Amy Carmichael Biography

(from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Carmichael )

Her Early life

Amy Wilson Carmichael was born in the small village of Millisle, County Down, Ireland to David Carmichael, a miller, and his wife Catherine. Her parents were devout Presbyterians and she was the oldest of seven siblings.

Amy’s father moved the family to Belfast when she was 16, but died two years later. In Belfast, Amy founded the Welcome Evangelical Church. In the mid-1880s, Carmichael started a Sunday morning class for the ‘Shawlies’, i.e. the mill girls who wore shawls instead of hats, in the church hall of Rosemary Street Presbyterian. Her mission among the shawlies grew and grew until they needed a hall to seat 500 people…Amy continued at the Welcome until she received a call to work among the mill girls of Manchester in 1889, from which she moved onto missionary work. In many ways Amy seemed an unlikely candidate for missionary work. She suffered neuralgia, a disease of the nerves that made her whole body weak and achy and often put her in bed for weeks on end. At the Keswick Convention of 1887 that Carmichael heard Hudson Taylor, founder of the China Inland Mission speak about missionary life. Soon afterwards, she became convinced of her calling to missionary work. She applied to the China Inland Mission and lived in London at the training house for women, where she met author and missionary to China, Mary Geraldine Guinness, who encouraged her to pursue missionary work. She was ready to sail for Asia at one point, when it was determined that her health made her unfit for the work. She postponed her missionary career with the CIM and decided later to join the Church Missionary Society.

Amy Carmichael’s Work in India

Initially Carmichael travelled to Japan for fifteen months, but fell ill and returned home.  After a brief period of service in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), she went to Bangalore, India for her health and found her lifelong vacation. She was commissioned by the Church of England Zenana Mission. Carmichael’s most notable work was with girls and young women, some of whom were saved from customs that amounted to forced prostitution. Hindu temple children were primarily young girls dedicated to the gods, then usually forced into prostitution to earn money for the priests i.e. Devadasi.

Carmichael founded the Dohnavur Fellowship in 1901 to continue her work, as she later wrote in The Gold Cord (1932). A popular early work was Things as They Are: Mission Work in Southern India (1903). Dohnavur is situated in Tamil Nadu, thirty miles from India’s southern tip…Carmichael’s fellowship transformed Dohhnavur into a sanctuary for over one thousand children who would otherwise have faced a bleak future.  Carmichael often said that her Ministry of rescuing temple children started with a girl named Preena. Having become a temple servant against her wishes, Preena managed to escape. Amy Carmichael provided her shelter and withstood the threats of those who insisted that the girl be returned either to the temple directly to continue her sexual assignments, or to her family for more indirect return to the temple.

Respecting Indian culture, members of the organization wore Indian dress and gave the rescued children Indian names. Carmichael herself dressed in Indian clothes, dyed her skin with dark coffee, and often travelled long distances on India’s hot, dusty roads to save just one child from suffering.

In 1918, Dohnavur added a home for young boys, many born to the former temple prostitutes. Meanwhile, in 1916 Carmichael formed a Protestant religious order called Sisters of the Common Life.

Amy’s Final days and legacy

In 1932, a fall severely injured Carmichael, and she remained bedridden for much of her final two decades. However, it did not stop her from continuing her inspirational writing, for she published 16 additional books (including His Thoughts Said . . . His Father Said (1951), If (1953), Edges of His Ways (1955) and God’s Missionary (1957)), as well as revised others she had previously published. Biographers differ on the number of her published works, which may have reached 35 or as many as six dozen, although only a few remain in print today.

Carmichael died in India in 1951 at the age of 83. She asked that no stone be put over her grave at Dohnavur.[8] Instead, the children she had cared for put a bird bath over it with the single inscription “Amma”, which means mother in the Tamil language.

India outlawed temple prostitution in 1948. However, the Dohnavur Fellowship continues, now supporting approximately 500 people on 400 acres with 16 nurseries and hospital. Rescued women can leave, or join the community, or return for important occasions, including the Christmas season. The foundation is now run by Indians under the jurisdiction of the C.S.I Tirunelveli Diocese, founded in 1896.

* * * * * *​

Amy Carmichael Quotes

The following are from: http://www.daringdaughters.org/amy-quotes/

“You can give without loving, but you cannot love without giving.”

“The night I sailed for China, March 3, 1893, my life, on the human side, was broken, and it never was mended again. But He has been enough.”

“If you would live in victory . . . you must refuse to be dominated by the seen and the felt.”

“Blessed are the single-hearted, for they shall enjoy much peace. If you refuse to be hurried and pressed, if you stay your soul on God, nothing can keep you from that clearness of spirit which is life and peace. In that stillness you will know what His will is.”

“It is a safe thing to trust Him to fulfill the desires which He creates”

“What is the secret to great living? Entire separation to Christ and devotion to Him. Thus speaks every man and woman whose life has made more than a passing flicker in the spiritual realm. It is the life that has no time for trifling that counts.”

“Give me the Love that leads the way
The Faith that nothing can dismay
The Hope no disappointments tire
The Passion that’ll burn like fire
Let me not sink to be a clod
Make me Thy fuel, Flame of God”

While she’s inside the Belfast tea shop, outside she saw a small girl, barefoot and hardly clad, shivered in the cold rain. Then she whispered, “When I grow up and money have, I know what I will do, I’ll build a great big lovely place, For little girls like you.”

“Can we follow the Savior far, who have no wound or scar?”

“O Love of God, do this for me: Maintain a constant victory.”

“From all that dims Thy Calvary,
O Lamb of God, deliver me.”

“Pray that we may enter into that travail of soul with Him. Nothing less is any good. Spiritual children mean travail of soul-spiritual agony.”

“Satan is so much more in earnest than we are — he buys up the opportunity while we are wondering how much it will cost.”

“The saddest thing one meets is a nominal Christian. I had not seen it in Japan where missions is younger. The church here is a “field full of wheat and tares.”

“I don’t pray for milk biscuits for the Dohnavur Family, all cut to a pattern and stamped with a single decorous pretty stamp. So many places, to judge by results, seem to be great biscuit manufacturers and they turn out tidy boxes of biscuits. I pray for soldiers, not biscuits!”

“There is always something to be happy about if we look for it: ‘Two men looked through prison bars, The one saw mud, the other stars.’”

“Joy is not gush. Joy is not mere jolliness. Joy is perfect acquiescence ~ acceptance, rest ~ in God’s will, whatever comes.”

More Quotes by Amy Carmichael,
From: christian-quotes.ochristian.com