Elisabeth Elliot - A Chance to Die: The Life and Legacy of Amy Carmichael

Also by Elisabeth Elliot

Through Gates of Splendor

Shadow of the Almighty

Let Me Be a Woman

Discipline: The Glad Surrender

Gods Guidance

On Asking God Why

The Shaping of a Christian Family

Keep a Quiet Heart

The Mark of a Man

Faith That Does Not Falter

Passion and Purity

Quest for Love

Be Still My Soul

The Journals of Jim Elliot

The Music of His Promises

No Graven Image

The Path of Loneliness

Secure in the Everlasting Arms

To all who loved Amma

1987 by Elisabeth Elliot

Published by Revell

a division of Baker Publishing Group

P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

www.revellbooks.com

Paperback edition published 2005

Ebook edition created 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meansfor example, electronic, photocopy, recordingwithout the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

ISBN 978-1-4934-3445-9

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture is taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

Scripture marked NEB is taken from The New English Bible. Copyright 1961,1970 by The Delegates of Oxford University Press and The Syndics of the Cambridge University Press. Reprinted by permission.

Scripture marked PHILLIPS is taken from Th e New Testament in Modern English, revised edition J. B. Phillips, translator. J. B. Phillips 1958, 1960, 1972. Used by permission of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.

Scripture marked TLB is taken from The Living Bible, copyright 1971. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.

Scripture verses identified AV are from the Authorized (King James) Version of the Bible.

Copyright material from Gold Cord and Toward Jerusalem by Amy Carmichael used by permission of Christian Literature Crusade, Ft. Washington, PA.

Excerpts from Freedom at Midnight by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, copyright 1975 by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre. Reprinted by permission of Simon 8c Schuster, Inc.

Be earnest, earnest, earnest

Mad if thou wilt;

Do what thou dost as if the

stake were Heaven,

And that thy last deed before

the Judgment Day.

Charles Kingsley

Hereby perceive we the love of God, because He laid down His life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. How often I think of that ought. No sugary sentiment there. Just the stern, glorious trumpet call, OUGHT. But can words tell the joy buried deep within? Mine cannot. It laughs at words.

Amy Carmichael, letter written in the Old Forest House, 1922

Every day we experience something of the death of Jesus, so that we may also know the power of the life of Jesus in these bodies of ours.

2 Corinthians 4:10 (PHILLIPS)

T o Amy Carmichael I owe what C. S. Lewis said he owed to George MacDonald: as great a debt as one can owe another.

I cannot pay it. But it is my hope that this biography will introduce its subject to a generation which has not had the privilege that was mine. I met her when I was fourteen. Mrs. P. W. DuBose, headmistress of a small boarding school in Florida, used to quote often in school vespers from Carmichael books. I was captivated, and told her so. She lent me the books.

Dohnavur became a familiar place. I knew its bungalows, its paths, its people; I breathed its air. Amy Carmichael became for me what some now call a role model. She was far more than that. She was my first spiritual mother. She showed me the shape of godliness. For a time, I suppose, I thought she must have been perfect, and that was good enough for me. As I grew up I knew she could not have been perfect, and that was better, for it meant that I might possibly walk in her footprints. If we demand perfect models we will have, except for the Son of man Himself, none at all.

The first of her books that I read was, I think, If, which became her best-seller. It was not written for teenagers, but for seasoned Christians with the solemn charge of caring for the souls of others. It was from the pages of this thin blue book that I, a teenager, began to understand the great message of the Cross, of what the author called Calvary love. I saw that the chance to die, to be crucified with Christ, was not a morbid thing, but the very gateway to Life. I was drawnslowly, fitfully (my response was fitful), but inexorably.

In a far more secular and self-preoccupied time Amy Carmichaels vision of the unseen and her ardent effort to dwell in its light, making any sacrifice for its sake, seems hardly believable, let alone worth trying to imitate. Will we be put off by her awesome discipline, her steadfastness, or perhaps by the cultural shift or the difference in vocabulary (saturated as it was by the English of the King James Bible and the mystics of centuries ago)? She spoke often of the country whose forces move unseen among us. That country is our country. We are its citizens as she was, if we call ourselves Christians. If its forces moved in Dohnavur, they move unabated here, too, where we live. If we are unaware, perhaps we have not listened, have not taken time to observe. Have we been deafened by noise, some of the worst of which passes for music? Has our vision, spiritual as well as physical, perhaps been impaired by the glittering images of the ubiquitous screen?

In spite of much that militates against quietness there are people who still read books. They are the people who keep me going. I write especially for those who bring to their reading a mind not hidebound by the sensibilities of our own time, but prepared to contemplate the Eternally Relevant; to seek in this book specifically the truth and the hidden meaning of a single life.

We read biographies to get out of ourselves and into anothers skin, to understand the convulsive drama that shapes, motivates, and issues from that other life. Our current vocabulary includes such terms as identity, role models, self-image, self-actualization, liberation, upward mobility, and fulfillment, worries that never crossed Amy Carmichaels mind. How shall we, accustomed to popular seminars on rights and how to feel comfortable, receive and transmit a faith that prized what the world despises (the Cross) and despised what the world prizes (all that dims the Cross)?

The Christian life comes down to two simple things: trust and obedience. What does that mean, exactly? We could hold a seminar and talk about it. Visual aids are better. Look at a life. Amy Carmichael set her face toward that other Country. Her education, experience, and environment were incidentals, a mere framework within which she lived for eighty-three years, loved, feared, trusted, suffered, celebrated, failed, triumphed, and died. Through all the lights, poses, moods, and disguises we discern the common human elements that make up all of our lives.

I offer the testament of one whose loyal answering of her Lords Come follow has made an incalculable difference to me. May it make a difference to my readers.

ELISABETH ELLIOT

Magnolia, Massachusetts

S he managed to stuff her two little brothers up through the skylight and then squeezed herself onto the slate roof. Glorious freedom. They stood up triumphant in the fresh wind that swept across the Irish Sea. The water was blue today, which to the girl (perhaps seven or eight years old) meant that it was happy. On some days it was green and angry, on others gray and anxious. Over the rooftops of the village they could see the stony beach and, far off across the water, the great rock called Ailsa Craig, and two rounded hills, the Paps of Jura. Now for the rest of the adventure. Gleefully the three children slid down the slates and paraded triumphantly around the lead guttersuntil they saw, gazing up at them, the astonished faces of their parents.