she had found her life’s destiny.1646 The question came afresh to her on the evening before she sailed to Japan. She was rather vague here, for she had got a letter pointing at ‘what you call “the other life”’ – was it a letter for a marriage proposal? She was startled:

It was a new thought. But presently as I waited quietly deep down in me a voice seemed to be saying: ‘No, no, no; I have something different for you to do’.

At that time, whenever this question arose, that answer settled the question. But there were times when the desire for marriage was strong. One day in Japan the fear of being alone was very strong:

It is all well while you are young, but when you are old you will be desolate. And then Another Voice spoke. ‘None of them that trust in Him shall be desolate’.

1645. In Amy’s Bible (1895) next to Isaiah 20:2. In the same Bible in the margin of Matthew 12:50 she wrote: ‘Old English motto, “In doing His will is our peace”’.

1646. In an unpublished note written by Amy, ‘Taken Out Of The Autobiography’, in the Dohnavur library.

How to cite: Kommers, J. (Hans), 2017, ‘Under the obedience of Christ’, in Triumphant Love: - The contextual, creative and strategic missionary work of Amy Beatrice Carmichael in south India, pp. 381–412, AOSIS, Cape Town. https://doi.org/10.4102/aosis.2017.tl41.15

The last time ‘the other life’ pulled was at Ooty:

I knelt down in that room and laid this that was pressed upon me before the Lord. It was not a question of giving up His service. It never had been that. […] But it would have led Thou out of India. Lord, what wilt Thou have me do? Shall I do this? And all I heard in answer to that was ‘No. no, no. I have something different for you to do’. The Lord silenced all Amy’s questions, and therefore she could write after all the deliberations in Japan and Ooty: ‘All that matters is that we should be obedient unto all meeting of His wishes’. In a letter written by Amy, dated 31 March 1944, she underlined in red: ‘Our very existence depends upon our obedience’.1647 And in the same letter, ‘Then shall we be able to serve, indeed to exist at all, only as we follow His thought’. She saw the obedience to the command of Christ as the key motive and the foundation for missionary work.

Dohnavur never had a matron. ‘We have no one between the children and ourselves’,1648 and ‘our guidance comes to us, or is confirmed to us, by means of what is given to us month by month’.1649 Amy continues:

Mission work is not a duty, but to give up yourself and obey when Jesus says we are His disciples that is what we do. A call based on the romantic will be quickly shattered, unless we intend only to do philanthropic work or to teach in a school with no other desire than to educate. No amount of education will convert a man. For to those who really care it is the unseen that matters first, for it is eternal. The Lord does not call us to impress people, but to love them, and to share His treasure with them. They are patient with our mistakes. But they watch us. Some may tell you that it is impossible not to tell lies, yet they expect from us utter sincerity, and demand from us unending patience. And above all they will watch us to see if there is the slightest touch of superiority in our attitude or in our thoughts, for even that will come out. They will applaud our preaching, they will be pleasant enough outwardly; but never, never will they put their confidence in us. However well we may learn the language we shall only know about them what they choose to let us know.

Obedience asks for talking and writing always the truth. She did not like to give mission stories a happy ending when it was not so in reality:

Does God need untruth to help His work? […] So far as I know not a single untrue or even slightly coloured word has ever found its way in a Dohnavur book. […] All the sentences have been sifted. […] Write the things that thou hast seen. […] All D.F. writers hold the same convictions. All spell Truth with a capital letter. The God of Truth, so it seems to us, does not ask for paint when the word comes to His servant.1650 It demands that we bring under his control all things. It affects the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the little luxuries that we enjoy, the use of what we usually call our money and our time, but which, in reality, are God’s if we are his. He does not call us to an ascetic life, but he wants us to live the disciplined life, for which the Lord loves his disciples. When the Lord calls many try to demand explanations and first want to secure the road in front of them, although this means an attempt at evading obedience.

Our Lord was always busy. He never was merely respectable. Most respectable people were against him. We like to be masters and in control of everything; he came to serve and to give his life. If the glory of God were the chief motive of all our living, there would be for many of us a great change in the use we make of our time, and in the way we live. He died for us, and for the people we work with. And do

1647. The letter is in the Dohnavur library.

1648. Cold Cord, 151.

1649. Meal in a Barrel, 3.

1650. Roots, 5.

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we not care? Amy sought real spiritual leaders. She needed brave, men with a fuller development of spiritual vertebrae than was common in ‘these easy-going days’ for her. She was looking especially for wise men, rooted in the Scriptures and coming from the Church in India. Men who were taught by the Holy Spirit and not the product of theological colleges. She had seen too much in Bangalore and other places: that much time and money was wasted. In this, she had a strong conviction and was so afraid of people entering the work of God who were of no use for the Church and of people who would evolve into something of no more use to creation than a new genus of jellyfish.

‘What are we going to do? Not what we are going to say or sing – but what are we going to do?’ For Amy obedience was a central word. In following her Lord she obeyed his voice: ‘If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them’.1651 Obedience was a daily workout for Amy. For this, she was ready to face trials in court, questions of other missionaries, and negative remarks of fellow Christians, for her conscience forbade any compromise.1652 Mission work:

Only the touch of the Living One can do that. How one feels one’s impotence in the presence of this colossal mummy of heathendom; a mouse might as well try to overturn the Great Pyramid as one of us seek to win a single soul.

Caring for the children, but above all making Christ real to them:

One begins to enter into it a little deeper day by day. He teaches one the absolute uselessness, and worse, of all fleshly energy. No word from Keswick came straighter home to some of us than: ‘God sends us here to the heathen for two purposes, to do them good and to find a grave for a good self’. May He make our self–funeral the greatest fact in our existence. So don’t always paint our skies blue! Do not always and only look down. Don’t forget, there is more, and repeat it over and over: Rejoice with Me, for I have found My sheep that was lost. Ultimately what was the aim of mission work, and her work in India? Amy just needed three words to express it. ‘Our aim is great – it is India for Christ.’ It stirred her to notice that in mission circles ‘there is no consciousness of need’.1653 Before all the people there, even ‘before the gods in possession here, we sing songs unto Him’.

Obedience, in the words of Campbell Morgan, is the one qualification for further vision. And the further vision for Amy came as she learned and obeyed the duty she had to be a ‘mother’ for the Dohnavur children. Another pivotal word was acceptance: only God can change the situations and the hearts of people. Never cease to expect and to hope.1654 For Amy the call of Jesus was a call for total transformation in the sense Paul was using it when he used the phrase ‘obedience of faith’ in his letter to the Romans.1655 These words captured the goal of Paul’s missionary commission to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles for the sake of the name of Christ and the believers total response to the Gospel, not only the initial conversion, but total dedication. The ‘obedience of faith’ combined both initial response and outgoing faithfulness in Christian living. The missionary task is incomplete if efforts fail to go beyond evangelism. Amy did not marginalise evangelism and did not limit the great commission to pioneer evangelism alone. The DF shows that she went beyond evangelism toward discipleship in order

1651. John 13:17 (KJV).

1652. Cf. here the remark of G. Davies in Genius and Grace (p. 280): ‘Likewise Amy Carmichael stayed in Dohnavur, South India, because of feeling compelled to obey the clamant demands to help children who were ritually sexually abused.’

1653. Overweights of Joy, 39.

1654. See Gold Cord, 151. Especially from Samuel Rutherford she learned to accept the way God was dealing with her and the Fellowship. See Gold Cord, 154.

1655. Chapters 1, 5 and 16. to see the transforming power of the Gospel both in individuals as society, not only reaching the lost but also reforming the reached. Inward peace produces outward transformation. Amy only wanted to obey her Lord, and she knew that ‘obedience leads to unexpected places and knows no precedents’.1656

A fight

‘Out of weakness were made strong, became valiant in battle’; these words from Hebrews 11:34 were an encouragement for Amy and The Starry Cluster as a whole. When she had been in India just one year and saw the huge workload and the strong opposition, she said: ‘The gods of the heathen must crumble and fail. Systems of error prove worthless and fail. Christ and His Cross at the last must prevail. By this we conquer!’1657 Starting itinerating work in Tinnevelly district she wrote on her birthday in the margin of this verse: ‘Remember the Lord and Fight. Dec. 16. 1896. God’s meaning for us, His missionary soldiers in 1896’.1658 Visiting the Village of the Lake, she was confronted with an ‘unbroken front’ of caste Hindus. ‘To visit in that village is to fight the devil straight.’1659 Those who turned to Christ could expect the most dreadful fate. Amy wrote of a woman who was frightened by her husband: as she, at midnight, felt him stirring beside her, she opened her eyes and saw a dagger gleaming. ‘Turn Christian – and expect this!’ he whispered in her ear.1660

Amy was to uncover one of the ugliest sores of Mother India – the secret traffic of temple girls and boys. Infuriated at what Satan was doing to these lovely children, Amy declared war. When God chose her location, the battle came. In India she fought many battles on her knees, risking her life on more than one occasion and facing arrest and imprisonment in order to snatch some pleading child from the jaws of defilement and destruction. Amy’s missionary career can be seen as one long battle, especially the first 30 years. These years were years of warfare, years in which she poured out love, catching the directing word of God. Especially when the DF sought to expand their working area and tried to get a foothold in several places, they often were met with fierce opposition. Due to the Gospel the great enemy defended his territory with all kinds of weapons to prevent people from turning from their idols to worship the living God. Amy and The Starry Cluster often noticed that those who wanted to come to the Lord would be carried off. There was beating, drugging, murder, anything rather than the disgrace of an open confession of Christ. Already the existence of the DF invited criticism from their environment and in 1934 Amy wrote to the children that they too were involved in warfare:

My children, our comrades in the war of the Lord. […] The more you love me the more steadfast you will go on. You won’t give way and fail. That would be utter defeat. I did not train you for anything so ignoble as defeat. ‘Be thou faithful unto death’, is His word to you today. Stand by your Fellowship and Family, and forget yourself in serving others. That is the way of joy.1661 Everything was done by Satan to prevent people from breaking caste and from following Jesus. We can read about the cost of following Christ in Ploughed Under. The Dohnavur hospital tried to extend its

1656. Ponnamal, 78.

1657. In a letter written from Kotagiri, 12 June 1896, 13 (PRONI D/4061/1/1-D/; D 4060/6/8).

1658. I Amy’s Bible (1895), in the margin of Hebrews 12:34.

1659. From the Fight, 10.

1660. From the Fight, 15.

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work by opening dispensaries in several places, especially in the Muslim town of Eruvadi (Song of the Plough) and the Hindu town of Kalakadu (Joyous City). ‘Crowds swarmed in day after day, and the men were definitely hostile.’1662 Also the purchase of the land for Three Pavilions was not without strong opposition from the Hindu priests. In another year houses were set on fire, people became sick, and again others attacked.1663 On 06 June 1931, a letter came from the people of 4th Street in which they asked the DF not to settle in their midst:

To the honourable mission of Dohnavur, the people of Fourth St. write as follows. You have got a house in the middle of us people of the Muslim religion and sitting down. But your religion and work are not beautiful to us. God has given you unbounded wealth and people, and also measureless learning. There when you bestow your money down without sitting down in this insignificant town (be in) one of the many places where there is good wind suitable to your dignity and glory. This place is not suitable for that. We believe that you who follow the way of justice will not cross the desires of us and walk in the unjust way. Therefore, our being merciful on us do not come to the Fourth Street. The universal petition of the people of Fourth Street.1664 About 1932 we read in the logbook: ‘Heard that the people in Eruvadi threatened to beat J.V. and Devasharma. […] Heard that the headman in Eruvadi had cancelled the order forbidding people to come to our house’.1665 Then some days later in the logbook a special message: ‘First fruit from Kalakadu. Ephesians 3:13 “My tribulation for you which is your glory”’. The Fellowship went through times of attacks from the evil one, and at the same time, the Lord granted Amy to see people coming to the Lord Jesus:

Our Lord Jesus did not fly from danger. He went straight into it. After a year of witness John had been arrested, and then our Lord went from Judea into Galilee just where the danger was These words Amy wrote in the margin of A Combined Harmony of the Gospels.1666

All work that had in it the seed of eternity was bound to pass through a baptism of suffering and be misunderstood, decried, and judged by its apparent failure or success. […] That is the truth, and we shall live to prove it.1667 Mission work is a fight, ‘for we are on the enemy’s ground, and the harder we mean to fight him the harder he will fight us’.1668 A fight against the powers not to be seen. She saw herself as a fellow warrior. Preceding her signature in one of her books, she wrote: ‘Yours in the Fight’:1669

There are no easy victories. The fact is irrefutable, and the sooner we face it the better, that certain fields are ‘discouraging,’ but the right ones will not be deterred.

Amy sometimes saw that people started believing the Gospel, but often the enemy took the burgeoning faith away. ‘Quatre Bras is won, but Waterloo has to be fought tomorrow.’1670 She saw India

1662. Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 283.

1663. Cf. Meal in a Barrel, 100.

1664. In Dohnavur Fellowship logbook, 06 June 1931 (in the Dohnavur library).

1665. In Dohnavur Fellowship logbook, 21 November 1931 and 10 December 1931 (in the Dohnavur library).

1666. Composed by O.E. Daniel. Quotation in the margin next to Luke 3:19–20.

1667. Ponnamal, 49.

1668. From the Fight, 25.

1669. In From the Fight, 5.

1670. In Amy’s Bible (1895), in the margin of Psalm 9:13. as a special battlefield and missionaries coming to this country required a strong character, conviction and integrity above all suspicion. She saw that caste tightened the people body and soul:

It is unspeakably strong, un-mercifully cruel, and yet it would seem as though the very blood of the people ran red with it. […] This then, is Caste viewed as a Doer. It does strange things, hard things, things most cruel. It is, all who fight are agreed, the strongest foe to the Gospel of Christ on the Hindu fields of South India.1671 She agreed with Bishop French, who wrote:

This work in India […] is one of the most crucial tests the Church of Christ has ever been put to. The people you think to measure your forces against are such as the giant races of Canaan are nothing to.1672 In Walker of Tinnevelly she quoted Mazzini1673: ‘We must act like men who have the enemy at their gates, and at the same time like men who are working for Eternity’. Even the nurseries where the little children lived, played and studied were a battlefield. When children were brought to Dohnavur instead of to the temples there was often a difficult process to get them through difficult legal complications:

It may seem a quick transition from nursery to battlefield; but rightly to understand this story, it must be remembered that our nursery is set in the midst of the battlefield. It is like a little sheltered place, where no sound of war disturbs the babies at their play, and the flowers bloom like the babies in happy unconsciousness of battles, and make a garden for us and fill it full peace; but underlying the babies’ caresses and the sweetness of the flowers there is always the sense of conflict just over, or soon coming on. We ‘let the elastic go’ in the nursery. We are happy, light-hearted children with our children; sometimes we even wonder at ourselves; and then remember that the happiness of the moment is a pure, bright gift, not meant to be examined, but just enjoyed, and we enjoy it as if there were no battles in the world or any sadness any more. And yet this book comes from the hot fight. It is not a retrospect written in the calm after-years, when the outline of things has grown indistinct and the sharpness of life is blurred. There is nothing mellowed about a battlefield. 1674 Mission work is never without fight. ‘I have never known a time when it was not so, and do not think I ever shall’ and ‘so long as we fight satan he will fight us, if he does not, it will be because we are not worth fighting’.1675 Her second book bears the significant title From the Fight. Mission work is going out ‘in the Fight, where fighting comes first and writing second’.1676 She learned this from the apostle Paul who never seemed to get tired of comparing the Christian life to a fight, a fight against tremendous odds, but always a fight with victory in sight. ‘For He must reign; we fight a conquered foe.’1677 ‘In this fight for the souls for whom Christ died, may we ever say, “In vain”?’1678 In Things As They Are she writes: ‘For the book is a battle-book, written from a battle-field where the fighting is not pretty play but stern reality’.

1671. Things As They Are, 104. Cf. too T. Walker: ‘In India the bitter cry is far more bitter, but it is stifled and smothered by the cruel gag of Caste. Orthodox Hindus would rather see these girls betrayed, tortured, murdered, than suffer them to break through the trammels of Caste’ (in Things As They Are, 118).

1672. Things As They Are, 105.

1673. On p. 398.

1674. Lotus Buds, 45.

1675. Edges of His Ways, January 22, 11.

1676. From the Fight, 3. The introduction of this book, written by Amy, closes with the words, ‘Yours in the Fight’, and is then signed with her name.

1677. Gold Cord, 345.

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Amy had learned from Thomas Walker that ‘India is satan’s chosen battle-ground’.1679 Mission work in India started by Protestant churches two centuries before the moment Amy saw her calling in Dohnavur. The experienced CMS missionary Walker wrote in 1905, ‘India has not yet been won’, and having said this he encouraged the whole Christian Church with, ‘Let us face the work in deadly earnest; let us “remember the Lord” and “fight”’.1680 Here he stressed something we frequently see in the writings of Amy. ‘We are not called to be weaklings but warriors.’1681 Missionaries are ‘soldiers’1682 and mission work is a fight. In mission work, it is ‘to let the song out before the gods in possession here’.1683 Knowing of the ‘giant powers’ she started to praise the Lord. Amy reminded her readers of Psalm 138:1 spoken in the Keswick Convention some years ago, which suggested the thought. ‘I give Thee thanks, o Lord, with my whole heart; before the gods I sing thy praise’ (RSV). Just like Thomas Walker, Amy knew that ‘India has not yet been stirred’, and she was waiting:

[T]o see such a manifestation of Divine energy as shall convince the Hindu and the Mohammedan world that the Lord is God. […] This battle is His. The victory was won on the Resurrection morning.1684 Yet mission work must not be based ‘on prospects of easy victory’.1685 When doors are open and people willing to receive you, use that opportunity, because doors are open now that will be shut tomorrow. […] How much longer will any door anywhere be open? We do not know. With the Lord is ultimate victory.1686 Amy makes an appeal to the people at home when she quotes a missionary working in India who said:

Let the people that are at home not care only to hear about successes; we must train them that they take an interest in the struggle.1687 Mission work a battle, and ‘battlefields are not beautiful’.1688 Amy’s battle to save children from a life of vileness went on during her whole life. We see this in the short talk one of the missionaries working in Dohnavur, given at the Missionary Meeting of the 1934 Keswick Convention:

Our Indian Sisters Miss B. Taylor (Dohnavur) told her hearers something of the condition of life prevailing in India, especially in regard to the treatment of little girls, where in the name, and under the cloak of religion, they were dedicated to the temple for vile purposes. They were brought up in those evil surroundings, and grew up with no sense of what was right and wrong. Miss Taylor told of one little girl who persisted in refusing that kind of life, and she was beaten and cruelly treated. Finally when she could bear the life no longer, she rushed out and drowned herself in the courtyard well. There were many little children who were being brought up in evil surroundings,

1679. In This One Thing, 135.

1680. In the preface of Overweights of Joy, VIII.

1681. Candles in the Dark, 13.

1682. Overweights of Joy, 53.

1683. Overweights of Joy, 1.

1684. Overweights of Joy, 2.

1685. Overweights of Joy, 53.

1686. Before The Door Shuts, 3.

1687. In Things As They Are, 145.

1688. In Things As They Are, 159. and who were out of reach, except by prayer. There was also the need of the Indian women; many of them were not aware of their need. But behind many a closed door in an Indian house there were poor widows shut away to a life of exile in a dark room because of supposed sins committed in a previous life, and which it was said had caused the death of their husband. One such child, married when she was only five, became a widow while she was still a child. What happened? The relatives were summoned; her pretty clothes were taken from her, and she was clad in a coarse white garment, her hair was shaved off, her jewels were taken away, and her relatives pushed her from them, cursing and reviling her. After being shut up for some years she began to wander from town to town seeking for the true God, and after years of suffering and trouble, she found Him; and today, though herself a Brahmin, she was going among the out- castes in the villages telling them of the love of Christ. Miss Taylor went on vividly to describe a Hindu festival, where sometimes more than a million people would be congregated in one town, and of a conversation that the missionaries had with one old Indian woman, whose wistful face spoke of her longing for God. For long years she had been searching for God, but never once, she said in her journeying’s of sixty years had she met a single person who knew Him, or could tell her anything about Him!1689 ‘Heaven’s statistics’1690 show us other things. Missionaries should not be ‘either optimistic or pessimistic, but just true. […] Truth beareth away the victory’. ‘And so we have tried to tell you the truth – the uninteresting, unromantic truth.’ This she wrote one day to awaken the awareness of the people at home:

Let there be no untruth in our talks when we tell people of our mission work. Don’t be afraid that subscriptions should be lost and candidates deterred by a too detailed account of what is called ‘the dark side’ things. But surely God’s silver and gold should not have to be dragged out of Christian pockets by force of tales of victory. It should be enough to know that the King requires the money for the prosecution of His wars. […] What we need is more common honesty.1691 For us who work in India there is no quick martyrdom. And yet no one who goes out in the battlefield and fights our Lord’s enemies is for long without a wound, the kind of wound that heals slowly and leaves a scar.1692 The Fellowship has never been free from attacks from the enemy and since 1923 the ‘fight grew more and more violent’. ‘Early in the year four men were baptized in the Red Lake near Dohnavur, and baptism, if it be vital, always leads straight to a new attack.’1693 Early in 1924, one of the schoolrooms was burned down. Since Amy was involved in Raj, the brigand whom she had led to faith in Christ,1694 ‘the local Apollyon had been active’.1695 Coming into a village:

[I]t is not the case of ‘come, see, and conquer’. […] The village was fast asleep, what the Bible calls dead. A real fight is exhilarating, but the stillness of the sleep of death has nothing exiting about it. […] We need to be re-inspired with the faith that accounts God able to raise them up even from the dead. […] It is Athens

1689. In TKW (1934): 247.

1690. Overweights of Joy, 54.

1691. Overweights of Joy, 55.

1692. Ploughed Under, 94.

1693. Meal in a Barrel, 2.

1694. The whole story is told by Amy in Raj, Brigand Chief. In 1921 and 1922 Amy met Raj (Jambulingam) in the forest. The robber confessed ‘I have been forgiven, and must I not forgive?’ 20 September 1923 she wrote in her diary: ‘With Christ, which is far better’. Unvanquished, the love of God prevails. ‘Blessed, ever blessed be triumphant Love. The forces of evil are immense; the awful powers of the material pile up about us like the piled rocks of the mountains. And yet at long last the Spiritual must conquer. It is the Spiritual that is strong’ (Raj, Brigand Chief, 308).

1695. Meal in a Barrel, 14.

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in the mud. […] But for months we worked on, and saw nothing. The people listened or did not listen, just as they felt inclined. They never argued or opposed. They were not alive enough. […] It looked impossible. But we have not to look at things from a human point of view, so that did not matter, and ‘we reckon on God who is at home in impossibilities’. And always look at the people, read the writing on her forehead which no earth soil could quite obliterate, ‘For whom Christ died’.1696 When we are speaking our words:

God strips them bare of accessories, musical or devotional, peels off all the emotion; searches through for the pith at their heart, caring just for the white thread of the Truth.

‘The rulers of the darkness, unknown and unimagined, gather up into one stupendous Force.’ In writing Things As They Are she knew that she could only touch the dust. ‘But in touching the dust we touch the out workings of an Energy so awful in operation that descriptive chapters are awful too.’ Opposition from the devil and what they experienced, convinced them that the opposition from the Hindus was ‘organized’1697:

Those were the days when our appearance in the most offended villages brought handfuls of dust thrown from behind walls full in our faces. We did not mind the dust, but we did mind being shut out of the people’s hearts.1698 Mission work was a fight because ‘each soul we pass must go to heaven or hell’. There was nothing romantic in missionary work ‘except on platforms and in books’. ‘And yet this book [Lotus Buds] comes hot from the fight.’ Visitors, who saw the happy children playing in the nurseries and having fun with their Sitties, who cared for them, did not see what was really happening:

It may seem a quick transition from nursery to battlefield; but rightly to understand this story, it must be remembered that our nursery is set in the midst of the battle-field. […] The happiness of the moment is a pure, bright gift, not meant to be examined, but just enjoyed, and we enjoy it as if there were no battles in the world or any sadness any more’.1699 After having heard of a little child they were unable to save, she writes, ‘Poor little girl! It makes one sick to think of her spoiled young life’.1700

The storms and the enmity she met, were seen by Amy as opportunities to ‘prove God’s keeping and His peace’. As if a nest is shaken by fierce winds, out of the inky clouds comes out a hand. ‘He who has held that nest [the DF] in the hollow of His hand all through the years, holds it there today. The nest is safe.’1701 Missionaries encounter their Shah Najaf1702 and only after a fierce battle is the victory there. She did not see yet everything subjugated to Christ.1703 But the invisibility of his power in its exercise was no

1696. All quotations in Chapter XXI ‘Dry Land’, in Overweights of Joy, 162–168.

1697. Meal in a Barrel, 14.

1698. Meal in a Barrel, 14.

1699. Lotus Buds, 45.

1700. Lotus Buds, 46.

1701. Fragments That Remain, 122.

1702. Lotus Buds, 53. The Shah Najaf was a tomb enclosed by masonry loop-holed walls 25 feet high. See F.M. Roberts, Forty-one Years in India (London: Macmillan, 1905).

1703. Hebrews 2:8. argument against the certainty of his ultimate conquest.1704 All her labours, toils, battles and efforts were but a small part of his overall strategy. She was part of his army, a member of one small regiment in the spiritual war:

We have the promise of triumph.’ ‘God will bring down the walls of the fortress.’ ‘We have no right to be discouraged.’1705 ‘Never is mission work a wrestle with a reluctant father (God forbid), but with His enemy and ours.’1706 Ours is a God who delivers, not from the hour of trial, but out of it, out of its power; and in the bearing up under it, not in the sliding out from beneath it, there is strength and victory.1707 She recognised that the discouragements of this world were but a prelude to the glory of the world to come. Glory proceeded out of suffering.1708 Mission work was obedience and therein was the joy of doing it. ‘The Lord said: “Go”, “Tell”, and we have come and are telling, and we meet Him as we “go and tell”.’

Her comment on remarkable stories sometimes in missionary books was sober, just the plain truth: ‘They do not happen here. Practical missionary life is an unexciting thing. It is not sparkling all over with incident’. A father and a mother can tell you how their child can repeat texts and tell Bible stories, ‘and if you are quite new to the work you put it in the Magazine, and at home it sounds like conversion’.

‘But a Christian Doctrine is not just a Creed, but contains a living Power.’ Often people asked Amy to tell converts’ stories, and certainly, they would thrill. But she knew that she was doing her work ‘in the Terrible’s lair’1709 and how this terrible one fought to get back his prey; therefore, she was afraid to tell these stories too much and felt ‘that silence is safest […] and for the present most glorifies God’. She learned by experience ‘to fear any attempt to photograph spiritual fruit’. The best thing others could do was to pray for the converts. ‘It is no less solemn afterwards, until Christ is formed in them. Converts are a responsible joy.’ They would be safe when they were in heaven! In Dohnavur the boys and girls very often sang a chorus about this, which goes to the tune of ‘Hold the Fort’:

Make us valiant warriors, Jesus, Over self and sin;
Lead us, lead us, on to triumph
Over foes within.
Lead us forth in any service
Thou, dear Lord shalt choose;
Make us steadfast, make us faithful,
Meet for Thee to use.1710

There was a separate fight for each soul. Ultimately it was not us who fought, ‘but the Powers of Light fighting against the Powers of Darkness’. It was as ‘knocking our heads against a rock’. Would it affect a rock when we smashed our heads against it? It was an old cry ‘Rock, Rock! When wilt thou

1704. Colossians 2:15.

1705. Lotus Buds, 56.

1706. Ploughed Under, 114.

1707. Lotus Buds, 115.

1708. Cf. 2 Corinthians 4:17.

1709. See what happened in the struggle of Star to confess Jesus and how ‘the evil one’ tried to withdraw her. It was really the struggle between ‘Siva or Christ’. In Overweights of Joy, Chapter VII: ‘Our work is only the undermining of the walls of the ancient fortress of at lies, that when at last the wave breaks on the shore, there may be less to withstand it; till then may God keep us patient, “henceforth expecting”’ (p. 45).

1710. In Osman, Buds and Teddies, 40.

Chapter 15

open?’ Amy cried it afresh. She saw the faces, the gesture and the smiles of the wise Brahmans when she passed them and heard them say, ‘Who will fall into the pit of the Christian Way!:

In all the work we look unto Him, Who has fought the good fight, and we as His servants should never forget, thorns were His heritage. He chose them for His crown. And His goodwill is on His servant, and He will give light and strength to fulfil all His will.1711 Ultimately it is for love of him that his servants ‘draw the swords’. In Amy’s words:

Captain belovèd, battle wounds were Thine,
Let me not wonder if some hurt be mine.
Rather, O Lord, let my deep wonder be
That I may share a battle wound with Thee.1712

However, there will come a day when we can say: ‘The End crowns all’. Dagon will fall! For us, called to go on with the ‘fight’, the victory will be there one day. ‘God may see a garden where we only see a grave.’1713 She knew that grace tried is always better than grace, it is even more than grace, for her it was ‘glory in its infancy’:1714

We have learned in Dohnavur to thank God for peaceful, commonplace days and quiet nights, though we do ask to be kept from that sloth of spirit which would shrink back from battle; and for everyone who offers to us I copy these words from Garibaldi to his soldiers: Come, … I promise you weariness, hardship, and battles. But we will conquer or die. This sacred work demands no lukewarm, selfish, slack souls, but hearts more finely tempered than steel, wills purer and harder than the diamond.1715 Amy saw herself on a pilgrimage full of adversaries. The war in the spiritual realm entered the sphere of her human life and the great enemy, the devil and all the other fallen spirits made her pilgrimage a real battlefield. We are amazed that she, who due to health reasons was not allowed to go to the mission field, physically bore all the strain and business for the Dohnavur children night and day. She never complained, and wrote in a very positive way: ‘The strongest, happiest, most victorious people are those who forget all about themselves in trying to help others’.1716

The enemy sought to destroy the people, especially the young ones among whom she worked, and to rob the supreme God from his glory. She tried to turn out the foes in her own ranks and carefully chose her weapons in this spiritual war, so by prayer and through the Word of God she had recourse. Amy always told her children that Dohnavur was God’s work and they who were saved from the devil’s den were taught by her that it also was the Lord’s work. The work was the Lord’s; the glory was his, too. The DF was in the mind of God and he had led Amy to that place in the desert to become a sanctuary for so many children. It is all in the control of God. And for us Mitchell’s words are enough: ‘Where reason fails with all her powers, There faith prevails and love adores’.1717 Dohnavur’s prayers were and still are held to save the children in danger as it was on the prayer day in May 1937:

1711. Edges of His Ways, 21 January, 10. Amy also quotes the German mystic Tersteegen.

1712. Gold Cord, 350.

1713. Overweights of Joy, 219.

1714. The expression is from Samuel Rutherford, one of Amy’s beloved devotional authors.

1715. In From the Forest, 58–59.

1716. In Whispers of His Power, 13 January, 18.

1717. In Mitchell, At Break of Day, 17 November, 328.

Remember our call. Renew our vows. Rededicate ourselves to the Lord for our children. That self may be dead and that Christ may rule in the practical things of daily life. That in the battles of this month at every point the devil may be defeated because of Calvary. […] That this month’s end may find us deeper in loyalty, unity, and purity of motive than we were before.1718