Some books are written to comfort readers at home. Things as They Are was written to disturb them. Published in 1903, it is Amy Carmichael’s frank, first-hand report from the mission field of southern India—an account so unsparing that some supporters in England refused to believe it, and a later edition had to append signed notes from other missionaries confirming that yes, the work really was this hard. Carmichael was not interested in the “bright side” that made for pleasant reading. She had come to India to win souls out of the grip of caste and idolatry, and among her deepest burdens were the temple children—little girls given over to lives of ritual exploitation—and she meant to show her readers the truth, whatever it cost them or her.
This guide is a companion to the full text, which you can read free on Ochorus. It explains what the book is, how it is put together, what Carmichael is really asking of her reader, and how to read a hundred-year-old missionary letter-book today without either flinching from it or turning it into a museum piece. You can read Things as They Are in full here, and it repays being read slowly.
What the book is, and why Carmichael wrote it so plainly
Things as They Are is a collection of letters and sketches written from the Tinnevelly district of south India, where Carmichael worked before founding the Dohnavur Fellowship. It is subtitled “Mission Work in Southern India,” and that plainness is the whole point. Two visiting friends who had seen the field for themselves urged her to gather her letters into a book so that others might see “exactly what they had seen.” She hesitated—the world has many books—but agreed on one condition of conscience: it would tell the truth and nothing else.
What drove her was a conviction that home supporters were being fed a romance. Reports dwelt on conversions and revivals; they said little about the resistance, the slow years, the converts beaten back into their families, the spiritual darkness she felt pressing on the work. Carmichael believed that prayer built on illusion was worth little—that intercessors could not truly stand with the missionaries unless they knew what the missionaries were actually facing. So she refused to soften the picture. In one chapter she warns the comfortable reader outright:
Leave this chapter if you want “something interesting to read”; hold your finger in the flame of a candle if you want to know what it is like to write it.Amy Carmichael
That is the spirit of the book. It stands under the text she set over the whole enterprise, “We can do nothing against the truth, but for the truth” (2 Corinthians 13:8). Carmichael did not confuse honesty with despair. She wrote plainly precisely because she believed truth serves the gospel and illusion does not.
How the book is structured
There is no single narrative thread. Things as They Are is built from short chapters, most of them a few pages long, each opening with an epigraph drawn from other missionaries—David Brainerd, Henry Martyn, Hudson Taylor, James Gilmour, Lilias Trotter—so that the reader hears Carmichael’s witness inside a chorus of witnesses from the whole mission field. The chapters move from the ordinary to the unbearable.
Early on she describes the sheer humdrum of the work—a whole afternoon of preaching that wins not one good listener—and the geography and social world of Tamil south India, dividing it into “the Classes and the Masses” and trying to explain the immovable reality of caste to readers who have nothing like it. Then the book descends. Chapter by chapter she brings the reader closer to the practice she found most terrible: the dedication of young girls to the temples, “married to the god,” and the near-impossibility of rescuing them. Titles like “Behind the Door,” “Married to the God,” and “Skirting the Abyss” mark the descent. The book ends by turning outward and upward—“Wanted, Volunteers,” “What do we count them worth?” and finally “Show me Thy Glory!”—so that the accumulated weight of the darkness becomes a summons to prayer and to costly obedience rather than a counsel of despair.
The central themes
The cost of obedience
Carmichael measures the gospel’s advance not in numbers but in cost. She quotes Hudson Taylor—“what costs little is worth little”—and lives inside that sentence. Converts in her pages are flogged, imprisoned in their own homes, sent away, sometimes “simply murdered.” A boy heir to property is tied up and beaten twice by a father who loves him, and does not waver. Carmichael refuses to promise ease to anyone considering the field, and she reaches for the Lord’s own image of fruitfulness through death: unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it abides alone (John 12:24). Obedience, in this book, is not a feeling but a laying-down.
Intercession
The book is finally an appeal for prayer—not general goodwill, but informed, laboring intercession. Carmichael is scathing about “ignorant faith” that expects the wall of caste to fall because one grain of dust has dropped from a brick. She calls readers to Abraham’s kind of faith, which considered the facts honestly and yet did not waver but grew strong (Romans 4:19–20). She reminds them that certain strongholds yield only to sustained prayer—“this kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting” (Matthew 17:21)—and that the harvest is the Lord’s to give, so we are to pray the Lord of the harvest to send laborers into His field (Matthew 9:38). Her whole argument is that you cannot pray rightly for what you refuse to see.
The reality of spiritual darkness
Carmichael writes as one who believes she is in a real battle against real powers, not merely against ignorance or custom. In the chapter “Missed Ends” she records a dream that has become one of the most quoted passages she ever wrote:
The tom-toms thumped straight on all night, and the darkness shuddered round me like a living, feeling thing.Amy Carmichael
The book takes seriously what Paul calls the powers of darkness (Ephesians 6:12), and it does so without sensationalism—she titles one chapter “Deified Devilry” and apologizes for the title, saying she can write no other. Yet the darkness is never the last word. Carmichael sets against it the confidence that Christ has already triumphed, and the whole book strains toward the prayer of Moses that gives the final chapter its name: “Show me Thy glory” (Exodus 33:18).
Love for the children
Beneath the reporting is a tenderness that keeps breaking through, above all toward the children. Carmichael writes of a mischievous little girl she calls the Elf with the delight of a mother, and of the temple children with a grief that is almost unbearable—girls sold or dedicated by their own families, whom she often could not reach, could not prove, could not take by force. This is the burden that would soon lead her to build Dohnavur into a refuge for exactly such children. Behind every page stands the Lord’s word, “Suffer the little children to come unto me” (Mark 10:14), and the reminder that not one sparrow falls to the ground without the Father (Matthew 10:29). It is love, not curiosity, that makes the darkness she describes so intolerable to her—and she wants it to become intolerable to her readers too.
Who should read it
This is a book for anyone who prays for missions and wants their prayers grounded in reality rather than in a brochure. It is for those weighing a call to hard places, who need to count the cost with open eyes before they go. It is for readers who suspect that modern Christianity has grown too comfortable and want to sit with someone who paid dearly and did not complain of it. And it is for anyone drawn to Amy Carmichael herself—this is among her earliest and most characteristic works, and it explains why the rest of her long life took the shape it did. You can explore more of her life and writing on the Amy Carmichael author page.
A word of care: the subject matter is heavy. Carmichael writes about the ritual exploitation of children with gravity and restraint—she says plainly that she cannot tell the whole truth, because if she wrote it, it could not be printed—but the sorrow is real and unhidden. Sensitive readers should come to it prayerfully, and perhaps not all at once.
How to read it today
Read it slowly, a chapter or two at a sitting, and let each one do its work before moving on. The book was built from letters and is meant to be taken in small drafts, not swallowed whole. Pause at the epigraphs; they place Carmichael in a long line of witnesses and are worth looking up in their own right.
Read it with charity toward its age. The language of “heathen” and the confident framing of the Empire belong to 1903, and a modern reader will feel the distance. Do not let that distance close your ears to what is timeless in it: the honesty, the intercession, the refusal to trade truth for comfort. And read it as Carmichael asked—not as “interesting reading” but as a summons. She sets over the humdrum of faithful, unrewarded labor the text, “It is required in stewards that a man be found faithful” (1 Corinthians 4:2), and then adds her own gloss:
Praise God, it does not say “successful.”Amy Carmichael
Best of all, read it with a Bible and a prayer list open beside it. The book is an argument for prayer; the natural response is to pray. Let the fields she describes send you back to the Lord’s words that the fields are already white unto harvest (John 4:35), and turn what you have seen into intercession.
If the book leaves you hungry for more of the same spirit, the natural next step is the classic journal of a man Carmichael quotes and clearly loved, The Life and Diary of David Brainerd. Brainerd’s account of preaching to the native peoples of North America, worn down by illness and yet given over wholly to God, is the same kind of witness Carmichael offers—honest about the cost, and radiant with hope beneath it.
For reflection
Whether you read alone or with a group, these questions may help you sit with the book rather than merely finish it:
- Carmichael feared that supporters at home were being given a romanticized picture of missions. Where in your own view of the church’s work—near or far—might you prefer the comfortable version to “things as they are”? What would change if you insisted on the truth?
- She writes that faithfulness, not success, is what is required of stewards (1 Corinthians 4:2). How would your sense of a “good” day of Christian service change if faithfulness, not visible results, were the measure?
- The book treats spiritual darkness as real and prayer as genuine labor (Matthew 17:21; Ephesians 6:12). Is your praying more like “a simple and pleasant exercise” or more like watching and wrestling? What would it take to move?
- Carmichael’s love for the temple children made their plight unbearable to her. Whose suffering has God placed within your sight that you have learned to look past? What might love ask of you there?
- The final chapter turns from the darkness to the cry “Show me Thy glory” (Exodus 33:18). Having seen what Carmichael shows you, what is one concrete way you will respond—in prayer, in giving, in going, or in obedience God has already made plain?
