When Amy was nearly eighteen she saw her father talking gravely to her mother by the dining room window. The matter was money, something not discussed in front of the children, so it was not until later that Amy learned the truth. David Carmichael had lent some thousands of pounds to a friend who needed to make a new start in life. When the time came for repayment, the money was not forthcoming. Not long after this blow, Carmichael contracted double pneumonia. He died on April 12, 1885, fifty-four years old. Amy recalled that the last thing she had read to him was from Milton’s Samson Agonistes:
All is best, though oft we doubt
What the unsearchable dispose
Of Highest Wisdom brings about,
And ever best found in the close.
If going to boarding school did not seem to Amy a major crisis—lots of girls went to boarding school—surely the death of her father must have. Yet in her story, written for the children, there is only the laconic statement, “on an April Sunday morning while the church bells were ringing, our dear father died,” followed by the lines of poetry which she said had been with her ever since. Not a word about what this sorrow meant to anyone in the family, least of all to herself. Not a hint that she was devastated, nor even tempted for a moment to doubt that all was best. It is, in fact, difficult to find anywhere in the writings of Amy Carmichael anything akin to the poet’s admission, “oft we doubt.” If any doubts rose in her mind—at the moment, perhaps, of watching her father’s coffin lowered into the ground—she would not in any case have put them on paper. Did she speak to her mother of what it had meant to her, or seek reassurance that her mother had no doubts? We are not told. Mrs. Carmichael needed a stronghold. That much we know. It was faith, not doubt, that moved her out of herself, out of self-pity and despair. She found what she needed in the words of Nahum 1:7, “The Lord is good, a strong hold in the day of trouble; and he knoweth them that trust in him.” Years later, Amy discovered in the margin of her mother’s Bible, next to that promise, a tiny notation: “Found true all along the line ever since.” The strength of her example was not lost on Amy.
Being of an acutely sensitive nature, Amy must have felt deeply the loss of her father. The happy, peaceful, predictable routine of her home life was profoundly shaken. If she had been born a hundred years later, she would very likely have been encouraged to be angry, told she had a right to express her anger and her sorrow and her bewilderment and her rage, and generally to disintegrate. These were not the expectations of her friends and family. Nothing could have been further from her expectations of herself. Instead, she threw herself into serving others. She became like a second mother to her brothers and sisters.
“The time when she impinged on my life was during about five years after our father died,” wrote her sister Ethel. “She lived an amazingly full life in those years, taking classes in painting and other subjects, teaching Eva and me during a period when we were not well enough to go to school, and starting various ‘good works.’ . . . If anybody asked me what were the strongest impressions Amy made on me in her youth, I think I would say—her enthusiasms.”
The preoccupations of seventeen-year-old girls—their looks, their clothes, their social life—do not change very much from generation to generation. But in every generation there seem to be a few who make other choices. Amy was one of the few.
The decisive moment which determined the direction of her life came on a dull Sunday morning in Belfast as the family was returning from church. They saw what they had never seen before in Presbyterian Belfast—an old woman lugging a heavy bundle. Amy and her brothers turned around, took the bundle, and helped her along by the arms. “This meant facing all the respectable people who were, like ourselves, on their way home. It was a horrid moment. We were only two boys and a girl, and not at all exalted Christians. We hated doing it. Crimson all over (at least we felt crimson, soul and body of us) we plodded on, a wet wind blowing us about, and blowing, too, the rags of that poor old woman, till she seemed like a bundle of feathers and we unhappily mixed up with them.”
There was an ornate Victorian fountain in the street, and just as they passed it, “this mighty phrase was suddenly flashed as it were through the grey drizzle: ‘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 declared by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is. If any man’s work abide—’”1
Amy turned to see who had spoken. There was nothing but the fountain, the muddy street, the people with their politely surprised faces. The children plodded on with the bundle of feathers, but something had happened to the girl which changed forever life’s values. That afternoon she shut herself in her room. It was time to settle some immensely important things, and things of that sort Amy Carmichael settled alone with God.
She began about this time to gather the children of the neighborhood to her home for meetings. Henry Montgomery of the Belfast City Mission used to take her through the city streets on Saturday nights. She saw something of “the other half,” and began teaching a group of boys in a night school, always ending
