Currently Reading: A Chance to Die

The amazing re-telling of the story of an Irish girl who throughout her life traveled to live to London,  Japan, China, Sir Lanka(then called Ceylon), and finally India -  and the people she touched with the love and good new of Jesus all along the way - her own brothers & sisters, the mill girls, a dear old man, children (her "Lotus Buds"), demon possessed, and the temple girls. 

"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." (pg 31) 

"She deplored the tendency she found in herself to do more talking and writing about praying than actual praying. She lacked practice, she wrote, so was it small wonder she was an infant in prayer speech. Would her friends at home help? Would they, when they wakened in the night or were busy at work and her name flashed into mind, would they recognize it as God's telegram to remind them to pray? Would they telegraph back? 'Don't let a moment slip. More may hang upon your instant yielding than you know or shall know till the great Then comes." (pg 85) 

"When this woman from the windswept seacoast of Ireland found herself 'away in the heart of heathendom with my sister-girls in this dark, dark jungle' she was telling the straight truth as she saw it. She turned with an instinctive deadly nausea from any coloring of the facts, any slightest bending of the truth in order to create a more interesting picture. She was far ahead of her time as a missionary reporter. The constituency was accustomed to a certain triumphalism in missionary stories. Not that there were none like Amy who told it straight, but there were many who popularized mission work by dramatizing the successes and skipping lightly over what was far more commonplace than success." (pg

105) 

"If it were possible to poll all the missionaries who have worked in all the world in all of Christian history, it would be seen that missionary work, most of the time, offers little that could be called glamour. What it does offer, as Amy wrote to prospective candidates in later years, is 'a change to die' - or, as Winsten Churchill put his challenge during World War 11, blood, sweat and tears. It offers a great deal of plodding and ploughing, with now and then a little planting. It is the promise of rejoicing, given to those who 'go forth weeping, bearing precious seed' that gives heart. So it was with Amy. Her home letters were not triumphant accounts of people turning to God from idols, but little stories of the one or two children in a village who were willing to learn one Scripture verse, sing one little gospel song..." (pg 177) 

"If by doing some work which the undiscerning consider 'not spiritual work' I can best help others, and I inwardly rebel, thinking it is the spiritual for which I crave, when in truth it is the interesting and exciting, then I know nothing of Calvary love." (pg 183) 

"In Amy's Bible, on a card pasted inside the front cover, are these words: 'These children are dear to Me. Be a mother to them, and more than a mother. Watch over them tenderly, be just and kind. If thy heart is not large enough to embrace them, I will enlarge it after a pattern of My own. If these young children are docile and obedient, bless Me for it; if they are froward, call upon Me for help; if they weary thee, I will be thy consolation; if thou sink under thy burden, I will be thy Reward." The words are followed by a picture of the Shepherd, reaching for a lamb while a vulture hovers overhead." (pg 205)