Amy Carmichael: What Will Last

It was a grey, wet Sunday morning in Belfast, in about 1885, and the Carmichael children were walking home from church.

Amy, the eldest, was about seventeen. With her were two of her younger brothers. As they went along the street they caught up with an old woman who was struggling with a heavy bundle. She was poor, and it showed: ragged clothes, the kind of person the respectable churchgoers of Belfast, in their good Sunday coats and hats, would have stepped around. The Carmichael children did not step around her. The boys took the bundle, Amy took the old woman’s arm, and they helped her along.

And then, as Amy told it years later, she felt the eyes on her. The street was full of people coming out of church, people the Carmichaels knew. Here were three well-brought-up young people from a good family, seen in public helping a woman like that. Amy felt her face go hot. She was embarrassed, and ashamed of being embarrassed, and wishing they were anywhere else.

They passed an ornate public drinking fountain. And as they passed it, Amy said, words came to her with such force that she turned round to see who had spoken. There was nobody there. Only the fountain, the muddy street and the people with their surprised faces. The words were from the Bible, from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, and she heard them in the King James Version she had grown up with:

“Now if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble; every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is. If any man’s work abide...” (1 Corinthians 3:12–14, KJV).

She did not say anything to her brothers. They took the old woman where she was going and went home. But Amy said afterwards that she knew something had happened that changed the value of everything. That same afternoon, according to her own account, she shut herself in her room and settled with God, once and for all, what she was going to live for.

She was seventeen. The question she settled was not whether she was a Christian. That had happened already. It was whether she would care more about what people thought of her or about what would still be standing when God tested every life with fire.

A Brown-Eyed Girl from Millisle

Amy Beatrice Carmichael was born on 16 December 1867 in Millisle, a village on the coast of County Down in the north of Ireland, the eldest of seven children. Her father, David, and his brother ran flour mills. The family were Presbyterians, devout and strict in the way of that time and place: family prayers, Sunday worship, the Bible and the catechism.

The most famous story of her childhood is a small one. When she was little she wanted blue eyes instead of brown, and she prayed for them, believing God could do it. In the morning she ran to the mirror and found her eyes still brown. She remembered being disappointed, and learning that “No” is an answer too. She told the story herself later in life, after she had discovered, in India, that brown eyes were a gift. It is the kind of story that people love to tidy up, but the bones of it come from her.

She was not a meek child. She was quick, bold, funny and wilful, the ringleader in her brothers’ escapades, and more than once in trouble. When she was about twelve she was sent to a Methodist boarding school in Harrogate, in the north of England. It was there, at about fifteen, that her faith became her own. As the story is usually told, during a special mission for children at the school she understood for the first time that Jesus loved her personally and had died for her, and she trusted Him. She did not describe it as a dramatic experience. It was more like a door opening that she walked quietly through.

Then the family’s world changed. The milling business ran into trouble, and the Carmichaels moved to Belfast, and in 1885 Amy’s father died. Amy was seventeen. Her mother was left with seven children and much less money than before. As the eldest, Amy took on a great deal: helping her mother, keeping an eye on the younger ones, and trying to work out what her own life was for.

So the morning by the fountain did not happen to a carefree girl. It happened to a teenager who had just lost her father, whose family had come down in the world, and who was perhaps more aware than ever of what respectable people thought.

The Foundation and the Gold

It is worth looking at the words Amy heard more closely, because they shaped the rest of her life.

Paul was writing to a church that was proud of its clever teachers and quarrelling over which one to follow. He reminded them that there is only one foundation for a church or a life. In a modern translation the verse just before Amy’s words reads: “For no one can lay a foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 3:11). The question is not whether you are building on Christ. A Christian is someone whose whole hope rests on Him and on what He did on the cross. The question is what you build on that foundation with the life He has given you.

Some building, Paul says, is like gold, silver and precious stones: it comes through fire unharmed. Some is like wood, hay and straw: it looks substantial until it burns. One day, “the Day”, he says, every person’s work will be tested. Paul is careful. He is not saying that anyone earns salvation by their work. In the next verse he says that even a person whose work burns up “will be saved, but only as if through the flames” (1 Corinthians 3:15). Salvation is a gift, built on Christ. But what we do with our lives matters, and some of it will last forever and some of it will not.

For Amy, that morning, the wood and hay and straw had a name. It was caring what the respectable people of Belfast thought of her. The gold had a name too. It was a poor old woman with a heavy bundle, whom Jesus loved.

The Shawlies

What Amy did next was not glamorous, and it was not in India. It was in Belfast.

Belfast in the 1880s was a booming industrial city, and much of its wealth came from linen. Thousands of girls and young women worked long hours in its mills, in heat and noise and damp, for little pay. Many were about Amy’s own age. They were too poor to afford hats, which every respectable woman wore to church, so they wore shawls over their heads instead, and people called them “shawlies”. Most churchgoing Belfast did not expect to see them in its pews. The shawlies did not expect to be welcome.

Amy decided they would be. She started a Sunday class for mill girls in the hall of Rosemary Street Presbyterian Church. She taught them the Bible, prayed with them and got to know them. The respectable members of the congregation were not all delighted to have shawlies in their church hall. Amy did not much care. The fountain had settled that.

The class grew. Soon there were hundreds of girls coming, far too many for the hall. Amy saw an advertisement for a hall made of corrugated iron that could be put up for about five hundred pounds and would hold about five hundred people. She had no money. She prayed. A woman named Kate Mitchell gave five hundred pounds, and a mill owner gave a plot of land. The building went up on the corner of Cambrai Street, and it was called the Welcome Hall, because that was what Amy wanted the shawlies to be. Most accounts date the hall to 1887, when Amy was nineteen; some give the opening as January 1889. Either way, a teenager with no money had started a work that needed a building of its own. A church called the Welcome still meets in that part of Belfast today.

At the same time, Amy was growing in her own understanding of God. In September 1886, at eighteen, she went to a meeting in Glasgow that followed the pattern of the Keswick Convention, a yearly gathering in the English Lake District where Christians met to pray and to hear teaching about living a holy life by depending on the Holy Spirit rather than on their own effort. She came away sure that the God who had saved her was also able to keep her and to make her holy, and that she could trust Him to do it. The next year she went to Keswick itself, and there she heard Hudson Taylor, the founder of the China Inland Mission, speak about the millions of people in China who had never heard of Jesus.

Choosing to Go

The call to go abroad did not come all at once.

In 1889 the family moved again, to Manchester in England, and Amy threw herself into work among the mill girls there too, living for a while in a cramped lodging in a poor district. It wore her out. Her health had never been strong. She suffered all her life from neuralgia, a painful condition of the nerves that could keep her in bed for weeks.

Then a new friendship changed her life. Robert Wilson, one of the founders of the Keswick Convention, a Quaker by background, had lost his wife and his only daughter. He came to love Amy almost as a daughter, and he invited her to live with his family at their home in Cumberland. She called him “the Dear Old Man”. When her first book about India was published, its preface by the mission leader Eugene Stock described her as “the adopted daughter of Mr. Robert Wilson, the much-respected chairman of the Keswick Convention.” It was not a legal adoption, but it was a real one in every other way.

On 13 January 1892, as she told it, Amy became sure that God was telling her to go. The words she heard were two of the plainest in the Bible, Jesus’ command in the King James Version she knew: “Go ye” (Mark 16:15). It was not easy. Robert Wilson was elderly and leaned on her. Her mother was a widow. Amy wrote to her mother, and her mother, though it cost her, gave her blessing.

She applied first to Hudson Taylor’s China Inland Mission. She went to London to train and was turned down on medical grounds; the doctors did not think she was strong enough. So she found another way. In March 1893, aged twenty-five, she sailed for Japan, one of the first missionaries supported by the Keswick Convention.

What Came After

Japan was hard. Amy worked there for about fifteen months, studying the language, living as simply as she could, and learning that her own ideas of how things should be done were not always the best. Her health broke down. She went on to China and then to Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, for a short time, before returning to England when Robert Wilson fell ill. Some people decided she was flighty. She was learning.

In 1895 she sailed for India, arriving in November. Apart from that arrival, she never left it. For fifty-five years she did not go home on leave even once.

She went to the Tirunelveli district (then spelled Tinnevelly) in the far south, a Tamil-speaking region, and worked with an English missionary couple, Thomas Walker and his wife. Amy learned Tamil, wore Indian dress and travelled from village to village by bullock cart with a band of Indian Christian women, who taught and prayed alongside her. One of them, Ponnammal, became one of her closest friends and co-workers. The work was slow. Many listened politely and went back to their lives. Some who wanted to follow Christ faced being cut off by their families and their whole community, and Amy saw the real cost of that choice to people she loved.

She wrote about it honestly, too honestly for some readers at home. Her book Things as They Are (1903) refused to tell the cheerful success stories that missionary supporters expected. Some people in England said she must be exaggerating. Some missionaries in India wrote to say she was not. Readers today will also notice that she wrote about Hindu religion as a missionary of her time, and that Hindus would describe their own faith very differently. But nobody could say she had made mission sound easy. In one chapter, which she called “Humdrum”, she said she had held on to the text “It is required in stewards that a man be found faithful”, and added, “Praise God, it does not say ‘successful.’”

Then, on 7 March 1901, a seven-year-old girl named Preena escaped from a Hindu temple where she was being kept and found her way to Amy. She had run away before and been caught and punished. Through her, Amy learned about the practice of dedicating young girls to temple service, which for many of them meant a life of sexual exploitation. Amy could not unknow it. She began, with her Indian colleagues, to take in and protect children in danger, one by one, at a place called Dohnavur. The children called her Amma, which means “mother” in Tamil. The work grew into the Dohnavur Fellowship, a large family with nurseries, schools and in time a hospital, which took in boys too from 1918. It was never safe or simple. Amy was accused of kidnapping, faced court cases, and buried children she had fought to save. She held a strict rule never to ask anyone but God for money, and the Fellowship believed He provided.

In 1931 Amy had a bad fall and was badly injured. She was largely confined to her room for the last twenty years of her life, in pain, and from there she wrote much of her large shelf of books and went on caring for her Dohnavur family. She died at Dohnavur on 18 January 1951, aged eighty-three. She had asked for no gravestone. The children put a birdbath over her grave, marked with one word: Amma.

It is easy to tell Amy’s story as if it began in India. It began in a wet street in Belfast, when a seventeen-year-old who cared too much about her reputation decided that she would rather build with gold. Everything after, the shawlies, Japan, Dohnavur, the long years of pain, was the same choice made again and again. She did not think the choice made her a better kind of Christian than anyone else. She thought it was simply what it meant to follow a Saviour who had given Himself for her, and who did not mind being seen with the poor.

In Their Own Words

“Humdrum we have called the work, and humdrum it is. There is nothing romantic about potters except in poetry, nor is there much of romance about missions except on platforms and in books.”

— Amy Carmichael, Things as They Are (1903)

Think It Through

1. Amy was embarrassed to be seen helping a poor woman, and then ashamed of her embarrassment. When have you cared more about how something looked than about what was right? What would “gold, silver, precious stones” look like in your week?
2. The Bible passage Amy heard says the foundation is Christ, and that even someone whose work burns up “will be saved.” So why does it matter what we build, if salvation is a gift?
3. Amy’s first great work was not overseas. It was with girls her own age in her own city whom churchgoers ignored. Who are the “shawlies” in your school or town?
4. In Things as They Are, Amy refused to make mission sound exciting and successful. Why do you think she insisted on telling it as it was? Is it harder to be faithful when the work is “humdrum”?

Read More on Ochorus

Amy Carmichael’s Things as They Are, quoted in this chapter, is in the library: her honest account of village mission work in South India in the years before Dohnavur, with its chapter “Humdrum”. Read it knowing that it is a missionary’s view of a world its people would describe differently, and that she wrote it to make readers pray. Her full biography is on her author page, and younger readers can meet her in Brave for God, in the chapter “Amy Carmichael: The Mother of the Rescued.” To meet the man whose words at Keswick first turned her eyes overseas, read Hudson Taylor’s A Retrospect (For Teens).