False Starts

“Trust in Jehovah with all thy heart, And lean not upon thine own understanding: In all thy ways acknowledge him, And he will direct thy paths.” — Proverbs 3:5-6 (ASV)

Amy reached Japan in the spring of 1893 and joined Barclay Buxton’s band at Matsue, a castle town on a lake in the west of the main island. Christianity had been banned in Japan for more than two hundred years, and believers had been tortured and killed. The notice boards forbidding it had come down only twenty years before.

She couldn’t speak Japanese, so she depended on Japanese Christians to interpret for her, among them a young woman she called Misaki San. It was humbling, and it taught her how much the gospel in any country depends on its own people.

Her biographers tell of a visit to an old woman who was ill and seemed close to believing. Amy was wearing English clothes, including fur-lined gloves against the cold, and she noticed the woman’s eyes drifting to the gloves. The moment passed. The woman didn’t respond. Amy went home convinced that her foreign clothes had got in the way, and from then on she wore Japanese dress. Whatever the exact details, the lesson stuck. She never thought clothes could save anyone. She did think they could get in the way.

Japanese was hard. The climate set off her neuralgia, which she started calling her “Japanese head.” Many people listened politely and went away unchanged. She learned that the mission field is not the platform, and that the stories told at conventions are only part of the truth.

Then there was the cave. Many years later she told a younger colleague that she had gone alone to a cave in the hills to pray. She was in her twenties, she would very probably never marry, and she was afraid of the lonely years ahead. There, she said, God gave her a line from Psalm 34 as she knew it: “none of them that trust in him shall be desolate.” She didn’t say she was never lonely again. She often was. But she said the promise held. The story comes only from her later memory, so hold it loosely; it fits the rest of her life.

After about fifteen months, in the summer of 1894, her health broke down badly. She left, first for Shanghai and then for Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, believing she was being guided, and she didn’t consult the committee that had sent her. To some at home it looked as if she had simply walked off her post, and their criticism was not all unfair. Feeling guided by God doesn’t excuse you from talking to the people responsible for you.

In Ceylon, late in 1894, news came that Robert Wilson had had a stroke. She sailed home at once. He partly recovered, and for some months it looked as if her missionary life was over. Japan: ill. Ceylon: called home. Some of her critics must have felt proved right.

Then in 1895 the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society accepted her. It sent women to work among women in India, especially in the secluded women’s quarters of high-caste homes, where no man could go. On medical advice she was to go to Bangalore, where the climate was cooler, and see whether her health would hold. In October 1895, aged twenty-seven, she sailed. She would never see Britain again.

China said no. Japan broke her health. Ceylon lasted a few months. India was chosen partly because of a doctor’s opinion about the weather. Told only by outward events, it looks like a string of false starts. Amy saw a path along which God had been leading her step by step, even when she couldn’t see where it went.

The proverb at the top of this page doesn’t promise a straight path. It promises that God will direct it. That’s harder faith than it sounds, especially while you’re still in the middle of the mess.

One thing to do this week: think of a plan of yours that fell through. Ask God honestly what he might be doing with it. And before your next big decision, talk it over with someone older whom you trust: the step Amy skipped when she left Japan.