MEDITATION:
Written by Pete Greig, a contemporary writer and church planter. This is an excerpt from his book “How to Pray.”
Long before anyone talked about human trafficking, a remarkable Irish missionary called Amy Carmichael was rescuing children from forced prostitution in India’s Hindu temples. With extraordinary resilience, this single woman, who described herself as a “wild-bird child,” stood up to the powerful temple priests and established two homes—for girls and boys—in the city of Dohnavur, in the Tamil Nadu state. She also started a hospital funded by the Queen of England. Amy Carmichael lived in India for 55 years and died there without returning to Northern Ireland.
She was also a prolific writer, and poet, penning some 35 books. Her devotional works, which are mystical and challenging, are also startlingly honest about her own personal struggles. They often take the form of conversations with God. As a little girl, Amy would sometimes spread out her sheets at bedtime and invite the Lord to come and sit down beside her. These intimate moments with God only seemed to deepen throughout Amy’s influential life as she became increasingly acquainted with the voice of God. Her writings have inspired countless others to further their own daily rhythms of prayer and listening. Amy Carmichael teaches us that listening to God does not cloister us away from reality but rather propels us out into wild adventures abandoned to what she referred to as “Calvary Love.” She was buried in Dohnavur in a grave without a headstone, at her own request. But the children she had rescued placed a birdbath over her grave, inscribed with a single Tamil word: Amma, which means mother.
PRAYER:
The prayer is written by Amy Carmichael and is from her book “If.”
Let us listen to simple words: our Lord speaks simply: “Trust Me, My child,” He says. “Trust Me with a humbler heart and a fuller abandon to My will than ever thou didst before. Trust Me to pour My love through thee, as minute succeeds minute.
Pathways Press.com 