Understand Hereafter

“Jesus answered and said unto him, What I do thou knowest not now; but thou shalt understand hereafter.” — John 13:7 (ASV)

Robert Wilson, the Dear Old Man, died in 1905. Amy hadn’t seen him since she sailed ten years before. That was the kind of grief missionaries far from home learned to expect. The years from 1912 to 1915 were different. One after another, they took the people Amy leaned on most.

In August 1912 Thomas Walker fell ill on a journey and died, far from Dohnavur. He had taught her Tamil, stood beside her when Preena came and helped her build the household, and his steady judgement had balanced her intensity. Now everything rested on her. Soon afterwards, while they were still mourning, a lawyer wrote demanding that a wall being built round part of the compound stop at once, claiming the land wasn’t the mission’s.

On 14 July 1913 her mother died in England. Amy had not seen her since 1895. Her mother’s letter of 1892, giving her daughter freely to God, had been one of the treasures of her life. Amy was forty-five, and an orphan herself.

Her biographers record that about 1914 a kidnapping charge was brought over a girl named Muttammal whom the household was protecting, and that Amy faced possible arrest before the case was dropped. Those details can’t be checked against court records, so hold them loosely. The general picture is clear: sheltering children at Dohnavur meant living under the shadow of the courts. In August 1914 war broke out in Europe, prices rose and letters from home slowed. The household told its needs to God and not to people, and later said it had never lacked what it needed, while Amy took care not to suggest that Christians who did go without were less faithful.

The hardest loss was Ponnammal, her closest Indian friend, who had led the band and become a pillar of Dohnavur. She had a long, painful illness, described as cancer. Amy prayed for her healing, and it didn’t come. Watching her suffer without being able to help was, for Amy, harder than the death itself. Ponnammal died in 1915, and Amy took her daughter into her own care.

Amy didn’t pretend to understand. She later warned against handing easy explanations to people in pain. What she chose was acceptance: not a dull giving-up, but a deliberate decision to take from God’s hand what she couldn’t understand, and go on.

All through those same years she was praying about something else. She had learned that boys too were sometimes given to temples, or to the travelling drama companies connected with temple festivals, and that some were exploited as badly as the girls. According to the Fellowship’s own history, the burden came to her about 1912. Taking in boys would need men, buildings and money, so she prayed that God would either take the burden away or show her what to do.

For six years nothing happened. Amy was impatient by nature; when she saw a need, she wanted to meet it. Now she waited.

In January 1918 a baby boy was brought to Dohnavur. Nobody had gone looking for him. Amy took him as the answer, and the boys’ work began. In time men came to care for the boys: Indian Christians, young men who had grown up at Dohnavur, and some from Britain, among them the brothers Godfrey and Murray Webb-Peploe. Amy wanted the boys to be strong and brave, and able to earn their own living in India rather than depend on a mission.

Jesus said to Peter, as he knelt to wash his feet, “What I do thou knowest not now; but thou shalt understand hereafter.” It is a promise of understanding later, not now. Amy got some of the “hereafter” in her lifetime, like the boy in 1918. Some of it she never got.

If you are waiting on God for something, or grieving something you don’t understand, you are not failing at faith. That’s where faith lives.

One thing to do this week: write down one thing you have been praying about for a long time. Next to it, write Jesus’ words: “thou shalt understand hereafter.” If you are grieving, tell one person you trust how you really feel.