Amy Carmichael

The Desire to Serve

Somewhere in time, December 16, 1867, Amy Carmichael was born in Ireland.  Many of us have heard the name and some of us are very familiar with her story.  Amy is best known for being a missionary to India. 

Amy grew up like a normal girl of her time.  She was a little precocious, but that never hurt anyone. One story that I read said when Amy was a little girl, that she prayed to God to turn her brown eyes blue.  When she woke up the next day and her eyes were still brown, she was severely disappointed.  Her Mother told the little girl that God answers every prayer and the answer to that prayer was no.  He had a reason for everything and He had a reason for her brown eyes.  Amy also suffered with what they called neuralgia.  Reading the symptoms, what she had reminds me of chronic fatigue.  She would be weak and achy, causing her to take to her bed for weeks at a time.  The interesting thing is the disease never stopped her.

She was raised in a Christian home, but her faith became her own as a teenager.  Shortly after her commitment to Christ, her father’s business started to struggle and she had to leave school and come home.  Once home, she was not idle.  In her day, there were girls that worked at the surrounding mill.  They were very poor and they would come to church with a shawl over their heads. This earned them the name shawlies.  Many people looked down on the girls, so Amy started holding meetings just for them.  Her meetings were so popular that she had to find increasingly larger buildings to hold her meetings.  Her last building held up to 500 people. 

Her father had died, so her mother moved to England and Amy came along.  She began working with Shawlies there.  It was there that she was called to the mission field.  Everyone tried to talk her out of it. She was a young woman. She was not married. She battled a debilitating disease. She was told it was foolish of her to want to go, she was not strong enough.

I Corinthians 1:25 (NIV) For the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom, and the weakness of God stronger than man’s strength.

She began to doubt the call herself, so she talked to her mother. Her mother confirmed that God had indeed called Amy to mission work. 

Amy’s first stop was Japan.  When she was there, her interpreter encouraged her to dress like a native.  She didn’t want to, she liked her western cloths.  At the home of a Japanese woman, to whom Amy was trying to ministger to, she found out her need to cling to her western cloths hurting her ministry.  The entire time Amy was talking, the woman was completely distracted by Amy’s fur lined gloves.  From that point on, she dressed like a native. 

How often do we cling to things we like and think we need, when God is telling us to let go and see what he will bring to us instead.

The climate in Japan was too hard on her, so she went to India.

She would spend more than fifty years in India.  Sometimes God opens doors in unusual way.  I have read a few different versions of the story, but Amy’s ministry started in an unexpected way.  One day she was in the market and she ran in a little girl named Preena who was running away from the temple.  She had been sold to the temple as a slave.  One story I read said she clung to the cross Amy wore on her neck has her captors tried to take her back.  This began a long ministry to the children in India.

Preena was the first child that Amy began to take care of.  What people in the Western world didn’t know, or care to hear, was that little girls sold into slavery were often also used for prostitution to help fund the temple.  When Amy told people about the atrocities, they assumed she was exaggerating, but sadly she was not.  Amy would darken her skin with coffee and with her brown eyes and the traditional Indian dress, she could enter their temple unnoticed.  She did this and found what Preena told her was true.  From that point on, she made it part of her mission to rescue these girls. 

You can give without loving. But you cannot love without giving." This is a quote from Amy.  She really believed this.  At time this caused her trouble, she was arrested for her work with the temple girls, but they could not convict her.  She continued her work, even when she was so sick she could not get out of bed.  During those times, she would write.  She had several book credited to her.  Many were used to train other missionaries heading out into the field.

Matthew 20:28 (NIV) just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. 

I think Amy is an excellent example of someone living her life out fully for Christ.  She truly desired to serve and not be served.