"...More Than Seven Stars"

I can't remember when I first learned about Amy Carmichael. Probably in a missionary story time during a Good News Club when I was a little girl. Born in Northern Ireland (like C.S. Lewis!), she lived 1867-1951, and was a missionary in India for fifty-six years. Faithful to sharing the Gospel in word and deed, she is perhaps best known for providing refuge to countless children who'd been dedicated to "service" in Hindu temples as prostitutes.

I read some of her devotional writings when I was in college, and for a long time, I kept these words of her's up on my wall: Guard Against Depression. Bear Evenly With All That Is Uneven. Never Be Shocked Out of Loving. I think they were her words of advice to a new missionary. I have recalled those words so many times over the years, needing to heed them again and again. I was thinking about them the other night, during a time of some tears when I found I was both struggling with some depression, and also feeling very "uneven" in many places in my life. I went to the shelf to pull down the one book I knew we had by Amy Carmichael, and to my surprise, found we had another one I'd never read (probably picked up in one of the countless seminary library sales we enjoyed during our six years as students and staff). I love it when God brings a book to my attention in ways like this -- to find a gem sitting quietly on your own shelf, and to realize it's a book you really need right now, is a beautiful thing.

It's called You Are My Hiding Place: A 40-Day Journey in the Company of Amy Carmichael. These are devotional readings arranged by an author named David Hazard, and apparently he had a lot to choose from. Carmichael was ill and bedridden for almost the final 20 years of her life, as he explains in his introduction, and her writings were both prolific and profound.

I've read a handful of the meditations, and a few of them have jumped out at me, but the one that's perhaps spoken the most comfort to my heart is Day 3, "No Insignificant People." In this meditation, Amy Carmichael speaks of God's lovingkindness, and how the Bible is full of stories that show how God in his great love for us speaks to our fears of insignificance. One of her examples is John on Patmos, in the book of Revelation:

"John, looking through the thin veil of time into eternity, saw his Lord --the Lord he had seen pierced -- now holding in His hand seven stars. John declares, 'I fell at His feet as though dead.' Immediately -- just as though this fallen one mattered more than seven stars, as though there were no stars -- 'He placed His right hand upon me.' (Revelation 1: 16-17) ...Isn't it beautiful that there was no rebuke at all for [his] human weakness?...He comforts. He lays His right hand on the soul wounded by weariness, or fear, or any kind of weakness at all. And he says, as if that one were the only soul in all the universe: 'O man, greatly beloved, fear not: peace be unto thee. Be strong -- yea, be strong!' (Daniel 10:19, Rotherham)"