He goes before (part 1 of 2)
Chapter 6
He goes before
At the age of 26 Amy set off to the East. It was 1893. The preceding years were excellent preparation for her future work. The spiritual resources from her Irish Presbyterian upbringing, combined with Keswick influences, the deep love to make the Lord Jesus known to those living in an ignorant state, the sense of the ‘Kairos moment’, provided the ideal ingredients for her venture.
One prayer filled Amy’s heart: that doors, hearts and heavens might be opened. She was not bothered by the fact that her going was unconventional as she was found not fit to pass the medical exam for any mission society, nor that the whole enterprise was funded by one donor; the assurance of the call was enough to go. We see her going as something natural, spontaneous, so full of heavenly approval, in a word it is the outcome of the indwelling love of Christ. In peace with God she was prepared to go anywhere the ‘Pillar of Fire might lead her’.417 On 25 July 1893 it was written in the KCMMB:
The first Keswick missionary, Miss Amy Wilson Carmichael sailed with the S.S. Valetta for Japan on March 1893, to join the Rev. Barclay Buxton’s mission at Matsuye because the medical adviser of the CIM was not willing to pass her for China.
And in the annual report is written:
On the 3rd of March last Miss Amy Wilson Carmichael left England as a Keswick Missionary, to join the Revd Barclay Buxton’s Mission at Matsuye, Japan, where she received a hearty welcome and a cordial invitation was given by Mr Buxton for more Keswick missionaries to join him in that large promising field.418
417. Though the Mountains Shake, 112.
418. KCMMB, 25 July 1893: The Keswick Missionary Committee decided on 09 October that the initial expenses for a missionary would be: ‘Outfit 40-0-0; Passage 35-0-0; Excess baggage 3-16-11; Voyage expenses a/c 7-0-0; Yearly salary $ 600.’
How to cite: Kommers, J. (Hans), 2017, ‘He goes before’, in Triumphant Love: The contextual, creative and strategic missionary work of Amy Beatrice Carmichael in south India, pp. 115–141, AOSIS, Cape Town. https://doi.org/10.4102/aosis.2017.tl41.06
‘He does the parting’
No missionary can ever forget the first impressions of a new country of adoption. Think of the farewell meetings 100 years ago, the packing, the last embraces, the last words, the wiping away of the tears. And then the journey of several months in often rat-infested ships, and then the first impressions of the new land, the first trying struggle to speak the new language, the first visits to the people and the first attempts to talk about Jesus. And also the first experience with the heat, the mosquitoes, sickness and defeat, the first disappointments and opposition, and to know that so much remains to be accomplished. To have faith in God and have the grace to realise that each of the people you meet needs Christ and not to rest until salvation has entered their hearts – all these are things that will never cease to touch us with a touch that makes all servants of God akin:
Oh could I tell, ye surely would believe it!
Oh could I only say what I have seen!
How should I tell, or how ye can receive it,
How, till He brings you where I have been?419
The love of God in Christ and the devotion to the slain, yet conquering Lamb was Amy’s very raison d ’être. Motivation in mission work can be mixed. We want to serve the Lord, but temptations to selfinterest and pride lurk darkly within. Amy, in the certainty that the Holy Spirit was leading her, was turned by the Spirit into a passionate lover of Christ. Out of her according to the promise of God would flow those rivers of living water that heal and bless. In the time to come she would spend, suffer and endure in patience all because of the One, and One only. The Lord would go with her a long, long trail, and as we will see, obedience as the outcome of being in the right relation with Jesus Christ was there until the end. A vivid account of her work in Japan is in one of her first books From Sunrise Land, Letters from Japan. Letters she wrote ‘just for home’, which appeared in 1895 with the purpose of ‘showing His hand’ in the work done in Japan. In loving memory of the Japanese brothers and sisters, she requests for prayer, knowing the love of God binding her to the people there, a love many waters cannot quench. The introduction mentions that these letters ‘are marked by a holy vivacity and a happy glow and sparkle of colour’.420 She always tried to make it live for the people at home to whom she wrote. She longed for a ‘fire-dipped pen’, to write ‘with one’s own heart blood’, so intensely did she desire for the people to be touched by the Gospel. These letters were written, as she herself explained in a New Year’s letter with the words of William Carey, to those ‘who hold the ropes’, and she asks for prayers from those at home:
And my dear little Keswick watchword rang in my ear all the morning –‘He goes before’. And ask this too, that across every day of our new year in letters of light, ‘He goes before’, till He call, or till He come, ‘very far better’, glorious best of all. […] He goes before you into, ‘there shall ye see Him’.
At the time Amy went to Japan, that country was one of the most unnerving fields for mission work in this era, as Japan had metamorphosed into an imperialist power in its own right. Here missionaries were forced to rethink their assumptions about racial hierarchies and the superiority of ‘Christian’ civilisations. In 1872 the Japanese government issued a decree that all Japanese citizens should receive primary education, regardless of gender or class. Missionaries, especially after 1873, rushed to fill Japan’s education void. Karen Seat observes that ‘missionaries mistakenly believed Christianity would be adopted by Japan as enthusiastically as the country seemed to be embracing Western-style education’.421 However in the 1880s and 1890s Japan’s political climate and attitude reversed sharply; Amy came to
419. From Sunrise Land, 116.
420. From Sunrise Land, XI.
421. K.K. Seat, Providence Has Freed Our Hands (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2008), 13.
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Japan when reactions against the West were heard and seen rather strongly. The country did not receive missionaries with open arms and because of the government’s anti-Western attitude, Christian schools and other Christian activities were regulated according to government standard.422 The day of saying farewell to her beloved was very hard for Amy:
Never, I think, not even in Heaven shall I forget that parting. It was a rending thing that I never wanted to repeat again. […] Even now (1945) my heart winces at the thought of it. I never knew how tears could scald [she wrote to her mother], till the last wave of your handkerchief disappeared today.
The farewell meeting in London was honoured by the presence of Hudson Taylor (CIM) and through F.B. Meyer and C.A. Fox the Keswick Mission Council put in an appearance. Hymns were sung, many times ‘Crown Him’ was heard and words were spoken, of which Amy quoted one sentence: ‘Jesus has two nail-pierced Hands. He lays one upon each and part us so – He does the parting’.423 If one thing was very hard for her, it was saying goodbye to family and friends. However, she bore it without making any trouble. ‘Have you ever found yourself making a great deal of a small trouble? I have. Especially goodbyes’.
Just before she sailed for Japan someone told her that so many people were praying for her. She was grateful for that, but at that moment she realised that it must be terrible to live an ordinary life, to be busy with many things, but ‘lose the thing committed to me’. During her whole life she lived with the knowledge that the Lord did not ask from her something she could offer, but that he asked her to be faithful in the work appointed. Amy’s life is an illustration of unreserved surrender to God, and of God’s complete possession of her for his own highest ends. She always was very committed to the cause of the Gospel and knew that each day and ‘each hour in each day counted; what if one were to be lost?’424 Called to serve she laid her life unreservedly in the hands of Jesus Christ.
From Albert Docks she sailed on 03 March 1893 via Gibraltar across the Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal, Red Sea and the Indian Ocean to Colombo (Ceylon). ‘Then I will go unto the altar of God, unto God my exceeding joy’; Miss Campell gave her these words from Psalm 43:4 as she departed.425 On board the middling steamer Valetta426 Amy and her friend Margaret day by day read the Bible with an old Indian man to save him:
Shall we meet again till the day ‘when He makes up His jewels’? One night, standing by the ship rails, she looked at the long low coastline of Africa. There, under the sparkling stars, she thought of that land which lay still in the darkness of death, – the light-bearers so few and far between, that today millions and millions whom Jesus died to win are left to live and to die unwon.427 Especially the Strait of Messina must have impressed her. This strait separating Sicilia and Italy, and linking the Tyrrhenian and Ionian seas, was greatly feared by sailors in antiquity, mainly because of the rocks and whirlpools known as Scylla and Charybdis. In fact, the strait’s currents do present considerable difficulties. When she was in Japan, she still remembered the passage through this strait and on one of the last pages of her Bible she made a nice watercolour painting of this strait and wrote ‘Strait of Messina, Oct. 21, 1895’. Was she thinking of Paul’s difficult sea journey through this same strait to Rome?428
422. See further in Seat, Providence Has Freed Our Hands, 13–17.
423. Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 55–56.
424. See Thou Givest … They Gather, 122.
425. See in Amy’s Bible (1895) written by her in the margin of Psalm 43:4.
426. She could not afford to buy a ticket for the luxurious Peninsula and Oriental line, even in second class. 427. From Sunrise Land, 3.
428. In Amy’s Bible (1895), Paul’s journey to Rome in Acts 27 and 28.
In Aden she was confronted with thousands of people – without Christ, without hope, without God in the world – and before the ship left she tried to convert some men there and for some she had good hope. ‘Shall we meet again till the day “when He makes up His jewels”?’429 She had to disembark in Colombo, because the SS Valetta was heading for India. Here she hoped to meet the missionary couple, the Lieschings, who were in correspondence with the Carmichael family. Seeing Ceylon, she felt God’s presence and the words of the Daily Light that day gave her joy in her heart. The text for that day was: ‘The joy of the Lord is your strength’:
As compared with joy in circumstances. Joy in health and strength – are natural joy whatsoever – This joy is something quite different. Ceylon. On board ship before landing. Daily Light. Aug. 14. 1893. Proved true.430 On 14 August 1893 she landed at Colombo and before a Mr Unwin came to meet her, she stood alone on the quay and remembered this poem: ’I know not where God’s islands lift, their fronded palms in air. I only know, I cannot drift, beyond His love and care.’431
The missionaries in Colombo warmly welcomed her. She was known as the ‘Keswick missionary’. All the missionaries in Colombo made much of Keswick, and with them Amy sang many Keswick hymns. They hoped that she would stay in Ceylon and join the Heneratgoda Village Mission. When boarding time came, Amy had to say farewell to her new friends. One of them said earnestly to her, ‘Perhaps the Lord will send you back again soon.’432 How prophetic! She then did not know what the Lord had in stock for her. Leaving Colombo the party headed via Penang, Singapore and Hong Kong for Shanghai. On boarding the new ship, the Sutlej, which was inferior to the Valetta, they inspected their cabin: ‘cockroaches to begin with, rats to continue with, stuffiness and scents to finish up with’. First they ‘went and told Jesus’, and they went to the steward. Everything came right and at the end Amy hung a printed ‘In everything give thanks’ in the cabin ‘to act as gentle reminder’.433
Like before she sought the opportunity to tell the Good News of Jesus and she saw change in the life of the captain who was converted during that sea journey. In a letter home she wrote: ‘I am so happy about the Captain […] my heart sings every time I think of him’.
On 20 April they reached Shanghai. Being at the CIM mission house for some days was in itself as she writes ‘an inspiration’,434 and there the party separated. The CIM members went to Yangchau and Amy waited for the steamer to take her to Japan. Walking with Miss Newcombe435 through the old city, she looked at the hands of a carpenter preparing a graven image from a tree. She watched how slowly the senseless features of Buddha were evolving out of that piece of wood. She wondered if the hand, now carving this image, ever would be raised in supplication to God. Praying for this carpenter it came into her thoughts: ‘They that make them are like unto them. But how can we leave them so?’436
429. From Sunrise Land, 5.
430. In Amy’s Bible (1895), in the margin of Nehemiah 8:10.
431. See Amy’s Bible (1895) in the margin of Psalm 65:5.
432. See Wellman, Amy Carmichael, 58.
433. From Sunrise Land, 6.
434. From Sunrise Land, 6.
435. Hessie Newcombe, CEZMS missionary from 1886 to 1895. Killed during the Huashun riots in August 1895. 436. From Sunrise Land, 7. Cf. Amy’s Bible (1895) in the margin of Isaiah 50:20 where she wrote: ‘Seen for the first time April 1893 in Shanghai City with Miss Newcombe’.
Chapter 6
Matsue at last
Now very close to her work among those who did not know Jesus Christ she had one passion as can be seen in what she wrote 12 January 1894:437
O for a passionate passion for souls,
O for a pity that yearns!
O for the love that loves unto death,
O for the fire that burns!
O for the pure prayer-power that prevails,
That pours itself out for the lost!
Victorious prayer in the Conqueror’s Name,
O for a Pentecost!
Letters from Mr and Mrs Buxton reached her, saying that they were waiting for her in Japan and on 21 April we find her on the steamer Yokohama Maru en route to the port of Shimonoseki in Japan. A violent storm with floods of rain made the sea voyage through the Tsushima Strait rather exhausting. ‘I was travelling alone, and, much against my will had been put in the first class.’438
Alone for the first time, and yet not lonely in spirit, for Thou hast made Thyself to me a living Reality. Who could be lonely with Jesus? He satisfies! We are steaming out into the dusk. Behind us lies the great dim shore of China. Before us a shore-line, more shadowy still. He knows what is in the darkness. I will trust and not be afraid.439 At the quay in Shimonoseki she stood, drenched by the rain, waiting for someone who would welcome her in Japan. Delayed by the storm the person appointed to meet her could not make it in time, ‘but between plans, and their fulfilment, is many a slip’.440 Via Nagasaki by Buxton’s arrangement, she met Miss Thompson at Shimonoseki, from where on a small coasting steamer she headed for Matsue, where she would live for the next 15 months.441 After arrival she was directed to an American mission station, to wait for friends from Matsue.
Japan was still a land of mystery for Westerners in the middle of the 19th century when Christianity re-entered Japan and protestant missionaries began their evangelistic efforts. It is generally accepted that the Jesuit priest Francis Xavier introduced Christianity in Japan in 1549. Christianity, however, merged with Buddhism and Shintoism after several years. Persecutions were severe and thousands died. Japan banned Christianity in 1626; a few Christians remained and went ‘underground’ while others turned to Buddhism. In the mid-1800s, thanks to the Kanagawa Treaty, a shift occurred. By then Japan left its two-century-old isolationist foreign policy known as Sakoku. The treaty, signed 31 March 1854, opened the country’s ports and after several years, missionaries were allowed to enter. In 1872 came the first Protestant church in Japan, in Yokohama, and began with 11 members. Foreigners were allowed to stay in the country and practice their own religion. Evangelistic work was difficult and at times the practice of Christian faith was even forbidden for Japanese by earlier Japanese rulers on penalty of
437. From Sunrise Land, 88.
438. Gold Cord, 6.
439. From Sunrise Land, 8.
440. From Sunrise Land, 8.
441. Present day Matsue (Matsue-shi) is a city located in Shimame Prefecture, of the Chagoku region on the main island Honshu. The city was originally established with the building of the castle – still to be seen today – from 1607 to 1611. On 01 April 1889 the place became a city. Due to the prominence of the lakes, the river and canals, the city is sometimes called the ‘water city’. Nearby Izumo Taisha is recognised as one of the oldest Shinto shrines in Japan. death. At the time of her arrival Amy was one of the 107 single women who worked in Japan. Often this going single was seen as ‘voluntary going into exile’. There were 151 female missionaries in Japan, outnumbering the 140 male missionaries. Mostly female missionaries were involved in the basic education of a new generation of Japanese women. Missionaries in Japan had to lie low because many Japanese still despised foreigners and they were limited in what they were permitted to do. There was democracy in Japan, but the emperor and his advisers were still in full control.
Arriving in Nagasaki and making her first steps in the country Amy felt called to, she was overwhelmed by so many impressions and thoughts of what would lay before her; she prayed: ‘Lord, I ask that I may be crucified to all but Thee, From all sin and self set free, ever, evermore.’442
It overwhelmed her she was now in a country where there were ‘more than thirty million people in this lovely land who have never heard even once of Jesus’.443 Surrounded by the realities of heathendom she sighed: ‘Think of His honour being given to another.’ Quoting Livingstone, she writes:
Think, if you can, that you see it done. Would it not move you into feeling anything, anything we could give or do, just nothing, if only it could help to heal the ‘open sore’ of Heathendom?
From the very beginning she knew that to an encompassing heathendom one could never get accustomed. ‘Certainly we are in a land where the Prince of Darkness has power.’ ‘This heartless, hopeless heathendom is awfully real’, ‘wholly given to idolatry’. ‘Oh, it is awful! Awful! […] The woe of it, the shame of it. Think of His honour being given to another.’444 Plunged into a silence among so many who did not know God and due to the language barrier, unable to speak to them, she felt utterly helpless:
The language seems very difficult, one cannot hope to know it usefully for a long time, but the mere presence of a difficulty is inspiring, especially when one can count on superhuman help in overcoming it. […] Oh, that the gift of tongues were for us today! […] Oh, to be able to speak freely.445 She did not want to have an easy missionary life:
[A]nd yet in every land it is possible to slip into that life. God hold us to that which drew us first, when the Cross was the attraction, and we wanted nothing else.446 She could rest in His plan, ‘and that what is in His plan, is right’. On the wall in her small room she put the two words: Yes Lord, reminding her daily of her once given word of surrender to the will of God. Amy became Japanese minded, and liked the Japanese way of amazing politeness so much, that later on in India ‘the Indian ways and manners felt almost rude’.447
She reached Matsue on 01 May 1893. The team of new missionaries, Amy together with Miss Hilda Spicer and Mrs Consterdine, were stationed in Matsue, then a town between two inland seas with about 50 000
442. From Sunrise Land, 8.
443. From Sunrise Land, 12.
444. From Sunrise Land, 15.
445. From Sunrise Land, 31. The Japanese language is very complex. The sounds of the Japanese language are only 5 vowels and 19 consonants. Some even have no English equivalents. Every circumstance has its own unique word, Amy found out. The grammar is head-breaking. No articles, no prepositions, the verb has no number, no person and no tense as understood in the British language. Amy tried to master the language, but finally she reluctantly gave in and worked on her evangelistic work in Japan with an interpreter. She saw it as the second best option.
446. Gold Cord, 6.
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inhabitants.448 In a distance rose Mount Daisen, still snow-tipped. With Matsue as their operating base, the team itinerated to the various villages around, and the days were filled with sowing the seed. This opened ‘a door into a new world, a World of Want’. Sometimes they had a stormy time when Buddhist agitators exited the people, and anti-foreign, anti-Christian sentiments prevailed. They were pelted with stones, their shoes were carried off. After reaching home safely, it was: ‘Praise Him for opposition. It shows us the devil sees something worth fighting for; anything is better than stagnation.’ Continually the party was reminded of living ‘in a shadowed land’. Never could one escape the ever-present darkness, which may be ‘felt’. Again she quoted Livingstone who once wrote that this work is a ‘sacrifice’. ‘It is emphatically no sacrifice.’449 In Japan she learned more about the ‘preciousness of souls’, and remembered her pastor in Belfast with whom, often late on Saturday evenings, she walked along the dark streets of the city, with the pastor who had just one desire.
‘When wilt Thou save the people? O God of mercy, when?’ Now she met thousands of people here with no God and no peace in Christ:
One night this distress over them and longing for them came to a head and yet we could do nothing whatever for the men on the other side of the paper wall but pray for them. It was then I realized in a new way the urgent need of being able to pray, not just pray summa, but truly pray, ‘storm the gates of heaven’ as someone put it. When, at another time with her interpreter and language teacher Misaki San (Figure 7), she was preaching and nobody wanted to listen, a prayer was born to pray with ‘a passionate passion for souls’.450 She refers here to Mr Wilson who used to pray ‘for much incense of His merits’. Amy once gave a Bible to a student who said ‘It will be a seed’. Amy told of it in a letter home and an undergraduate from Oxford, Mr Paget Wilkes, read that letter and prayed every day ‘in five solid minutes prayer’ for this student. Later he went as a missionary to Japan and worked for a while in Matsue. One of the first he led to Jesus was the student who had received a Bible from Amy!451
She tried to be as close with the Japanese as possible: ‘divested of hats and shoes, we sit on the floor, and are Japanese to the Japanese’.452 Very early she put on a Japanese dress ‘to draw me closer to these strange new sisters, that they might be drawn to Him’.453 She noticed that her English clothes distracted people from the message she had for them. Once an old woman was on the brink of believing in Christ, when she saw Amy’s gloves and started to talk about the gloves. It startled Amy and from that moment, she dressed in the kimono ‘and never again, I trust, risked so very much for the sake of so very little’.454 No worry about clothes ‘sets free hundreds of pounds’, so ‘all extras of dress are cut off’ and this means
448. In the KCMMB for 24 July 1894 are the names of two persons as Keswick missionaries in Matsue, Japan: Miss Amy Wilson Carmichael and Miss Florence Fukgill.
449. From Sunrise Land, 46.
450. Amma’s Book, 29.
451. In Amma’s Book, 30.
452. From Sunrise Land, 12.
453. From Sunrise Land, 13.
454. Amma’s Book, 30. ‘We went to see an old lady who was very ill. She had not heard the Gospel before, but was willing and eager to listen. So I spoke and Misaki San translated, and our hearts prayed most earnestly. “Lord Jesus, help her. O help her to understand and open her heart to Thee now.” She seemed to be just about to turn to Him in faith when she suddenly noticed my hands. It was cold weather and I had on fur gloves. “What are these?” she asked, stretching out her hands and touching mine. She was old and ill and easily distracted. I cannot remember whether or not we were able to recall her to what mattered so much more than gloves. But this I do remember. I went home, took off my English clothes, put on my Japanese kimono, and never again, I trust, risked so very much for the sake of so very little’ (Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 59).
Source: © Dohnavur Fellowship. Permission to reproduce was obtained from Jeremiah Rajanesan. Photographer unknown. FIGURE 7: Amy with her colleague Miss San in Japan on a mission tour around Matsuye.
Chapter 6
‘just so much the more to give to Him who gave us all’.455 Wearing the local dress opened doors for Amy, which would have been closed if she had continued to wear English dress. Several times we can read the exclamation: ‘Oh, to be able to speak freely’; ‘Oh! to be able to explain’. Amy had embroidered on her dress ‘God is love’, so these were the forms for a text,456 for a few broken words. She prayed for love, real divine love, to love the unlovable, and loved on, always, through all: ‘Give me a love like Thine! Give me a love like Thine! Should it lead me like Thee, unto dark Calvary, Give me a love like Thine!’457 One of the first lessons she learned was that when her pride was offended, or when she was ignored, or when someone stopped her message, in the words of Mr Buxton, this was ‘good for the flesh’. Later, in India when she was in Bangalore and had the same experiences she felt deep in her heart, ‘See it as a chance to die’, and again later on ‘let it be: think of me’. ‘These three sentences have peace making powers.’458 One day she was in Kyoto and her American friends showed her the city and its temples, ‘beautiful works of art’. They took her to one of these temples and they went inside, ‘but all the time we were in it, it seemed to me as though the master were looking down with such a surprise in His eyes. How could we care to see what grieved Him so?’ By then, Amy decided, unless the Lord would send her to one, as his messenger, she would never again enter a heathen temple (09 November 1893):
It is evening. From the room below the scent of incense rises. We can hear them praying their powerless prayers. From our window we can see roofs, each covers a heathen house. On our way thither we pass many an idol shrine. I counted nearly fifty and then stopped, sick at heart. Just outside this heathen village stands a tall stone Buddha. We looked at it and thought of Gideon.459 She felt being surrounded by idols. In her letters sent home, particularly the one written on 10 February 1894, she wrote about the ‘toss-and-tumble’ of itinerating work, ‘passing the graves of those who had never heard’. ‘These Satan-bound people will they ever believe at all?’ It was a custom among the missionaries in the preaching of the Gospel to show pictures of Jesus Christ. One day she heard a little girl talking about magic lantern pictures. The girl said: ‘They will show their God.’ A little bit later, she read in a magazine an article by Prof. Wallace from Dublin, in which he wrote that to make a picture of Lord Jesus was showing something that was untrue. Amy remembered that as a child she had treated such pictures with reverence and thought of Zinzendorf and the picture of the Crucifixion. When a child said: ‘They will show their God tonight’, she asked herself: was this the place to use such pictures? ‘And my heart answered, No, I cannot use them.’ When she was in India she saw many missionaries were also using these pictures. She did not say anything, ‘only I did not use them myself’. Rev. Walker at that time started to have the same view, and Amy told her children then: ‘But I know that as we trust the Spirit He does not fail us’.460
The strain of the daily travelling under the hot sun, the camping in odd places wrung out her strength and the first signs of her sickness asserted themselves as she described herself as ‘being possessed of a nervous system, ganglionic and cerebrospinal quite complete’. And she went on: ‘O, that we may be quick and sure in buying up the opportunities’. ‘Opportunities are not toys to be played with as we will.’ Life was serious, and every moment of every day has to be accounted for – a
455. Amma’s Book, 30.
456. Amma’s Book, 30.
457. From Sunrise Land, 13.
458. Amma’s Book, 29.
459. From Sunrise Land, 69.
460. For Amy’s use of pictures in preaching, cf. Roots, 31. When others have a different opinion on this issue, Amy says: ‘Judge not, is our Lord’s command. Unfortunately, if you are led in at all an unusual way, people who are not led in that way do often take it for granted that you are judging them though truly you are not. What can we do about it? Leave it. Show love if you have a chance; avoid argument’ (‘Let it be, think of Me’, in Roots, 31). theme captured in Frances Havergal’s hymn ‘Take my life, and let it be, Consecrated, Lord, to Thee. Take my moments and my days, Let them flow in ceaseless praise’. As is seen in the holidays Mrs Havergal undertook to Switzerland and France, time had to be used ‘to be useful’, ‘to evangelize’, and to ‘do good’. Amy was of the same opinion concerning time.
Temptation and testing
The climate in Japan was trying for her: home, friends and ways of life are hard to do without. Trifles have the power to fret and chafe. Perhaps study and service force their way in and hinder her quiet time with him who says to ‘be still and know’. It is both terrible and possible to get out of touch. At times Amy felt very strongly that she was out of touch with everyone.461 She began to tackle the difficult Japanese language to be able to communicate with the people. Meeting the people she was aware of the difficulty and resistance ahead. The longer she was in Japan the more she saw more the urgency to direct evangelisation. ‘There are more than thirty million in this lovely land who have never heard even once of Jesus.’462
In her eyes, Japan was becoming the ‘Britain’ of the East and with all the changes, the opportunities to bring the Gospel would diminish. It could overwhelm her when she was thinking of this century that had seen 60 times as many births as baptisms. One evening, sitting alone in a quiet room, and too tired to sleep, Amy felt the shadow of a darker darkness and she says about it:
Japan, with its thirty millions unreached as yet. God’s islands of the sea. […] We know them on our map. But do we know them in our heart! Think of them all: dishonouring Him tonight, full of sorrow and sin tonight: wrapped in the death-gloom tonight. How can we be so cool about it?463 The answer people gave when they were asked:
Are you ready for the next life? [was] we are not ready for this life, how then can we be ready for the next?464 Is it nothing to you, O ye Christians? Will ye pass by and say ‘It is nothing, we cannot aid them’. You can give – or go – or pray; You can save your soul from blood-guiltiness. For in lands you never trod, the heathen are dying every day, and dying without God.
Mr Buxton accompanied the team in her first year and with him she was singing choruses, rather joyfully, while going along the road.465 She used all her time to visit all the nearby villages. To reach the people was difficult. In us is nothing, but she knew, in the life-seed of the living Word is everything. Not only forgiveness but also cleansing. This is full salvation. ‘Thine is the mighty ordination of the pierced hands.’ There were times she exclaimed: ‘It is very difficult to get people’s souls. Very difficult indeed. But the battle is not ours but God’s.’466 Amy was always been keen to ‘see’ what was beyond the surface. She ‘saw’ more than others sometimes see. While in Japan she saw the beauty of nature, and enjoyed the flowers, birds and the great views. Then she could say one day: ‘On the surface, beauty everywhere – the wooded hills fair already with early blossom, villages nestling beneath them, bright with busy life: under the surface – death, death, death.’
461. Cf. in From Sunrise Land, 34.
462. From Sunrise Land, 12.
463. From Sunrise Land, 165.
464. From Sunrise Land, 141.
465. Thou Givest … They Gather, 183.
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We might have been walking in a living graveyard. ‘“Dead in trespasses and sins”, those words mean something now.’467 The people gave more reference to their flowers ‘than many a Christian bestows upon his Christ’. ‘The winning of a single soul is a tremendous miracle.’ People do not know ‘the language of love’. In December 1893 at Hirosi she saw how some converts wanted to keep their idols as curios. Some drew back. The work seemed going to be a failure. ‘But first: utter humbling of the flesh, then manifestation of the Spirit. Souls were saved. Hallelujah.’ Some days later back in Matsue she knew she needed words straight from the Lord, not via others.468
She expressed her love for these people in this way: ‘but to the native all around, is the goal of my ambition’. After that day in Kyoto, she kept far away from places like temples, but ‘unless when consciously sent’, she went, to save one individual. She felt as if she were standing on the shores of an infinite ocean. Most of them just pass. ‘Fifty thousand of that spirit fleet will touch their horizon tonight.’ Amy was of the opinion, as she distinctly writes on 05 April 1894, that she was in Japan to strengthen rather than extend the work. The Christians had to learn to wait upon God to do the next step:
People liked to get more Christians and go to many places to get followers for Christ, but it is not so much where we are, as whether we are where our Lord wants us to be.
She thought of, and prayed for, Africa, China, Japan and India, ‘with their twenty million widows’. That alone was enough to touch any woman’s heart surely.
The place she really liked in Japan was Hirosi, an almost purely Buddhist village. Before she started work there, she was alone with God for one day. She read Julian of Norwich and found that Julian had discovered what she was groping for:
And all this brought our Lord suddenly to my mind, and showed these words and said: I am Ground of thy beseeching: to will it: and after, first it is my will that thou have it: and after, I make thee to beseech it and thou beseechest it. How should it then be that thou shouldst not have thy beseeching?469 She then asked for one soul and then for other ones, one, two, four and eight. And the Lord opened the hearts of all these people:
These four were the first birthday gifts I ever had from heathendom. That was 16 December 1893. […] It would take too long to tell how the eight were given. It was like watching an invisible Hand at work.470 In India she often thought of Hirosi and:
[L]onged with a great longing to have an Indian Hirosi. But it was never given. Perhaps it is that the Lord does not repeat Himself. Does He ever repeat the creation of a single blade of grass? He had other plans for me here. […] But I do not think that is a thing to talk about. At most, what did I know then, what do I know now of what St. Paul meant when he said, ‘My little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be fully formed in you?’ There are some words in the Bible that make us ashamed.471 She never could forget the blessings in Hirosi; in this way this experience was never repeated in her later ministry, but she knew to be content with the way the Holy Spirit would work, where, when and of his choosing. And that he used her in a different and unforgettable way will be shown later on.
467. From Sunrise Land, 117.
468. See in Amy’s Bible (1895) in the margin of Jeremiah 23:31–32.
469. Amma’s Book, 33.
470. Amma’s Book, 34–35.
471. Amma’s Book, 35. Cf. too Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 69.