A Chance to Die

with what she called a “good-night service,” probably her chance to give them something from the Bible, perhaps a gospel song, and prayer. She started a program called the Morning Watch to encourage boys and girls to spend a regular time each day in Bible reading and prayer. She gave them pledge cards, blue with a gilt edge, which they could sign. When they met on Saturday mornings, each would tell what had helped him during the week, or confess failure to get up in time. It can’t have been too dull an hour, because two of her brothers joined. Another member recalled that it was always a happy time and everybody loved Amy.

She initiated a weekly prayer meeting for schoolgirls in their own homes, then moved it to Victoria College when some of the staff and students joined them. She worked at the YWCA, and had a class at Rosemary Street Presbyterian Church for “shawlies,” mill girls who, too poor to buy hats, covered their heads with shawls. This was something of a shocker to the proper church members. Not only were they unaccustomed to the presence of such “common” folk, but the idea of Mrs. Carmichael’s permitting her daughter to venture into the slums to fetch them was deplorable.

Not one to refuse even unnecessary risks, Amy was more than ready to take risks for the sake of others. She had certainly been sheltered, and she knew it. The shawlies were not sheltered. What sort of life did they lead? she wondered. Her brother Ernest, working for the railways, knew things she didn’t know. She pressed him for information as to the sort of conversation the shawlies must hear. He wasn’t sure she ought to know, but Amy would not be put off. He told her a few things. She intensified her prayers that the girls would grow up pure and good.

This zealous work with young people went on for more than a year. Amy poured herself into it, but felt that she was not really building as she had determined to build, in gold, silver, and precious stones. Something told her all this activity might amount to nothing more than a heap of wood, hay, and stubble unless she began living a holy life, a life that would help others. She was full of misgivings. The list of her activities must surely have seemed an impressive one to those who looked on, but to the girl herself they were nothing. They were empty. Nobody was truly being helped as she believed they should be. What had she missed? How could she live the life she longed for? How to be holy? Was there any hope of it for her?

1. I Corinthians 3:12-14.

Chapter 3

Mutton Chops Don’t Matter

In September 1886 Amy was invited to visit friends in Scotland, and it was there that a second spiritual crisis took place. They went to Glasgow where a convention was being held “on Keswick lines, that is, teaching that was given each year for one week in a large tent in Keswick, in England’s Lake District. The tent meetings had their origin in 1874 in a six-day conference at “Broadlands,” the country estate of the Right Honorable W. Cowper-Temple. The chairman was Robert Pearsall Smith. The purpose, articulated by Smith’s wife, Hannah Whitall, was “the promotion of holiness or the Higher Christian Life.” Canon Wilberforce and George MacDonald were among those attending, along with “nonconformist bankers, ritualistic curates, peers with parsons, novelists with temperance reformers.”¹

There was a spirit of such unity, a sense of being lifted to such heavenly heights, a springing up of such hope of an unbroken walk with God, that it was decided to repeat the meetings on a larger scale. Five weeks later, a second conference was held in Oxford, attended by the Vicar of Saint John’s, Keswick, Canon Dundas Harford-Battersby, a former Anglo-Catholic. Both of the Smiths were speakers, as well as a mining engineer named Evan Hopkins. Through their messages Harford-Battersby received “a vision of faith, a sight of the glory of the Lord . . . I shall never forget what I saw then, to my dying day.”² He also met Robert Wilson, owner of coal mines in Cumberland, and the two became close friends. The following year the vicar wrote to Wilson to propose “a numerous assemblage to look for and wait for a blessing at God’s hands.” The largest hall in Keswick accommodated only four hundred, so a tent was hired, and the famous Keswick Meetings began. It was a “spiritual clinic,” a place where Christians might come “to have the great Physician, the Lord Himself, diagnose and heal their spiritual ailments.”³

Flyleaf of Amy’s Bible.

Keswick teaching spread to other places, and so it was that Amy Carmichael attended the meeting in Glasgow.

The hall was full of a sort of grey mist, very dull and chilly. I came to that meeting half hoping, half fearing. Would there be anything for me? Could there be anything? I don’t remember feeling there was anything (my fault) in either of the two addresses. The fog in the Hall seemed to soak into me. My soul was in a fog. Then the chairman rose for the last prayer . . . “O Lord, we know Thou art able to keep us from falling.” Those words found me. It was as if they were alight. And they shone for me.

The restaurant where her friend took her for lunch was not a five-star. The mutton chops they ordered were badly cooked. Mutton chops? thought Amy. What does it matter about mutton chops? The Lord is able to keep us from falling! To keep us from falling! This, this at last, was what she had prayed and agonized for. She wrote down the date, September 23, 1886, in her Bible.

If mutton chops didn’t matter anymore, neither did clothes. When Amy got back to Belfast, the long mourning period for her father was over and it was