Ever since I was a little girl, around 5 years old, I've wanted to be like the missionary Amy Carmichael. I wanted to, and still want to, serve God with all that I am and give myself to help others selflessly in any way that I can. In addition, I've always had a strong desire to work with young children in some compacity and to love and care for children in need of a family. As a result, it was an easy decision for me to write my biographical essay for school on Amy Carmichael. The essay I wrote was as follows.
A Biographical Essay on Amy Carmichael
By: Abigail H.
David and Catherine Carmichael named their firstborn child Amy, which means “beloved”. Little did they know when they named her this, that she would later move to India as a missionary and would be beloved by many people even countless years after her death. God used Amy Carmichael in mighty ways throughout her life, both before she went to India as a missionary and while she served there. The life of this godly woman changed the lives of many people, and her legacy remains inspirational to this very day.
In the year of 1867, on December 16, Amy Beatrice Carmichael was welcomed into the world by her two loving parents in Millisle, County Down, Ireland. Over the course of the next years, Catherine gave birth to Amy’s six siblings, two girls (Eva and Ethel) and four boys (Norman, Ernest, Walter, and Alfred). This highly influential woman possessed a fearless and sassy personality as a child, often times resulting in Amy, and her siblings with her, getting into mischief. One time, she somehow pushed her two younger brothers up through the skylight in their house and then went up onto the roof herself. They didn’t stop there, though. Instead, the three of them slid down their slate roof and then spotted their parents staring at them with astonished faces. This young girl longed to have blue eyes instead of brown eyes and desperately prayed to God for blue ones, but God had a purpose in them being brown. Her parents were God-fearing Christians who faithfully taught their seven children the Bible and prayed as a family on a daily basis. When Amy was 16 years old, the Carmichael family moved to Belfast. Just two years later, when she was 18, Mr. Carmichael died, partially due to the anxiety of his flour mill business falling through. As a result of her father’s death, Amy stopped going to boarding school as she had been. Instead, she went home to help her mother and tutor her siblings for the following ten or so years. God developed this young woman’s character a lot through her early years, using even her earthly father’s death to do so.
Even before Amy moved to India, she began her ministry among the poor and needy girls and young ladies in her area. After her discovery of the “shawlies”, poor mill girls who wore shawls on their heads instead of hats, Amy began a Sunday morning Bible study for them in the hall of a Presbyterian church. It wasn’t long before they outgrew the hall and a new building, able to hold 500 people, had to be constructed. This building, known as the Welcome Evangelical Church in Belfast, was erected in the year of 1887. In addition, in 1887 she heard Hudson Taylor speak at the Keswick Convention, and it was here that she felt convinced that God was calling her to mission work. Amy planned to go to China as a missionary in 1892, but she got word, once she was already packed to leave, that she hadn’t passed the physical. This was due to her having a disease of the nerves called neuralgia which made her whole body weak and achy and often put her in bed for weeks on end as a result. In the year of 1893, Miss Carmichael travelled to Japan as a missionary. Throughout the period of time she was in this country, God worked greatly through Amy to draw many souls to Himself. The language in Japan was very difficult for Amy to pick up on and the culture was just as challenging for her to adapt to, yet this didn’t stop Carmichael from witnessing to others. Every day this 26-year-old lady prayed for the specific amount of people that the Lord impressed on her heart to be saved that day, and God faithfully answered each time. However, she became more and more ill each day and was sent back to the UK after being in Japan for a mere fifteen months. Even though Miss Carmichael didn’t stay in Japan as a missionary, her life of mission work was far from over.
Amy again left her home in 1895, a year after a friend had invited her to join the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society in Bangalore. This time, she left her homeland for the final time to serve the Lord in another unknown, foreign country. Amy went to live with the Reverend Thomas Walker and his wife in the Tinnevelly district in Southern India the year after she had moved to India. Carmichael wasted no time in beginning to adapt to the culture and start her lifelong ministry in India after arriving. This woman learned the challenging Tamil language to where she could speak it fluently. Also, she studied the Hindu caste system, an important aspect of the Indian culture. In addition to learning the language and caste system, she dressed herself in simple Indian clothes and dyed her skin with dark coffee. Amy wasn’t in India long before she heard about temple prostitution, a practice where families would sell or give their daughters to the Hindu temples as prostitutes in order to gain favor with the gods. Once she heard about this practice, Amy fought against it and saved many girls from it and took them in under her roof. The first of the many children she would help was Preena, a girl whose widowed mother had sold her into temple slavery. One day, while outside the temple to draw water, Preena heard Amy Carmichael nearby telling some women about God and sharing the Gospel with them. Later that week, when the little girl got word that she was going to be offered to one of the gods as a wife, she tried to run away. However, she didn’t succeed in her attempt at escaping, and her poor little hands were harshly branded with a fiery poker as a result. Despite the branding she had received the first time she tried to escape, the words of the white woman and the God she spoke of drove Preena on to try again. By the mercy of God, the seven-year-old girl made it all the way to where Miss Amy was currently residing by escaping in the middle of the night while the others were sleeping. The brave woman didn’t even consider taking Preena back to the temple as a possibility for a single moment, despite the fact that she herself could be imprisoned for taking the girl. This was just one of the many instances that this selfless woman didn’t spare herself of any difficulty that was required of her to save the lives of children. Furthermore, she was known to travel many miles on India’s hot, dusty roads in order to rescue just one child, and sometimes she would even sneak into the Hindu temples to do so. In 1901, Amy founded the Dohnavur Fellowship, just 30 miles from the southern tip of India, which served as a haven for the around 1,000 children whom she had rescued/provided a home for. By 1913, over thirty Indian Christian women volunteered to serve in the ministry with the Dohnavur Fellowship housing one hundred and thirty girls. Five years later, in 1918, Carmichael began a home for boys as well. Most of these boys had been born to former temple prostitutes. Eventually, a hospital was added onto the campus. Imagine the bravery and selflessness it took for Amy to willingly risk her life in order to save those of others.
Although joy played a big part in her life, Amy also experienced great trials throughout her life. In 1932, she was badly injured from a fall which, mixed with arthritis, caused her to be bedridden for the last twenty years of her life. Her bedroom, sitting room, and study all in one was where she spent the last two decades of her life. This room, known as the Room of Peace, was large enough that many other girls could sleep in there with her too and was built to be more of a general home-room instead of a personal one. It contained three large windows out of which she could see a pair of beautiful blue kingfishers constantly fishing for minnows in vessels underneath the trees surrounded by greenery. In addition, there were many books featured on the bookcases in the Room of Peace which were gifted to her by friends over the course of her life, reading being her mental change of air. She continued to serve the Lord while being cooped up, mostly by writing. Due to Amy being a prolific writer and poet, she wrote many books and poems throughout the years she was bedridden. Over the course of her lifetime, she wrote and published 35 books in total, many of which were about the mission work in India. One of her many great quotes that she experienced first-hand is, “Let us not be surprised when we have to face difficulties. When the wind blows hard on a tree, the roots stretch and grow the stronger, let it be so with us. Let us not be weaklings, yielding to every wind that blows, but strong in spirit to resist.” (“Amy Carmichael Quotes,” www.azquotes.com) Amy Carmichael, the faithful, loving, brave, and selfless Protestant Christian missionary died peacefully on January 18, 1951, in India at 83 years of age. Amy risked much for the sake of the Gospel, and never returned to her birth home on furlough at any point during her 55 years of service in India. Having requested there to be no stone to mark her burial place, her children placed a bird bath which said ’Amma’ (meaning ’mother’ in India) over her grave instead. The love which Amy had for her children would be remembered by them for as long as they lived.
Once they were grown up, Carmichael’s children carried on the work she started at the Dohnavur Fellowship. Within the past 113 years, it is estimated that about 1,875 girls and 670 boys have been rescued from dangerous moral and physical situations to live in safety at the Fellowship. In addition, the Fellowship now encompasses a dairy farm, hospital, and preparatory school. The dairy farm has about 40 cows and the milk, being full of nutrition, is sent to the children’s home and the home of the elderly. Parama Suha Salai is the name of the hospital, meaning “Place of Heavenly Healing” in the Tamil language. Being able to accommodate 70 beds and having an out-patient number of 40,000 people per year, there are full-time doctors and multiple visiting volunteer doctors as well. Helping children who have just recently joined the children’s home here is the Jeevalaya Preparatory School. Here they are taught basic concepts in various subjects and how to interact with other kids. The Dohnavur Fellowship continues on strongly and steadily to this day and sticks to Miss Amy’s main vision for it.
The legacy of this godly woman doesn’t just impact the people in and around the Fellowship, but rather both men and women all over the world. Elizabeth Elliot, for example, was greatly impacted by Carmichael’s life of service to the Lord. As a result, she went on to write a detailed biography titled ‘A Chance to Die’ on Amy’s life’s journey all the way from a little girl till her death. Many more people have been inspired by her life as a missionary, Mrs. Elliot being just one of them.
Amy Carmichael’s life can be summed up by the words faith, love, service, and sacrifice. God used this ordinary woman to complete an extraordinary work in her homeland of England, in Japan, and in India. Thanks to this fearless Christian woman, temple prostitution was outlawed in the country of India in 1948, just three years before she departed from this earth to be with her Lord for all eternity. As a result of her faith in and love for God and love/work amongst needy children, Amy is beloved by many even to this day.
Bibliography
“Amy Carmichael,” religionfacts.com/amy-carmichael, 17 Mar. 2015
This article tells what religion group she was in and gives an overview of her childhood, work in India, and legacy.
“Amy Carmichael’s Legacy,” thinker.education
Bradfield, Haley, “Amy Carmichael Biography,” www.inspirationalchristains.org, 3 Feb. 2017
This biography is more of a brief version of her growing up, work with the ‘shawlies’, calling to missionary work, and her work in India.
dohnavurfellowship.org
This website has an overview of what is currently going on at the Dohnavur Fellowship and tells about Amy Carmichael.
Elliot, Elizabeth, “A Chance to Die,”
‘A Chance to Die’ is a very accurate and detailed biography of the life of Amy Carmichael all the way from when she was a child to her death.
Pena, Madeline, “Amy Carmichael: Mother to India,” bethanygu.edu
In this article you read about Amy’s faith as a child, call to ministry, work with the ‘shawlies’, missionary work in Japan and then in India, and her legacy.
Richardson, William, “Amy Carmichael,” lights4god.wordpress.com, 16 Dec. 2013
This article gives a semi detailed overview of her life, features a couple of her quotes, and mentions some of the books she wrote.
