Amma asked about the work Pungaja was doing, caring for children. “Do you find your work hard?” she asked. Yes, said Pungaja. “These are soldiership years,” Amma told her, and gave her a medal inscribed “Saved to serve.” Pungaja responded to the soldier training, and later was placed in charge of the place of correction, a separate compound where the most difficult members of the Family live, some mentally ill, some merely intractable and rebellious. Once an outsider, who happened to be a doctor, remarked that it seemed strange to have such a place in Dohnavur. The only answer that could be offered was that if he knew the whole history, if he had come over the same road, he would understand. The conviction held that the light God had given for dealing with these problem people was sufficient. An outside opinion could not supersede that. It was still a family, but a very large and sometimes unwieldy family, and those whose behavior destroyed peace and unity had somehow to be sequestered. Pungaja, a gentle, quiet woman, is still in charge. “It is my joy to serve them,” she says simply.
Amma’s birthday letter to John had called 1936 “a year of battle.” She went on to say, “Now as we look forward we see great stones and many of them. ‘Who shall roll away the stone?’ More and more I delight in that word that says, ‘The angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone and sat upon it.’ We shall see the angel of the Lord sitting upon many a stone during the coming year.”
The next year brought “Adria.” It was an experience Amy likened to the voyage of the apostle Paul to Rome in Acts 27, where they were “driven up and down in Adria,” even to the point of desperation, “and falling into a place where two seas met, they ran the ship aground.”
“Where the Will of God and the will of the flesh are in conflict there will be rough water, and if the flesh does not yield to the Spirit there must follow the painful breaking up of hopes and expectations, even as the timbers of that ship were broken up with the violence of the waves.”1
“The flesh” in this case refers to two trusted workers who had to be dismissed for deception and disobedience continued over a long period of time. The peremptory manner in which they were dismissed was anything but delicate, and others objected. Some of them left or were asked to leave. There was misunderstanding in correspondence to other parts of the world, resulting in deep wounds to those who were disciplined and those (principally Godfrey Webb-Peploe) who administered the discipline. This was a “crashing sorrow” to Amy, for it “undid the work of years. Our white Dohnavur is being besmirched,” she said, but declared she would rather be deceived a hundred times than distrust and misjudge once. She refused to publish abroad the truth of the matter. Vindication must rest in the hands of God.
One worker who did not know the details of what had happened wrote to Amy, “We are with you utterly . . . God grant it be stainless steel that comes out of this furnace.”
When one matter “blew over” or was laid to rest, there was always another. At this same time the hospital was in full swing, which brought all kinds of people into contact with those who had been safely cloistered before. Rumors began to fly that Dohnavur children were bastards, which greatly upset the children, and some turned hostile. There were in fact some who had been born out of wedlock. If the mother was high caste, the child had to be got rid of. The children’s genetic history was never divulged. All who asked questions about their origin received the same answer: You are where you are first because God brought you, and then because we loved you very much.
Amy found comfort in Samuel Rutherford’s words, “O if my faith could ride out against the high and proud winds and waves when my sea seemeth all to be on fire!”
“There is no promise of calm waters for any mariner,” Amy added. “But our Lord can give the faith that can ride out against any high and proud winds and waves. And He can come to our succor though our sea seemeth all to be on fire.”2
1. Amy Carmichael, Though the Mountains Shake, p. 13.
2. Ibid, p. 17.
Chapter 45
I Hold Me Fast by Thee
Avisitor with a serious heart condition told Amy that her doctor had said if she so much as bent over too suddenly she might die on the spot.
“However do you resist the temptation?” Amy wanted to know. Death had held no terrors for the child who swallowed the laburnum pods in Millisle. It looked like a lark then. It looked positively blissful now. When Amy’s doctor suggested in 1934 that she might not have more than five years left, or even only three, before her Glory Day, Amy was elated.
“You would not have said such a blissful thing lightly,” she wrote. “I know He might even now ask for longer than that five years, but that there is even a natural hope of that little while being enough, is purest golden joy. . . . Only pray that He will ‘take from me all slothfulness that I may fill up the crevices of time’ and truly finish all He wants me to do.”
She felt like “a slug on a cabbage leaf.” Her enemies, the various chronic ailments to which she gave biblical names like Sennacherib (who “came down like a wolf on the fold”) and Goliath, did not leave her
