Gold, Silver, Costly Stones

“But if any man buildeth on the foundation gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay, stubble; each man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it is revealed in fire; and the fire itself shall prove each man’s work of what sort it is.”

— 1 Corinthians 3:12-13, ASV

Belfast

The Belfast to which the Carmichaels moved in the early 1880s was a city growing at astonishing speed. In the course of the nineteenth century it had changed from a modest port into one of the great industrial cities of the British Isles. Its linen mills were among the largest in the world. Its shipyards were beginning to build the great liners. Its population had multiplied many times over within living memory, and it was still climbing. Rows of narrow brick houses spread out from the mills along the Falls Road and the Shankill, and tens of thousands of women and girls walked to work each morning in the dark.

The Carmichaels did not live among them. They took a house in a respectable district, and they worshipped at Rosemary Street Presbyterian Church, one of the old congregations of the city centre. For a time, at least, life went on in much the way it had in Millisle. But the family business was failing, and the money that had once seemed secure was draining away.

Her Father’s Death

In 1885 David Carmichael died. He was still in middle life, and his death was a shock to the whole family. Amy was seventeen. She was the eldest of seven children, and her mother was left with a large family, a failing business, and debts. The comfortable years were over.

We know less than we would like about Amy’s grief. She did not write much about it, and her biographers have little to go on beyond the fact itself and its consequences. But it is clear that her father’s death changed her position in the family. She became, in a real sense, her mother’s partner, sharing the responsibility for the younger children and for the household. It was a role she seems to have taken on without complaint, and it prepared her, in ways she could not have foreseen, for the role she would one day take on at Dohnavur.

It is worth noting, too, that a long and painful illness entered her life at about this time. She began to suffer from neuralgia, a condition of the nerves that brought attacks of severe pain, sometimes lasting for days or weeks and leaving her exhausted and unable to work. It would trouble her for the rest of her life. In an age before modern painkillers, there was little that doctors could do for it. It would be the reason a mission board turned her down, and it would be her companion in every place she lived.

A Sunday Morning

The most famous story of Amy’s Belfast years is one she told herself, long afterwards, as the moment when the direction of her life changed. It happened on a dull Sunday morning, as the family was walking home from church. Amy and two of her brothers saw an old woman, poor and ragged, struggling along the street with a heavy bundle. They turned and helped her, taking her arms and carrying her load. It was not a dignified sight, and the respectable people who were coming out of church at the same time could see them. Amy later admitted that she felt hot with embarrassment.

As they passed a fountain in the street, words came into her mind with such force that she turned to see who had spoken them. They were the words of Paul from the third chapter of First Corinthians, in the Authorised Version she knew: “gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble.” Every man’s work, the passage goes on, shall be made manifest, for the day shall declare it, and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is. There was nobody there. The fountain splashed, the people walked on, and the boys and their sister went on with the old woman. But when she got home, Amy went to her room and stayed there for some time alone. She said later that she settled something with God that day.

The ASV, quoted at the head of this chapter, renders “precious stones” as “costly stones,” but the meaning is the same. Paul is talking about the work that Christians build on the foundation of Christ. Some of it will last, and some of it will burn. The test is not how it looks to other people but how it stands in the fire of God’s judgement. On that Sunday morning, a girl who had been embarrassed to be seen helping a poor woman in the street was suddenly confronted with the question of what she was building with her life. Respectability, she realised, was wood, hay and stubble. The love that bends down to carry an old woman’s bundle was gold.

It is a story that has been told so often that it is easy to tidy it up. She did not become a different person overnight. She went on caring about what people thought of her, and she would struggle with pride for the rest of her life, as she freely admitted. But from that morning, as she told it, she knew where the line ran. She would rather be seen with the poor, and look foolish, than be admired and build with stubble.

The Glasgow Meeting

A second turning point came in 1886, when she was eighteen. She travelled to Glasgow to attend a convention for the deepening of spiritual life, of the kind that the Keswick Convention had made popular. These meetings, which had begun in the English Lake District in 1875, taught that Christians need not live in constant defeat by sin, and that by trusting Christ and yielding themselves entirely to him they could know a life of rest and victory. The teaching was sometimes called “the higher life” or “holiness,” and it drew large crowds, especially among evangelical Anglicans, Presbyterians and Quakers.

The convention at Keswick itself had been founded by the vicar of St John’s, Keswick, Canon Thomas Harford-Battersby, together with a Quaker businessman from the neighbouring countryside named Robert Wilson. Its motto was “All one in Christ Jesus,” and it deliberately brought together Christians of different denominations under one tent each summer. Amy did not yet know Robert Wilson. Within a few years he would be the most important older friend of her life, and his house would be her home.

Amy had come with a sense of need. She was finding the Christian life a struggle. According to her own account, the speakers at the meeting did not help her much. What reached her, near the end, was a short prayer offered by the chairman, which drew on the closing words of the letter of Jude, where Christ is praised as the one who is able to keep his people from falling. In the ASV the verse reads, “Now unto him that is able to guard you from stumbling, and to set you before the presence of his glory without blemish in exceeding joy.” She said afterwards that she went out of the hall with the knowledge that he was able to keep her, and that this was enough.

That conviction stayed at the centre of her faith. She was not a theologian, and she did not spend much time on the debates that the Keswick teaching provoked, about how complete the victory over sin could be in this life. What she took from it was simpler: that Christ himself was the keeper, and that the life of faith was a life of trusting him rather than straining after holiness in one’s own strength. It was a teaching that would carry her through much that was to come.

A Life Begins to Turn

The two experiences, on the Belfast street and in the Glasgow hall, belong together. One was about service: what she would build. The other was about strength: how she would be kept. Together they gave her a direction and a source of power for it.

She began at once to look for ways to serve. She started meetings for the children of the neighbourhood, and she visited the poor. She joined in the work of the city mission. And she began to notice the girls who walked past her church every morning on their way to the mills, wrapped in shawls because they could not afford hats, and who never came inside. The next chapter tells what she did about them.

The Fire That Proves

Paul’s image of the fire is a sobering one. It is not about salvation; he says plainly that the one whose work is burned up will be saved, “yet so as through fire.” It is about the value of what we do with our lives. Much that looks impressive will not survive the test, and much that looks small will. An old woman’s bundle, carried through the streets of Belfast on a wet Sunday, may outlast a great deal of religious activity.

Amy Carmichael spent the rest of her life measuring her work by that test. She was suspicious of statistics, of large claims, of success that could be photographed and reported. She cared about whether the work was real, whether the converts were true, and whether the children were loved. In the most famous passage of her later writing, she would ask herself again and again whether her love was the love of Calvary, and if not, what it was worth. That searching habit of mind began on the Sunday morning by the fountain, when a girl in her teens, embarrassed by the company she was keeping, heard Paul’s words and knew that God was looking not at how her work appeared, but at what it was made of.