Classic Book of the Month - A Chance To Die

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, November 2nd. You’re listening to WORLD Radio and we’re so glad you are!

Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Coming next on The World and Everything in It: Our Classic Book of the Month.

Author and missionary Elisabeth Elliot wrote 24 books during her lifetime, many of them bestsellers. Today, reviewer Emily Whitten talks with biographer Ellen Vaughn about one of Elliot’s lesser known books, titled, A Chance to Die. It’s a reflection on the life and faith of Amy Carmichael, a Christian missionary serving in India.

EMILY WHITTEN, REPORTER: If you haven’t heard of our author this month, Elisabeth Elliot, here’s the capsule version of her story: In 1956, Auca tribesmen—or more precisely, Waodani tribesmen—killed her first husband, Jim Elliot, and 4 other missionaries in Ecuador. That led to deep heartache, but Elliot also prayed for God to open doors to return.

Within two years, God answered by leading her, her young daughter, and another missionary to live with the violent Waodani tribe. Many in the tribe heard the gospel and stopped spearing innocent people. Some came to faith in Christ. Elliot later moved back to the U. S. and spent much of the rest of her life speaking and writing books.

The one we’re looking at today, our Classic Book of the Month, bears the cryptic title A Chance to Die. Elliot published it in 1987. By then she was a mature woman of faith reflecting on the significance of her “spiritual mother,” Amy Carmichael.

VAUGHN: Amy Carmichael was a young Irish Christian from a religious and supportive family. And when she was about 20, she felt a real calling from God to expand her life for people in need.

Author Ellen Vaughn discusses Carmichael and her connection to Elliot in her 2020 biography, Becoming Elisabeth Elliot.

VAUGHN: She ended up in India, and particularly had a lifelong ministry with what we would today call sex trafficking and horrible injustices and abuses to young girls and boys.

Vaughn says Elliot was attracted to Carmichael’s boldness, her grittiness, and her identification with indigenous people.

VAUGHN: But she was also very attracted to her writing style, to her poetry, and more importantly, the nature of suffering. That was a lifelong theme for Elizabeth, and Amy Carmichael really spoke to that theme.

Take the title, A Chance to Die. Elliot explains on p. 176 that the phrase comes from Carmichael’s letters. Carmichael knew that some back in England thought her work saving children seemed glorious. The reality, day by day, felt far from glorious. Taking care of formerly unwanted or abused children was often dirty, mundane, and heart-breaking work. To put their needs first, she had to constantly die to herself. So, when asked to describe missionary work, Carmichael wrote, it’s “a chance to die.”

Throughout the book, Elliot makes much of this counter-cultural calling:

VAUGHN: A lot of American Christianity is, it's gotten fused with the values of the culture in terms of comfort. And that is, I think, what Elizabeth Elliot and Amy Carmichael, of course, will be anxious to puncture—any illusion that Jesus calls us to our best life now, to a life of comfort and wealth and health.

Elliot includes a lot of Carmichael’s poetry in A Chance to Die. I’ll admit I did skim over some of it. But one poem stood out to Vaughn on the theme of suffering, so I asked her to read a bit. Here’s Vaughn.

VAUGHN: “Hast thou no scar? No hidden scar on foot or side or hand? I hear thy song is mighty in the land. I hear thee hailed like bright, ascendant star. Hast thou no scar?” And the poem goes on to say that the feet of Jesus are scarred and how can one purport to follow Jesus if one has no scars of one’s own?

Carmichael isn’t suggesting we seek out suffering. She simply means that real Christian life means taking up our cross and following Christ. The scars that come, whether physical or emotional, can draw us closer to God and make us more like Him.

Elliot highlights another aspect of Carmichael’s life in the first pages of A Chance to Die. Here’s Elliot in a clip from the documentary, Amy Carmichael: Mother to the Motherless.

ELLIOT: I love the story that the book opens with when she was just a little girl, and she stuffed her two little brothers through the skylight, and then climbed through the skylight herself. And then here they were sitting on this steeply slanted slate roof. When they looked down and there were their astonished parents looking up at them. She was a girl who was very uninhibited. And that to me spoke volumes about her courage.

In Elliot’s book, courage shows up again and again. Carmichael faces daily pressure to feed, clothe, and educate the hundreds of children at her mission outpost, the Dohnavur Fellowship. At times, British leaders pressure Carmichael not to rock the boat politically—to accept traditions like caste distinctions and temple prostitution. But in all these conflicts, she seeks to obey God rather than men.

VAUGHN: Amy broke precedent with many missionaries of her day because Amy Carmichael dressed as the Indian women dressed, she ate with them, she lived in the same settings they lived in. And what that is is incarnation. It's like Jesus who came and dwelt among us.

Vaughn says we see the same incarnational principle when Elliot went to live with the Waodani. And like Carmichael, Elliot found courage through dependence on God—out of years of seeking to do “anything” … if He would lead her. Here’s Elliot again.

ELLIOT: The more I read of Amy Carmichael’s works, the more I realized that this was a theme that went through everything she ever wrote. It was the power of the cross and the necessity for every missionary to put himself totally at God’s disposal.

In A Chance to Die, Elliot shows us the cost of that obedience. Carmichael spends the last part of her life bedridden, struggling to remain faithful despite debilitating pain. But we also see her fruitfulness. By the time of her death in 1951, Carmichael left behind nearly 40 books and a thriving ministry that continues to this day.

VAUGHN: I think one thing that Elizabeth Elliot really drew from Amy Carmichael was a fresh way of seeing some of the theological truths that she had known all her life.

Do you need a fresh vision of theological truth and faithful service to Christ? If so, I hope you might consider reading our Classic Book of the Month, A Chance to Die by Elisabeth Elliot. I also highly recommend Ellen Vaughn’s Becoming Elisabeth Elliot. Both would make great gift options, together or on their own.

I’m Emily Whitten.

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