The Secret Place of Amy Carmichael

Amy Beatrice Carmichael was born on December 16, 1867 in Millisle, County Down, to a Presbyterian family whose household rhythms of prayer and hymn singing formed her first sanctuary. As a girl she learned to look for Christ among the poor. In Belfast she gathered working mill girls, the shawlies, into meetings of Scripture and song and practical help, a work that taught her to pray in crowded rooms and to expect God's provision when there was no visible supply. In those early years she tasted both the sweetness and the cost of obedience. She learned to accept hiddenness, to labor without applause, and to measure a day by faithfulness rather than ease.

In 1892 she sensed a call to foreign mission and soon embarked with the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society. After brief service and a period of testing in Japan and then in Ceylon, she reached South India in 1895. The land tested her body and enlarged her heart. Heat, illness, and cultural challenge drove her to secret prayer rather than to retreat. In the south she met children whose stories would mark her forever, girls dedicated in the temple system and boys caught in webs of abuse and abandonment. She did not write theories about compassion. She opened her door. In 1901 a small child fled to her for refuge, a girl later remembered as Preena, terrified of being returned to a life she could not bear. Amy took her in, prayed, and refused to let fear dictate the terms of love. The decision turned a missionary's life into a mother's life and a single bungalow into a growing fellowship of rescued children and consecrated workers.

The place that formed around her became the Dohnavur Fellowship, named for the nearby village in the Tirunelveli region of Tamil country. It was not an institution first. It was a family shaped by prayer, Scripture, and daily labor. Amy and her Indian coworkers rose early to seek God, tended gardens, taught classes, and made a home for those who arrived thin, frightened, and wary of trust. She learned to move through towns with quiet courage, to listen to whispers of danger, and to deal with officials with a mind clear and a conscience at peace. When opposition arose she answered it with patience and with facts, and when resources ran low she asked the Father who sees in secret. She refused to make public appeals for funds, not from pride but from conviction that God would defend a work He had called into being and that the children of the house must learn to live by prayer.

As the years passed the Fellowship grew to include nurseries, cottages grouped as families, a hospital, and schools. Indian leaders, women and men, took responsibility for the daily life and the future. Amy taught them to abhor the language of possession and to cherish the language of stewardship. She asked the Lord to give the house the spirit of worship in ordinary tasks, the willingness to be interrupted for the sake of a child, and the courage to tell the truth when a life was in danger. She guarded the worship of the church with simplicity. No elaborate services, no celebrity, only Christ at the center, Scripture read and obeyed, prayer offered with faith, and work done in love.

In 1931 she suffered a severe fall that left her largely bedridden for the remaining two decades of her life. The years of pain became years of deeper prayer and of writing that outlived her strength. From a small room in Dohnavur she composed letters, poems, and books that taught a way of the cross clear enough for a child and deep enough for a saint. She wrote of the cords of love that hold a community together, of the discipline that keeps love from dissolving into sentiment, of the purity that guards the house of God, and of the hidden exchanges in the inner life where the will bows to the Savior. She never returned to the British Isles after 1895. She chose to live and die among the people God had given her. On January 18, 1951 she fell asleep in Jesus at Dohnavur. She asked that no stone be placed over her body. The children set a simple birdbath to mark the place and inscribed one word in Tamil, Amma, that is, mother.