Amy Carmichael (For Teens)

An Irish missionary, born in Millisle, County Down, in 1867, who went to South India in 1895 with the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society and stayed fifty-five years without going home. After years of travelling the villages with a band of Indian women, she began in 1901 to shelter girls in danger of being dedicated to temples, and later boys too, at Dohnavur, in what became the Dohnavur Fellowship. The children called her Amma, “mother.” She died there in 1951.

Yes. It names her father’s early death and her lifelong pain, the converts who lost their families, the two boys who died of cholera, the dedication of small girls to temples and the exploitation that followed for many, the babies who died, and her twenty years of pain after her fall, all plainly but without graphic detail. It also names her faults: she could be severe and imperious, she wrote harshly and sometimes unfairly about Hinduism, and her parting with the young Stephen Neill was bitter.

In the villages, most days ended exactly as they began. She held on to the verse “It is required in stewards that a man be found faithful,” and wrote, “Praise God, it does not say ‘successful.’” She meant that God asks his people to be faithful, not impressive, and that there is joy in simply obeying when nothing seems to happen.

No, and the book is careful about this. The practice was outlawed in the Madras Presidency by the Madras Devadasis (Prevention of Dedication) Act of October 1947, after a long campaign led by Indian reformers such as Dr. Muthulakshmi Reddy and Moovalur Ramamirtham. What Amy did was shelter children, one at a time, for nearly fifty years; her witness was one of many streams that fed the reform.

She wore a sari, ate Indian food, spoke Tamil, gave the children Tamil names and raised them as Indian Christians, and she would not allow caste at Dohnavur. She wrote warmly of the courtesy and intelligence of the Hindus she met, and of the grief of families who lost a child to the Christians. But she also wrote about Hinduism in harsh terms common among missionaries of her day, and the book says plainly that a Hindu reader had every reason to object. It also reports historians who argue that reform writing harmed the hereditary temple communities.

From the full-length biography of Amy Carmichael in the Portraits of Courage series, which quotes chiefly from her own early book Things as They Are (1903) and uses the later biographies only for facts. Stories that rest on later retelling, like the blue eyes, the fur gloves, the cave and the coffee-stained skin, are marked as such. There is also a children’s edition for younger readers.

That no is also an answer to prayer; that faithfulness matters more than visible success; that you can tell the truth about hard things without despising the people involved; that one person, even one runaway child, matters to God; and that weakness and waiting are not wasted.

She chose a path that would very probably mean she never married, and in Japan, she later told a younger colleague, she went alone to a cave to pray about her fear of loneliness. She took comfort from Psalm 34, as she knew it: “none of them that trust in him shall be desolate.” She was often lonely afterwards, but she said the promise held, and she gathered a family of hundreds who called her Amma.