He goes before (part 2 of 2)
Skies not always blue
‘Without hope in the world’. Oh! if but one drop from the ocean of heathendom, as it is, undiluted, un-idealised, could be microscoped, caught in some great lantern slide, and flung in all its loathsome vividity upon the sheet, if but one note from the grief-chorus could rise day and night –‘for half the world is Macedon’- and could be telephoned across, and could sound through the hall, while with bated breath you listened, I think you would hardly leave that missionary meeting, saying ‘how nice it was’ and how much you had enjoyed it! Oh, one longs for anyone to disturb the peaceful slumbers of His daughters who are at ease, anything to waken up His soldiers who are off duty, to the intensity, the urgency of the need. The night is far spent, the day is at hand. Our Master, our King may soon be here, and what will He say when He comes?472 There were times that she:
[H ]ad no harvest songs. And the sower’s songs are tears. For you must not paint our skies blue always. There are cloudy days too and days when the heavens above us seem brass – deaf, dumb, pitiless; and days when all seems lost in the horror of a great darkness, and we can only look blindly upward, and hold on, and lean hard, and know that through all He loves. ‘I have prayed for thee that thy faith fail not’, comes to one then with a power unknown before.473 Think of all these people, dishonouring him tonight, full of sorrow and sin tonight; wrapped in the deathgloom tonight How can we be so cool about it? But believe: ‘That God is on the field when He is most invisible’. […] To doubt would be disloyal, to falter would be sin.
Daily Bible classes progressed, but sometimes she felt handicapped that first year away from friends and books. She met some Japanese who could speak a little English and with her broken Japanese she sometimes could go on without interpreter.474 It remained an obstacle for Amy all that time in Japan not having enough knowledge of the language. How precious in this situation was every ‘atom’ of Bible knowledge but she also realised how very little she still possessed of the abundance of what the Lord has given us in the Bible. Samuel Rutherford was another author she had at hand.
The Japanese know how to decorate a garden, to order flowers in a vase for special delectation. ‘How these Japanese will enjoy Heaven.’ Amy saw in flowers ‘the beautiful smiles of God’. She quotes Faust: ‘We are weaving for God the garment, the only garment, they may ever see Him by.’ ‘Will you not ask that we may be saved from ever, by word or look or gesture, pushing a soul back into the dark?’475 She was on the lookout for men and women filled with the Spirit of God, and who would be used mightily:
That is Japan’s need today.476 Prophets of her own, figures like Elijah who dare to stand and face the crowd, and dare to bear the after silence of the desert; for marked out for a life-long loneliness is the man who is the ‘Voice’. How glad she was when 10 new-born people were preparing for baptism. She exclaimed, ‘My heaven will be ten heavens in Immanuel’s land.’ In From Sunrise Land we see that she did all the work with her eye on the Coming of Jesus Christ:
We had a happy time over our Lord’s Second Coming. These men and women have literally turned from idols, to serve the living and the true God, and to wait for His Son from heaven’. This is a splendid reality to them.
472. From Sunrise Land, 52–53.
473. From Sunrise Land, 119.
474. From Sunrise Land, 142.
475. From Sunrise Land, 149.
Chapter 6
Therefore, ‘buy up the opportunity’. In the fight against the awful force of the ‘principalities and powers marshalling their unseen array’, there was the certainty, as the glorious CIM motto says, ‘Christ IS Conqueror’. But it will ‘cost much if they follow in the cross-marked path of Jesus’. ‘Pray that this small story may be life-crowned, light-crowned, love-crowned through the glad eternal ages’.
Always she was afraid that so many did not fully understand what the Lord wanted his people to do in this world:
Oh, for a trumpet peal which should alarm, arouse, awaken; but the heavens above are dumb, and no thunders shake the mountains. The beautiful slumbering world sleeps on, and we – oh what can we do? So few, to such a need!
She wonders:
How can anyone to whom our dear Lord Christ is precious hold aloof from service true!
Oh, who this day will rejoycingly say,
With a joyful heart and free:
Oh, King Divine, my life shall be Thine,
I consecrate all to Thee?
In August 1893 she went to a Missionary Conference in Kyoto, where all the participants were longing for a fuller consecration and filling with the Holy Spirit. This was for them a Keswick experience in faraway Japan. What the missionaries needed was ‘truth in the inward parts, and fearless truthspeaking – that is our today’.477
Arima: ‘Crucified with Christ’
In a letter to her mother, Amy writes:
I never knew, that such need for real consecration meetings could exist on the Mission field. But we are here just what we are at home – not one bit better – and the devil is awfully busy. […] There are missionary shipwrecks of once fair vessels.478 Amy had seen that even on the mission field people bring their own hearts with all personal wishes and grievances. How easily differences of opinions could cause frictions and disturb friendships among fellow workers.
Loneliness often marks God’s child. Was not the content of discipline of Amy’s sanctified mission life the suffering, loneliness, patience and prayer? From Yokohama on 29 November she honestly writes, ‘a homesick day’. When she looked around she saw some roses in a vase on the table, ‘their scent was the scent of home’ and when in the afternoon a parcel arrived from one of her teammates, she was surprised by a motto worked in white letters on bright Turkey red: ‘FAITH IS THE VICTORY’.479
This meant much to her, we can understand. Really, loneliness for God’s servant is no small thing. Loneliness calls us to move more deeply into the realm of faith, where we discover that there is a presence, which is the ultimate fulfilment of our emptiness and which grounds us in what is real
477. See From Sunrise Land, 48 and 49.
478. Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 61. and unchanging. Loneliness also can overcome us when the workload is so much that we cannot find a safe place for our own soul. When this is going on for a time, the burden can take its toll. When someone or something intervenes with our intimacy with God, the manna he sends daily is then difficult to see.
It was at Arima that Amy faced a personal question. To that mountain one day she had gone – it was 20 August 1893 – to be all alone with her God and talk with him. Alone in the presence of God decisions may be taken which determine a whole life. She was in fear about her future. She wanted to be alone with God. It was there the devil terribly attacked her: ‘It is all right now, but what about afterwards? You are going to be very lonely.’ We scarcely read anything of her own feelings toward the opposite sex or if she for herself longed to be married. In one of her letters,480 she reveals something upon this matter in a very obscure way, but here in Arima we get a bit more insight into her heart and about her feelings. Getting older, the thoughts of marrying or not became more urgent for her. She saw fellow CIM missionaries in the field – she had met many of them in Shanghai – who after some years of service married another missionary. She worked in a team in which some of her colleagues were married and had children. And what would be her future? Some men wanted to propose to her, but she had declined them. What was the will of God for her? Never to marry? Never to experience the physical love of a husband? Never to become a mother? These questions the devil pressed into her heart. Ever being lonely. Here at Arima she brought all her entangled thoughts to the Lord. ‘Lord, what can I do? How can I go on to the end?’ He said to her, ‘None of them that trust in me shall be desolate’ (Ps 34:22). That word never left her, and ‘it has been fulfilled to me’. Life is full of paths with its unexplained sorrow, and her path:
[W]ith its unexplained sharp flints and briers, and with its unexplained perplexity of guidance, its sheer mystery, is just loving kindness, nothing less. I am resting my heart on that word.
She remembered Tersteegen’s line:
Am I not enough, Mine own?
Enough Mine own for thee?
Am I not enough Mine own?
I forever and alone,
I, needing thee?
‘It was a long time before I could honestly say “Yes” to that question. […] but at last, the rest, for in acceptance lieth peace.’481 To love him only and to trust him. He would take care of her, and he did! Did she not become a ‘mother’, Amma, for hundreds of children for whom she was a loving mother who gave them abundant love, care and tenderness?
The future would not always be bright. There alone with God the words ‘not only but also’ were given her. She would also experience sorrow, ‘but in the end’, ‘we shall see His face’. In 1899 she again read Psalm 34:22 and then she wrote in the margin:
Arima – Japan, August 20.’93. Lonely day. Trusted this. Not only love but also loneliness – yes even so what so the costing. None may ever know, save Thee and me – Thy choice is best. In Thy dear will I rest and lay. By Thou shall I satisfy – satisfied. S. India, 1899.482
480. Candles in the Dark, 27.
481. Candles in the Dark, 56.
482. In Amy’s Bible (1895) in the margin of Psalm 34:22.
Chapter 6
This loneliness of determined decision-making and staying faithful to a calling that seems impossible wears us down. The shattering of the pillars of her refuge had come, but God left his mighty, winning, peacekeeping Spirit with her. Here she learned the definite personal experience: ‘I am crucified with Christ’. Abiding in Christ in the way of the fatherhood of God discerned the truth of the promises of God in the moments that passed there. She was fit now for flying, for fighting, for following and for the time ahead of her. Many bridges had to be crossed before she would ‘see’ God’s ultimate purpose for her life. God always gives his servants tests. Tests everyday, tests of patience, tests of courage and of humility:
The tests of the Spirit may try us; let us welcome them. They show us what God would have us to be. They show us what He will help us to be. And there is a secret discipline appointed for every man and woman whose life is lived for others. No one escapes that discipline, nor would wish to escape it; nor can any shelter another from it. And just as we have seen the bud of a flower close round the treasure within, folding its secret up, petal by petal, so we have seen the soul that is chosen to serve, fold round its secret and hold it fast and cover it from the eyes of man. The petals of the soul are silence.483 ‘Deep down in me a voice seemed to be saying, “No, no, no, I have something different for you to do”.’ So the ‘other life’ pulled. Arima was the place of full surrender, where the Lord explored down to the deepest springs of her spirit where his Spirit worked, and read her deepest prayers she could not even express. More than 40 years later, on 20 August, she wrote to her ‘Dohnavur children’:
On this day many years ago I went away alone to a cave in a mountain called Arima. I had feelings of fear about the future. That was why I went there – to be alone with God. The devil kept on whispering, ‘It’s all right now, but what about afterwards? You are going to be very lonely’. And he painted pictures of loneliness – I can see them still. And I turned to my God in a kind of desperation and said. ‘Lord, what can I do? How can I go on to the end?’ And He said, ‘None of them that trust in Me shall be desolate’. That word has been with me ever since. It has been fulfilled to me. It will be fulfilled to you.484 Here she gave up marriage,485 and the fear of loneliness; she prayed the Lord to touch her body as being his temple, to shine out in and through it, and to fit in with his plans for her to enable her more and more to manifest the life hidden with Christ in God. In her Bible she wrote: ‘Thy choice is best, in Thy dear will I rest, And by and by thou’lt satisfy.’
Amy never in her life took celibacy as a command of God. This even was impossible for her, for then God would contradict himself.486 Amy was a God sent messenger, not an ascetic. During her life she wrote some 36 books, and nowhere was the idea of celibacy exalted in her writing; after having settled in Dohnavur, she never prevented the girls from marrying. Often she sent girls who had grown up in the Fellowship and who found it hard to adjust themselves to life to an ordinary Indian town or village and in this way prepared them for a married life. About one of the Dohnavur girls she wrote:
She would have been a perfect wife and mother, but unfortunately in our district the Christians keep caste in marriage and there was not a bridegroom of Suhinie’s caste. So the Church lost the greatest gift we could have helped to give it, a new true Christian home set up in her midst.
483. Kohila, 111.
484. In Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 62.
485. Amy’s brothers once in Scraps wrote that Amy candidly predicted she would never be a wife. See Wellman, Amy Carmichael, 39.
486. See here Chambers, ‘Notes on Jeremiah’, in The Complete Works: ‘Whenever celibacy or poverty are enjoined in the Bible they are enjoined because God wants to express in that crisis a particular message in a particular age. This command is not a principle laid down but a command from God to a prophet […] because I am under a superior command, viz.: a relationship to God’ (1417).
Amy never thought about marriage as God’s second best. Seen from a purely practical point of view, she had experienced that for married women, when sickness entered the house, there was a risk that valuable workers were forced to leave the mission field. Often when the woman had to go, the couple with the children had to leave and then two workers were lost for the mission. For the rest, she enjoyed it when she saw married couples happy and she knew that the best the DF could give to India was good, stable Christian families and she never would prevent this. Her mother had asked her in one of her letters if she loved ‘anybody very much’.
She had to guess, because she never received a clear answer from Amy and for us, it is the same. But never, neither in India nor Japan, did she give the impression that she was indifferent to marriage. For her, marriage was a God-given alliance: ‘Marriage is important, inevitable, imperative, but more so ten thousand times is the keeping of the caste. Still, marriage is the goal of life.’487 All her feelings she expressed in ‘Not Only … But Also’. Next to this song she wrote: ‘In the cave. Arima. August 20, 1893’. And: ‘Sengelteri. Sept. 1914. Thinking of one whose lover had been slain in the war’:488
Not only love but also loneliness- Yea, even so
What though the nearest man not ever know. All that in this must be,
That being a secret between Thee and me, Thou knows.
And it cannot work me ill, Being Thy will; And by and by Thou wilt satisfy.
But unknown years stand up and stare at me
The sun beats hot; I look around for shelter, find it not.
Companion me; Be shelter, Lord, to me!
O let Thy shadow be as the cool starlit night-in noonday-unto me.
I think that Amy, with her deep and caring love, knew what it meant if she would not marry. Never to become a mother herself, never to feel little loving arms around her neck. In her own words in India:
I remember wakening up to the knowledge that there had been a very empty corner somewhere in me that the work had never filled; and I remember, too, thanking God that it was not wrong to be comforted by the love of a child.489 And children’s love she had during her life, abundantly!
Leaving Japan
Shuppatsu (Japanese for: ‘depart’ or ‘take off’) came to mind when, earlier than was expected, Amy had to say farewell to friends and new converts in Japan. We now enter a painful episode in Amy’s life, which she used to form her character and inculcate greater humility. Many missionary biographies gloss over personal difficulties, but one of Amy’s most endearing characteristics was her transparent honesty, which made her write about her own shortcomings and lack of faith. A story in the ‘Life of Faith’490 at the end of 1894 showed how wonderfully God had led the missionaries, ‘especially in the connection with the work of Miss Amy Wilson Carmichael’. In the KMC meeting of 09 April 1895, it was reported:
[T ]hat Miss Amy Wilson Carmichael, invalided and went to Shanghai, and hence to Ceylon, where she worked with the Heneratgoda Mission till November, when she returned to England and hoped to go out again in the Autumn of this year.491
487. From the Forest, 68 and 69.
488. Made in the Pans, 79.
489. Ponnamal, 33.
490. A Keswick Convention periodical.
491. In KCMMB, 12 January 1895, 52.
Chapter 6
On 04 May 1894 she writes to her mother:
Perhaps you had better address my letters c/o the CIM, Shanghai, as the doctor wants me to go to China for a complete change this summer. […] Don’t imagine I am ill because I am ordered off. It is only that change of thought is a good thing sometime, and one dare not risk head trouble here. The climate is dreadful upon brain and eyes especially.492 In Japan Amy had used unconventional methods to reach the people. She used the method of preaching, talking to the people, wearing the same clothes as the Japanese women and avoiding all pictures of the Lord. After you had used some pictures the reaction of the people afterwards was that, now they had seen ‘a picture of the foreigner’s honourable God’. ‘From that time doubts as to this mode of work in heathen lands, came to me.’ She describes the disappointment of a child who saw a picture of Jesus Christ:
I never tried to influence anyone in this matter, only I did not use them myself. But soon several others began to feel the same, and among them was Walker Iyer. And when converts were given, we found that unless they were taught to do so, they did not want pictures of the Lord Jesus Christ. […] I shall never forget the disappointment of one of you when someone sent you a lovely little picture of our Lord as a Child in the Temple. I remember the tears of disappointment when the string was untied, and the wrappings taken off, and the picture taken out of its box – ‘I thought He was far more beautiful than that’.493 On 03 July, ‘a hot, hot afternoon’, suddenly came a collapse. On 22 January 1894, on one of her preaching tours she suddenly could not go on. ‘Within half an hour I could hardly think, with acute neuralgia.’494 She had developed a neurotic disease (an affliction of the nerves) that could only be contracted by foreigners called ‘Japanese Head’. This sickness was extremely painful; Amy had succumbed, and was ordered to get total rest. Her plans for itinerary work were interrupted and she felt so useless, as still so much had to be done.
Sometimes she had to stay in bed for some days due to the neuralgia, in her case due to sunstroke. As her physical weakness did not diminish, it was decided for her that she must leave the country. All this happened rather abruptly. In her letter of 24 June she writes a lot about the itinerary work around Matsue and Yonago, and on 03 July she is already en route for Shanghai via Imaichi where she would preach for a day. It was a bright and busy Sunday, when suddenly a collapse came. On a steamer her umbrella was whipped overboard by a gust of wind. After arriving at the hotel, she took a bath, ‘and for the first time in my life I collapsed’. That evening there was a Bible study at 10 o’clock. She took Isaiah’s word literally: ‘they shall walk and not faint’. She went to that meeting and a woman was saved:
On Sunday I collapsed […] a terrible comedown, for I always declared nothing could make me faint. […] But this time over I went and before I came back all the humiliating attentions attendant upon such departures had been showered upon me, […] and I find myself environed by wet towels, doleful faces, and a general sense of blurs. […] This Imaichi work ended Japan for me.495 She was advised by the medical adviser to go a healthy place in China, Chefoo. The preaching band went back to Matsue and there it was decided for her to go away for a time of rest. Before her leaving, there was a communion at Matsue: ‘side by side we kneel, Japanese and English sisters together, one in Him’. At that moment, Amy was:
[L]ifted to the land [where] lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindred’s, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands.496
492. Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 73.
493. Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 61.
494. From Sunrise Land, 92.
495. Amma’s Book, 38–39.
This was for her the perfect union and she found peace with God’s dealings with her and her future.
The parting from friends in Matsue, and especially in Hirose, was a sad one for her. So difficult it was for her to leave the Japanese friends and the people, who had mostly heard the Gospel just once. ‘When will they hear again? How is it there is no one to spare to continue this poor little weak beginning? Why, oh why, are the hands so few?’
‘The CIM must have thought me a very bad penny to turn up like that.’497 Chefoo was full. War was threatening between Japan and Russia. She waited ‘perplexed but not troubled. And then one day suddenly and clearly the word, as I believed, was spoken: “Go to Ceylon”. Ceylon! Why to Ceylon?’
She told the others; even she herself did not know why she had to go to Ceylon. She only knew that she had to obey:498
When shall we have done ‘playing with missions’? […] There are two great realities in heathendom. The reality of the presence and power of the devil; the reality of the presence and power of the Lord. The more awfully the one presses, the more gloriously the other shines.499 Some days before her departure she witnessed the baptism of some of her converts and after the ceremony they took a photo together with Amy. She was always very reluctant to have her photo taken, but she consented. What did it mean when she later erased her own face from that picture? She always felt that only one was important: Christ only. But was this action a sense of humility that went too far? Today we can be glad we have at least a few photographs, representing various stages of her work and life in Dohnavur.
Together with Amy, four other women missionaries had to leave the country in 1894.500 She left, praying and asking for prayer for those who would stay behind:
Will you pray for them, that they may be kept from the danger which lingers near blessing? Let us ask that this child – church so weak as yet, may through the exceeding greatness of His power, according to the energy of the strength of His might grow strong in Him, and become a crown of glory, a royal diadem in the hand of our God.501 ‘Saryonara, saryonara, good-bye’. Then the last embraces, the last words and the last wishes. She left with deep gratitude and at the same time eager to know what the Lord had next in store for her. She had had a very remarkable year. With God’s grace, she had seen men and women coming to faith in Christ. A missionary who visited the place where Amy, and her Japanese fellow worker who interpreted for her, had worked found that a group of new believers had stood firm in their Christian faith.502 She must have thought a lot during those days about her going to the mission field without the support of a recognised missionary society. Whereas in Japan she had seen that a well-organised society could perhaps have done more to prepare some roads, she now had to discover them herself. She had met with obstacles, which could have been avoided or monitored earlier. In a letter to her mother she had written
497. Amma’s Book, 38.
498. Amma’s Book, 38.
499. From Sunrise Land, 177.
500. The remark on the site of the GFA Missions that she left Japan because ‘the missionary community was not the picture of harmony she had envisioned’ is difficult to verify. Cf. http://www.gfamissions.org/missionary-biographies/carmichael-amy-1867-1951.html.
501. From Sunrise Land, 179.
502. In Wilkinson, At BBC Corner, 20.
Chapter 6
at that time: ‘Unless God guides definitely to an unlinked coming out, such as ---‘s and mine, I never would advise it. In more ways than one it is trying.’503
In Shanghai Amy wondered about the foreigners, and also the representatives of her own country, whom did not much adorn the doctrine to their closely watching heathen observers. Their way of life upset her. ‘As drunk as a Christian’, is a proverb in the ports, and when in the interior a native preacher wanted to describe the far country of the parable, he said: ‘it was just like Shanghai, the Shanghai the foreigners have made’.504
We read in Roots her answers to questions about the way God was dealing with her destination in life. ‘Afterwards thoughts came up, like “Do you understand why God took you to Japan if He wanted you in India?” “Why were you led in such a round-about way?”’ For her the answer came from the epistle to the Ephesians. She put signs in the margin for the present, the past and for the future:
[A]nd I found that the marks for the past and for the future never stand by themselves. They are always related to the present. The past leads forward, the future leads back. You will see what I mean if you read Ch.1, 4 (there the past leads on), and verses 10–12 (there the future leads back). It is as if the present, our today is sandwiched between the far, far past before time was, and the future, the fullness of time, when time will cease to be. In Ch. 3, 9–13 twice over the past leads on to the present – and what a present!
Amy wanted to say: ‘If only it wants to lead us into such an understanding of the ways of your heavenly Father that you will never be perplexed by anything He does’.505 Here she quotes the Spanish mystic Theresa of Avila:
Is it not a thing most wonderful that the great God – His majesty, or ever He had formed the earth and the world, – should think of one who is less than the least, and should plan the very things that should be done; and should prepare a way wherein the feet that so easily stumble, should walk, that in the ages to come he might show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us through Christ Jesus.506 Amy’s mission work in Japan was short, but very intense. She left, certainly with many questions, but also in the assurance that her work had not been in vain. ‘Fulfilled – thank God’, when later on she thought about the work in Hirosi. These words we can read in the margin of Matthew 28:7:
Then go quickly and tell His disciples that He has risen from the dead, and behold, He is going before you to Galilee; there you will see Him. Lo, I have told you.507
‘Just following’ – ‘He goes before’
In due course, the boat arrived in Hong Kong, where the bishop’s wife, Mrs Burdon, welcomed her. Amy, very tired, needed a rest and was cared for by Mrs Burdon, who treated her as if she were her own mother. She stayed for some days at the bishop’s house. The bishop himself lived in his library among his many books. Mrs Burdon was very motherly to her and after some days Amy went with her to the
503. In Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 59.
504. Scraps, (no. 15, 16 July 1894).
505. Roots, 25. ‘Known to God are all His works from the beginning of the world, so it follows that all that happens to us, His children, is not only foreknown but planned beforehand; and every influence brought to bear upon us helps us the better to fulfil His loving purposes.’
506. Amma’s Book, 28.
507. In Amy’s Bible (1895). hospital, to visit patients and to read with them. Amy taught many of them the song ‘Cleansing For Me’. ‘Wasn’t it good of Him to guide me even such a tiny bit of seed sowing to do?’ The short stay in Hong Kong was an ‘unexpected Elim’ for Amy. She added these words in her letter:
One little thing I must tell you to the story of His love. I had rather dreaded any talk as to my journey or destination, fearing at last kindly – I don’t know what word to use, you know what I mean – and when Mrs Buxton asked me (a natural question of course) about it, I was tempted to say as little as possible – but that would have been dishonouring so I simply told her how I was going forth at my Master’s Word, not knowing why – just following – that was all. For a while she said nothing, and afterwards we had a very earnest talk and prayer. Not one word of expostulation or misunderstanding, or blame. How foolishly I had feared it – oh one need fear nothing – nothing.
Amy was not well and got a chill:
And for the next few days I had a new lesson to learn. He brought me to the very end of myself. Self strength – self energy – everything. […] What if I never reach Ceylon at all – or what if my work there, His work for me, is to give up all and go home by the next boat. […] It would be a grand failure in the eyes of everybody. My belief that He was calling me to do something, would seem proved false. It would seem as if I misread His will, and missed His voice altogether – was I ready for that? And then He drew near – walking upon the waters Himself. My precious Saviour, and he spoke peace. […] Yes I was ready for that – even that. And then came rest – oh such a rest. After this I was very weak for days, but the rest lasted. It was rest that ‘remains’. ‘Go to Ceylon’, was the word Amy had heard from God. The CIM people and the Burdons urged her to stay a little longer, but Amy felt someone was waiting for her in Colombo and had no rest before she was again on deck of the ship that would bring her there. ‘Just following – He goes before.’ These words Amy wrote on 18 July 1894 sailing on the SS Clyde to Ceylon:508
The Lord drew very near to me. He told me to go to Ceylon. Today I sail thither, knowing only He is going before. […] And only Heaven is better than to walk with Christ at midnight over moonless seas. A CMS missionary en route to the Middle East escorted her as far as Colombo, where a member of a little village mission would meet her. In the margin of her Daily Light for 02 August she wrote ‘Very ill – fever – alone – kept – comforted’. She wondered if God would have sent her to Ceylon in 1892, if she had been quite ready. ‘But I needed to learn some lessons first, so He sent me for training to Japan’,509 she cheerfully wrote to her mother on 08 August. Without notifying the Keswick Convention, she sailed on 28 July for Ceylon. She had written earlier to a group of the Heneratgoda Village Mission, but had not received a reply, and it was a great comfort to her to see on arrival that she was expected. To her grief, she heard that both the Lieschings had succumbed to malaria. In Colombo the remaining three young women had prayed for someone to help them and Amy’s coming was seen by them and as God’s answer to their prayers for help.
Why this sudden move? And done without consultation with those who had sent her. Was it an impulsive move? Amy herself reckoned also with questions others might ask her and wrote:
I cannot attempt to explain this. Only those who so has felt the Spirit of the Highest in this most solemn way, will understand at all, and I am prepared for much blame, or at best understanding, but I cannot help it. One dare not anything but obey, when that Voice speaks, as I can speak. And all one can do then, is shut our eyes, close one ears – ye as blindly, deafly, but with ones and all eye and ear, follow in the Way be it – as now in the sea, a path in the great waters footsteps all unknown.
508. Scraps, (no. 15, 16 July 1894).
509. In Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 76.
Chapter 6
And for those who seriously fear about this new step into the unknown, she gives us three remarks of guidance, and these three remarks have ‘been given clearly enough to rest the hearts of dear friends here’:
1. His Word given with great power straight to one of it, inward by the Spirit.
2. The other to unanswerable force, the other the inward leading of the Spirit.
3. The promise of circumstances.
For the last remarks she did not have a word from the Scriptures. ‘Though as to the last, O, I do not see infallible warrant for it in the Bible.’ She then refers to the old Bible saints who appeared sometimes to have gone in what seemed direct opposition to existing facts. ‘His Word was all they had to go upon.’ For her it was enough to be sure that the circumstances act as ‘confirmatory witnesses, and comfort the minds of loving observers who care enough to be concerned’.510 From Whittier she quotes:
Nothing before, nothing behind - The steps of faith.
Fall on the seeming void, and find the Rock beneath.
And only Heaven is better than to walk
With Christ at midnight over moonless seas.
After the ship called at Singapore and Penang where the passengers had been in quarantine for some days, the ship headed to Ceylon. Again she questioned herself if this undertaking really was in God’s approval:
When we got within sight of Ceylon, things got real and satan came with terrible power. I cannot write about that now. At last I went to bed and slept, knowing the everlasting arms were underneath, it was all peace and I thought the worst was over, but at dawn it woke again and once more, o just awfully the devil came with thoughts and fears. I had just to throw myself as it were, upon my invisible and for the moment, unrealized Lord. Then I went on deck, still tortured, still weak, feeling oh light – The joy of the Lord is your strength. Lord it shall be, yea it is. A flood of sunshine fell across the mists and they were gone.
While still not sure about God’s approval, she prayed that ‘the thick veil of sense may be made thin’ by the ‘lightest touches of the Blessed Spirit’:
What if nobody meets me? What if I and stranger after all? It will be only being stranded upon Him – My Rock – My All. I have lost my balance on His side. Fallen right into His very arms. I will trust and not be afraid. […] Just as it had come to this, just as He was softly talking to me, just as every fear had gone, someone passed along the deck, returned, saw me and said, ‘Welcome to Ceylon’.511 She arrived safely in Ceylon where several friends, including Mr Cooper and Jessie Nicolas, gave her a warm welcome. ‘Such kindness, wasn’t it? How He plans when He is leading, one may literally fear no evil – none.’
Heneratgoda, Ceylon and back to Broughton Grange
Weak, tired, not knowing what lay before her, Amy arrived in Colombo. ‘A moth could have crushed me,’ she said. A look in her Daily Light encouraged her when she read the text for that day: ‘The joy of the Lord is your strength’.512 We meet her inner conflict about going to Ceylon and follow her puzzled
510. Scraps (no. 9, Colombo).
511. Scraps (no. 21, 25 November 1894), 10–12.
512. Nehemiah 8:10.
heart in her letter home.513 ‘And now you will wonder if I yet know why I am here. I do not quite yet.’ She goes back to 18 July, ‘the day He came so near and told me to come’. Among her home mail that day was a letter from Mr Gregson, dated January, with at the end a note dated March; in it he said: ‘We are asking the Lord to send another worker, who will be a leader, sent from the Holy Ghost to witness for the Master in the villages of Ceylon’:
As I read those words – utterly unexpectedly the Master’s ‘Go’ was flashed on me. My first thought was that He meant me to go to this little Village Mission, and to be to it what those lines spoke of.
Was this the Lord’s direction for her? She doubted and had much fear of being misled in any way, ‘that I dare not face it’:
Still I knew I was to go, even should it be in blind faith, not knowing for what, and he made it plain that I might rest without asking Him further as to His purpose, so, as you know, I went. […] And as we neared Ceylon the thought returned – perhaps that is why he is sending me – but, oh, such a rush of fears and I felt as if every particle of my being rose into one cry – ‘I cannot’.
When Amy heard in Heneratgoda that the missionaries saw her coming as an answer to their prayers, ‘they almost seem to have accepted me by faith there and then’.514 At first the group had prayed for one to be sent from England, but the missionary due to go to Ceylon had been stopped. Now she was the answer to their prayers. Amy still was between hope and fear:
A lifetime seems to be packing itself away into these few hours. […] Oh what a whirl one would be in if one were not kept. I think He will show me what He means soon. These lines comfort me, ‘When over dizzy heights I go, one soft hand veils my eyes, the other leads me safe and slow – o Love of God most wise’! The day after she arrived and was heartedly received by several missionaries who worked in Ceylon, ‘I was well welcomed and I long more than ever to buy up the swiftly passing never returning opportunities, and yet to remember and to live on’.
Who serve the Lord must hold in view
They need Him, more than needeth He,
Who serve Him best, in Him too, Rest.
This little poem is underlined in her letter. ‘I wonder, everybody welcomed me. I was in the circle before I knew it.’ The many new friends around her overwhelmed her so, that ‘I longed for quiet alone with the Master. A day away from the kindest voice, a time when one could just wait, this was my felt need.’
Last night I was kept awake with many thoughts, and fears as distressing as ever, just swarmed. […] It was true, I could not, dare not touch it – I could not, but He in me could. Two years ago I should not have been half so much afraid – perhaps because I did not know myself so well then. I had not got to the end of myself, and I felt fairly strong – but now – oh the shrinking back – And yet if indeed He was leading on, to draw back would mean ‘Lord I cannot trust Thee for the Power’.
The little village mission was linked more than to anyone else to Mr Gregson. Amy also was afraid of what he would think to see her now with all her questions and weak body, vulnerable to collapse under the heat of the day. ‘To all these thoughts there was but one answer. And at last I could let go all, and say, “Yes Lord”.’ The long day of being alone with God for prayer and fasting was not anymore necessary for her, for, ‘it was so simple. A few minutes with Him made all things plain.’
513. Scraps (no. 21, 25 November 1894, Shanghai), 13–15.
Chapter 6
Here, too, the Bible had for Amy the last word. In Daily Light that day it was that little that gave her a straight message from God, ‘our sufficiency is of God’. This strengthened her:
O yes, All of God. There is no room for self here. Perhaps the very keenness with which the feeling of helplessness pierces and presses, may show one all the more upon Him who is sufficient.
When she boarded the SS Clyde for Ceylon, friends in China had given her a word: ‘El Shaddai, the Lord which is enough’. ‘How I needed it then, how I needed it now.’ Here in Heneratgoda she felt the companionship of people who feared the Lord. She wrote: ‘This was the Psalm – (119:63) – for the day the friends came to see me at Heneratgoda, Ceylon. Nov. 1894’.515
People at home, still wondering and fearing for her very physical weakness that caused her to leave Japan, were set at ease when they read:
Perhaps I should tell you that on the day He gave me the command to come here, He gave me for the just time the faith to claim the deliverance from the head-pain. Often Florence used to say, why don’t you pray and believe for it to be taken away? But I never could and did, till that day. At Hong Kong and afterwards it was worse again. It was as if satan were let loose upon one for a season. Since then I had not had it once. It is quite well now. To His glory I tell this. Himself has done this. Even in the un-ability to pray for removal, I see His hand now. His time had not yet come. May He use every bit of the strength restored to His own great glory. Oh that He may have all His purchased possession the uttermost of His inheritance. he is very near. He is very dear. Our last words must be of Him, the beloved, the Altogether Lovely – or to Him – our own Master. […] And now once more, goodbye – oh flee – follow – fight – called – chosen – faithful, till He come, our precious and glorious King. With love to you all, and a very earnest please, please pray, Your Amy.516 After having travelled so much she did not give us the impression of being worn out or very fatigued. For her it was not the end of her missionary career. She started to learn Singhalese for when on a preaching tour she felt the difficulty of speaking through interpretation. The whole of her life was in the grip of God for ‘This one Thing’. On the one hand it gave her the opportunity – she writes home from Heneratgoda517 – to have ‘a prayer behind each sentence’, but on the other hand she adds between brackets ‘but– I hope I won’t have to do it always’. She did not intend to give up. It overwhelmed her ‘seeing many, oh so many of this Blood-bought loved – unto the death ones who seek their own, and not the things which are Jesus Christ’s’. Those people who are seeking their own, ‘should they not have the chance’? Amy stresses the role of the missionaries in bringing the lost ones to Christ:
And remembering that this is as possible, perhaps, more so, to us who are here, as to you who are at home. […] May we be true to our Christ. […] O dear ones who have laid some loved one down to help to bridge that gulf – is it not well worth-while?
She never met any rudeness during her work, although mission work ‘perhaps is the most seemingly resultless of all work. A very literal casting the bread on the water.’
Glad she was when Mrs Pollock spent some time with her. ‘You don’t know what it is to have somebody even for half an hour, who can be motherly – sisterly.’518 She also had the delight there of having a friend again in Clare, a cousin of Mr Buxton. This was for Amy a time for reflection on her own motivation.
515. In Amy’s Bible (1895) in the margin of Psalm 119:63. ‘I am a companion of all them that fear thee, and of them that keep thy precepts.’
516. Scraps (no. 21, 25 November 1894, Heneratgoda, Ceylon).
517. Scraps (no. 21, 25 November 1894, Heneratgoda, Ceylon).
518. Scraps (no. 21, 25 November 1894, Heneratgoda, Ceylon).
‘I ask you once more to pray that we may be true to our Christ. […] Pray that we may be apt through and through. True as steel.’519
Amy still was a bit confused, about the way God was leading her, but she enjoyed the work and her time ‘was full of love’. ‘If love could have kept me there I should be there today.’520 The workers there were Burghers, descendants of the Dutch who had intermarried with the Singhalese. They were soul winners, fearless in their witness.
Amy attracted children. She writes that the children were very fond of her and called her the Mal Nona, the flower woman, because of her fondness for all kinds of little weeds and flowers. One day the children brought her a lily. She tried to explain to the children that God is the creator of all these tiny nice flowers and he takes care of them. He too cares for little children:
They cannot see what I see in them. I tell them they are bits of God’s handiwork, straight from His fingers – but they do not see it at all. I wonder if we, His dear children, for whom He prepared all these lovely things, do not think it worthwhile to care.521 She also could practise here the care of babies for she paid numerous visits to Mrs Besant, who had a three-week-old baby. She said she became an expert in caring for babies. ‘I think I could bath her safely and I know to hold her without letting her head drop off, to her ayah’s supreme satisfaction.’522
One evening some friends came from Colombo asking her to join them in their work. Amy was inclined to do so, but one moment she thought, ‘What about Bishop Moule? He doesn’t see with you.’ They answered her, and it shocked her: ‘He is a shining lamp of disobedience.’ ‘And so mentally I called a halt.’ That evening after the friends were away she read in Psalm 119:63: ‘I am a companion of all them that fear Thee and keep Thy commandments’. That settled the matter for me:
Suppose things had been different I would never have been one of this dear company of fellow-lovers. So you see how even there, in that jungle village in Ceylon, there was thought of you, or at least of my being yours; is it not wonderful?523 She heard the doctor’s verdict that she could never return to Japan, due to ‘brain exhaustion’, so she decided to stay in Ceylon.
Far away in England many were wondering about Amy’s move to Ceylon: what about their ‘Keswick child’? A cable, sent to Amy from the DOM in which he strongly advised her not to join any mission in Ceylon, made her wonder if she had done something wrong and, a little later, a letter came to her from his hand in which he wrote that he was seriously concerned. We can understand Mr Wilson’s point of view: Amy was a Keswick missionary, and he was responsible to the Keswick Mission Committee. Now one of them was just leaving the field, without any notice to them and not having been given any approval for this move; we understand it was difficult for him to reprove and to back her up whom he loved so dearly. To her mother she wrote:
Something told me you would rejoice in my being here […] but oh my heart ache and aches for the DOM. […] Oh mother, this was of Him. How could I wait and hesitate, when He said: ‘Go forward’? But I should have
519. Scraps (no. 21, 25 November 1894, Heneratgoda, Ceylon).
520. Amma’s Book, 39.
521. Amma’s Book, 39.
522. Scraps (no. 6).
Chapter 6
waited in letting it be known, until all was clear at the home end. I so trusted He would show it there as here – but it has not been so, and I see my wrongness and cannot be sorry enough. […] I think there will be puzzling muddles if anything but the real truth is said at home, as everybody here knows it, and before I heard what was ‘to be said’ I had both said and written naturally and not forcedly or half-truthfully. I simply say that I left Japan for rest and change, that when at Shanghai I believed the Lord told me to follow Him down to Ceylon, and so I came.524 It was not her intention to stay permanently in Ceylon. She saw it as a soldier’s duty to fill the gaps. ‘One must as willingly be nothing, as something’, but coming home, as her mother wanted, she called off. For ‘did ever a soldier, worth calling one, run away at the first shot! Praise Him – the pain is over now, and I am strong for the battle again.’ At the time she left Japan, Mr and Mrs Buxton had been on furlough. After having heard of her move and read the letter she had written to them, he replied at once:
I do thank God for His precious gift to us of having you with us for one year, and for all you have been in the work, and as an influence of love and union in our party. You have been, to us all, more than I should like to tell you. […] If you have any word from the Lord about it for me, do not be afraid to tell it plainly. I only want that we should be in the line of the work of the Holy Ghost.525 Others saw it differently and noticed that physically she was very weak. She was advised by a friend of the DOM to see a doctor and the response was the same as she got in Japan. Have a long rest. She felt she needed guidance. ‘I did not feel guidance comes from doctors’, for what about Japan? Weymouth’s translation of Colossians 3:15 says:
Let the peace which Christ give settle all questionings in your heart, so in peace I waited, meanwhile learning what I could of Singhalese, till suddenly I knew why I had been told to go to Ceylon.526 After having heard of Mr Wilson had had a stroke, and that he was seriously ill, she immediately packed her few belongings and sailed back home. On 27 November 1894 she left Colombo, a long journey and one long nightmare. In the margin of Daily Light of 01 December, she wrote ‘Indian Ocean, on the way home. In much fear, ill, and alone’, but two days later, she wrote ‘Is anything too hard for the Lord?’ The marginal note reads ‘Realising this’. Of the journey from Colombo to icy cold Naples, it was early December, 1894, she could hardly remember all that had happened. Friendly people – ‘I blessed that Roman angel’527 – routed her out of the train in Rome and put her on the train for Paris. Via Calais she reached London where her mother met her. She felt sick, but to all around her she said she was fine: ‘I must be well, for I must go to Broughton Grange’.528 She was puzzled about what people would say in Keswick about her move from one country to another without consulting them. She had not thought of asking them permission, for ‘I belonged first to the Lord and had gone to Japan in obedience to His word, not the word of man’. Amy thus wondered at their:
[K]indness and patience for they too were a good deal puzzled by this calm walk from land to land. But they said nothing of it, though afterwards the Committee made a rule that anyone sent out from Keswick should henceforth belong properly to a Missionary Society and be subject to its rules.529
524. Scraps (no. 21, 25 November 1894, Heneratgoda, Ceylon).
525. Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 77–78 and 79.
526. Amma’s Book, 41.
527. Amma’s Book, 41.
528. Amma’s Book, 41.
The Mission Committee had some consideration with her, being the protégé of their chairman Mr Wilson.
She could not have written them first asking for permission, but ‘I was all the time listening to Another Voice’. She felt she had an unusual training for an unusual kind of service. Later on in Dohnavur she would say:
No single thread of the web (I trust) the Great Weaver is weaving, can be touched without that touch affecting other threads and so none of us acts apart from the others. […] I think it is all part of the preparation for something elsewhere.530 Back in Broughton Grange she prepared some account of her work in Japan in connection with the Keswick Mission in a book entitled From Sunrise Land. The book is a collection of letters from Japan, illustrated by Amy and William, one of Mr Wilson’s sons. From the very beginning she was not happy to gather the letters – they were just for ‘home’ – but at last could not withstand the pressure others put on her to publish them. In her own copy of the book, she wrote: ‘Bad rhymes in parts, bad writing all through’.
Really, it had been a whirlwind, only to be described as a ‘chaotic’ missionary career.531 What a list of difficulties: application to the CIM, for reasons of health this option barred by the London office; back to Cumbria at Broughton Grange; through Mr Buxton to Japan, and she just sailed off. And there, difficulty in mastering the language, long walks on hot sunny days causing many sufferings, often severe headaches until she came to the brink of exhaustion. In July 1894 on her way to Shanghai, for recuperation in China. Believing God called her to Ceylon – later on as we have seen she explained this move in a letter home from Heneratgoda – she sailed via Hong Kong, Singapore and Penang to that island. After just a few months there, news arrived from Broughton Grange about the sickness of Mr Wilson, and she returned at once. From a very cold Brindisi (Italy), ‘angels’ were sent by the Lord to direct her to Rome, and to rouse her from sleep on one train, and direct her onto the right train to Paris. Travelling overland, via Paris to Calais, and after a rough crossing her mother met her on 15 December 1894, just one day before her 27th birthday. Years later, remembering this Channel crossing, reading 2 Corinthians 4:18, she wrote in the margin Keble’s thought: ‘When the shore is won at last, Who will count the billows past?’ and added ‘Crossing from Calais to Dover alone in the gale. Dec.15. 1894’.532 She stayed a few days in a house she knew from Keswick, and then we see her back just before Christmas 1894 in Broughton Grange. Did it not ever cross her mind that people at home would be worried about her, even stronger that they would oppose this precipitate solo action of hers, or at least would not be amused? Others did not see that actual moment when she followed the Gleam, which for her was stronger than the rules of a committee and concerned family and friends at home.
She left Colombo, where the spending of her life was clear duty. Not knowing what the Lord had in store for her, she went back to England and she felt: this is well, as everything was well for her that was within the will of God. God can break or mould, just as he chooses. There were things in her heavenly Father’s dealings with her, which had no immediate explanation. Being in this situation she did not know why he was doing it; he did it for one purpose only that he is able to say: ‘This is my woman, for whom I have a special purpose’. Amy knew for sure that God’s Word, his truth and his promises are not dependent
530. Amma’s Book, 41.
531. Sharpe, ‘The Legacy of Amy Carmichael’.
532. In Amy’s Bible (1895), in the margin of 2 Corinthians 4:18: ‘Because we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.’
Chapter 6
on our calendar. ‘It is not what a man does that is of final importance, but what he is in what he does.’533 During the years behind her, faith was schooled through many trying experiences and small beginnings. Amy persisted in prayer, and as she would write many years later:
[I ]t does not matter how many questions fill the deep places of prayer we shall know the answers tomorrow. Today is enough that we may prove our God by the humble, the far-reaching energies of prayer.534 She was still remembered in Ceylon long after she had left the country. The CEZMS village mission work had school and dispensary work. In 1910, more than 600 women and girls were under instruction in schools and in their homes. There was an increasing missionary interest among the workers and the girls. They often met at noon to pray for special cases or countries and, years later when Amy was in India, they collected nearly five pounds to send to Miss Wilson Carmichael for her nurseries.535
533. Chambers, The Complete Works, 51.
534. Raj, Brigand Chief, 309.
535. In A.D., Until The Shadows Flee Away. The Story of the CEZMS Work in India and Ceylon (London: CEZMS, 1912), 232.
Shall we not each say, God must be all in all; I will sacrifice everything for Him? May God help us tonight to make a consecration afresh of our whole being to the furtherance of Christ’s kingdom. And whether it be in mission work far away, or in Christian work near at home, or whether it be that we do not know how to work, that we are poor weak worms – whatever it be, let everyone yield himself a willing sacrifice, and then Christ can and will use the very weakest
for the glory of God.
A.C. Murray, ‘That God May Be All In All’, final address at the 1895 Keswick Convention. In H.F. Stevenson, ed., Keswick’s Authentic Voice (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1959), 434.