Category: Carmichael, Amy

Tim’s birthday

Sr. Dorcee, beloved1 Comment

Yesterday would have been my brother Tim’s 57th birthday.  Three years ago he took his life on St. Patrick’s Day.  (This was the “very challenging time” of the “Courage” post.  See May 7, 2009.)  There were many, many ways that God upheld me through that time and many, many friends who did the same.  One of those friends was Amy Carmichael (see my last post).   Four months after Tim’s death, I read this and it was a great comfort:

For God sees the whole man, and He has a tender way of looking at a soul at its highest, not its lowest.  He does not do as we so often do, misjudge it because of what its diseased mind made its body do in a blind and broken hour.  And we have to do with a Love that can grasp the poor hands that reach out to Him in that darkness–what father would not do that?  And He is our Father.

But when those who have prayed for such a one have no assurance that there was ever any turning to Him who alone can save, then indeed we seem to be viewing a land like that hopeless country the prophet describes, whose streams shall be turned into pitch, and the dust thereof into brimstone. ‘And He shall stretch out upon it the line of confusion and the stones of emptiness.’  But a word of peace comes through the confusion: prayer in the name of His Beloved Son does not fall upon stones of emptiness. Sometimes, somewhere we shall know better than we know now how gracious the Lord is.

from Gold by Moonlight

Accepting the unexplained

Sr. Dorcee, belovedLeave a comment

Amy CarmichaelA woman who has been very instrumental in my life was a Protestant missionary from Ireland to India in the first half of the last century.  (A little anecdote: as a child, she prayed for God to change her brown eyes to blue, a prayer God did not answer.  Only later when she was in India rescuing children from temple prostitution, did she realize the value of her brown eyes.  It made it much easier for her to disguise herself as an Indian.  She could darken her skin, but she would never have been able to disguise her blue eyes . . .) As a result of an injury, she ended up spending a good part of her life bedridden and wrote many poems, letters, and meditations from her bed, for which I will be eternally grateful. 

For some reason, this excerpt from her book, Edges of His Ways, has been on my mind the past few days:

This is the fruit of my morning’s reading.  It is not new, but it came to me as new.

God counts on us to accept whatever answer to our prayers He gives us, whether or not it be the answer that we wished and expected.  When Paul wrote to the Christians of Rome, he asked for the kind of prayer that is like wrestling with a strong (though unseen) enemy [cf. Rom 15.30-32].  He asked for prayer for three things, that his service (the offering of alms) might be acceptable to the Jewish Christians; that he might be delivered from the Jews who did not believe; that he might come to them–the Christians of Rome–with joy.  The answer to the second of these three prayers was two years in a prison in Caesarea; the answer to the third was two years’ imprisonment in Rome.  In both cases his was the kind of imprisonment which required the prisoner’s right hand to be chained to a soldier’s left.

Not many of us love to be under a roof between walls, without being able to go out into the open air. Think what it must have meant to Paul to be not only indoors but never once alone.  Think of being chained to a Roman soldier at all hours of the day and night.  “That I may come unto you with joy by the will of God, and may with you be refreshed.” There was not much natural joy and refreshment in coming as a chained prisoner. 

Nothing was explained. Paul and the men and women of Rome were trusted to accept the unexplained and, like John the Baptist, not to be offended in their Lord.