Amma

“Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth by itself alone; but if it die, it beareth much fruit.” — John 12:24 (ASV)

In the autumn of 1931, her biographers record, Amy prayed, as she often had, that God would do whatever would best fit her for his service. On 24 October 1931, at dusk, she went to look at a building being prepared for the work, at Kalakadu according to her biographers. Workmen had dug a pit in the floor and left it uncovered. In the half-dark she stepped into it and fell. She broke her leg, dislocated her ankle and injured her spine. She was sixty-three.

Everyone expected her back on her feet within weeks. She never was. For almost twenty years she lived mostly in one room, often in pain, able to walk only a little. Outside her window was a bird-bath, and she watched the birds.

Was the fall God’s answer to her prayer? Amy came to believe that God had allowed it and would use it. She didn’t believe he pushed her into the pit, or that pain was good in itself, and in her better moments she didn’t pretend to understand. People all over the world prayed for her healing, and the answer was no. The girl at the mirror in Millisle learned the same lesson again, at far greater cost.

The hardest part may have been losing control. Others, Indian and British, had to take on more of the leading. That was good for a Fellowship that would one day live without her, but she found it hard to let go.

Yet out of that room came the books most of the world knows her by, among them Gold Cord (1932), her history of the Fellowship; Rose from Brier (1933), written for people in pain by someone in pain; and If (1938), a small book that measures everyday failures of love against the love of Calvary. She wrote notes, often daily, to members of the Fellowship, and letters to strangers. People noticed a gentleness that had not always been so clear in her active years.

The losses went on. Arulai, by then one of the Fellowship’s leaders, died in 1939. In August 1947 India became independent, and in October the Madras Act against temple dedication was passed. Amy stayed. The Fellowship had long been preparing for Indian leadership.

Amy Carmichael died at Dohnavur on 18 January 1951, aged eighty-three, after fifty-five years in India without once going home. She didn’t want a monument. She was buried in the Fellowship’s burial ground, called God’s Garden, among the children and workers who had gone before her. Over her grave they put a bird-bath, and on it one word: Amma.

How should her life be weighed? Honestly. Hundreds of children, perhaps more than a thousand over the years, grew up at Dohnavur who might otherwise have faced exploitation, neglect or early death, and they were given a home, a family and a faith. The Fellowship still works in Tamil Nadu today, under Indian leadership. But her writing about Hinduism was often harsh and sometimes unfair, and it did harm. She could be imperious, as the parting with Stephen Neill shows, and Dohnavur’s walls may have stayed high too long. She was a woman of her time and her empire. The shadows are real. They don’t cancel the light.

A saying often attributed to her, though rarely with a source, is that missionary life is simply a chance to die. It echoes Jesus’ words at the top of this page. She let go of Belfast and the Welcome Hall, of Robert Wilson, of the village work she loved, of her mother, of her health and finally of control. Each time something died. Each time, she believed, something grew.

And it all began with one child who walked through the dark to find her. You will probably never run a Fellowship. But you can be faithful to the one person God puts in front of you.

One thing to do this week: ask yourself what one word you would want written over your life. Then ask God whether there is something you are holding on to tightly that he is asking you to let go of, and take one small step toward letting it go.