“Go Ye”

“And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to the whole creation.” — Mark 16:15 (ASV)

In 1889 Amy and her mother moved to Manchester to help in a mission among mill workers. Amy chose to live among them, in a dirty, vermin-ridden room in Ancoats, one of the poorest districts in the city. Within months her health broke. The neuralgia got worse, and the long hours, poor food and foul air wore her out. She had given up the Welcome Hall to come, and now she couldn’t do the work.

Then an old friend stepped in. Robert Wilson was a Quaker businessman from Cumberland and one of the founders of the Keswick Convention, which taught that Christians could know a life of rest and victory by trusting Christ and giving themselves wholly to him. He was much older, and by the usual account a widower who had lost his only daughter. In 1890 he invited Amy to recover at his country house, Broughton Grange. She stayed. He treated her as a daughter, and she called him “the Dear Old Man.” She was never legally adopted, but her early books came out under the name Amy Wilson-Carmichael. Her mother agreed to the arrangement, and that was its own quiet generosity.

At Broughton Grange missionaries came and went, and Amy heard the needs of the world round the dinner table.

Then, on 13 January 1892, alone in her room, the words “Go ye” came to her with a force she couldn’t mistake. She didn’t claim to hear a voice out loud; she was suspicious of people who did. She said that a command she had heard all her life became, that evening, a command to her. You may know what that’s like: a verse you’ve read a hundred times suddenly won’t let you go.

The next day she wrote to her mother, a widow with little money, asking her blessing to go to the other side of the world, maybe for good. Her mother’s reply, which Amy kept all her life, gave her daughter to God freely and with thanksgiving. Catherine Carmichael would die in England in 1913, and Amy would not be with her. The missionary gets the stories. The parents get the empty chair.

Robert Wilson found it harder. He was old and he loved her. Some friends told Amy plainly that her duty was to stay with him, and that she was dressing up a wish for adventure as a call from God. That was not a silly argument. Jesus himself condemned people who used religious words to dodge caring for their parents. Amy was choosing between two good things, and she knew it, and she suffered over it. In the end he gave his consent, and went on writing, praying and giving for the rest of his life.

Her first thought was China. She applied to the China Inland Mission and went to its training home in London. Then she failed the medical. The doctors said her neuralgia made her unfit for inland China. The mission she admired most had shut the door.

She didn’t believe the call had been withdrawn, only that one door had closed. Another opened. The Keswick Convention agreed to send her as its first missionary, to join Barclay Buxton, an English missionary leading a band of workers in western Japan. In March 1893, aged twenty-five, with no language training and poor health, she sailed.

Years later, in Things as They Are, she explained why she kept going on the hard days. “He said ‘Go, tell,’” she wrote, “and we have come and are telling, and we meet Him as we ‘go and tell.’” She didn’t go because she felt strong. She went because she believed the one who sent her would be found on the road.

Not every call is to the other side of the world. But Jesus’ command is not “Be successful.” It is “Go, and tell.” And going nearly always costs someone else something too.

One thing to do this week: thank someone who has let you go, or made room for you to do something hard: a parent, a grandparent, a friend. Tell them what it meant. Then ask God where he might be saying “Go” to you, even somewhere small.