Rescuing Temple Children - The Story of Amy Carmichael

Discover the incredible true story of Amy Carmichael, one of the most influential Christian missionaries in history. In this episode of the LEV 3:16 Podcast, we explore how Amy Carmichael devoted 55 years of her life to serving in India, rescuing children from temple prostitution, and founding the Dohnavur Fellowship, a refuge that transformed the lives of more than 1,000 children. Learn how her unwavering faith, sacrificial love, and courageous commitment to Jesus Christ enabled her to overcome suffering, loneliness, and physical disability while leaving a lasting legacy through her missionary work and writings. Whether you are interested in Christian missions, missionary biographies, church history, inspirational Christian stories, women of faith, or the life-changing impact of the gospel, Amy Carmichael’s story will challenge you and encourage you. Join us as we examine her remarkable journey, her famous books such as If, and the lessons modern Christians can learn from one of the greatest missionary heroes of all time.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi and welcome to Leviticus 316. My name is Tanette and I'm your host. I'm both a teacher and a missionary, and this in this episode, we're going to be talking about one of my uh missionary heroes, Amy Carmichael. Amy Carmichael had her name carries so much weight. She is uh she was a missionary to India, and when she landed in India, she never left. She spent 55 years there. 55 years. She never went on a furlough, she never took a vacation, she just never left the country. Alright, let's start at the beginning. She was born in 1867 in Mill Isle, Northern Ireland. She was b she came from a strong Presbyterian family, and so she had a very strong faith from the very earliest of ages. A story that is just very fascinating to me. In Sunday school, she learned that you could pray to God about almost anything and he would answer you. So she, when she was little, she had these, well, she always had these brown eyes, deep brown eyes, and most of the other um people in Ireland had blue eyes, and she was jealous, she wanted blue eyes, and so she believed that if she prayed to God that uh she could have brown eyes, that when she went to bed at night, she would pray that, she prayed that, believing that in the morning, whenever she woke up, that she would have blue eyes. So she prayed one night for God to give her these beautiful blue eyes. She went to bed believing that he would, and in the morning she woke up. Um she was just devastated when she looked into the mirror because she still had brown eyes looking back at her, and uh she didn't understand, and it was sometime later she felt in her heart God speaking to her. Uh Amy isn't no and answer to, and so she felt like um God was telling her that she needed to have brown eyes, she didn't know why, but years later, whenever she went to India, she found out that she needed those brown eyes. You'll find out why as we continue this story that she does need those brown eyes, she did need those brown eyes, and so uh that was very important. Now, in 1893, she went off uh on her very first um mission assignment, and it was not to India, it was to Japan. She stayed there for two years. She had a terrible time trying to learn Japanese. She said it was so terrible that you could put it on her tombstone, expired trying to learn Japanese. So she had a terrible time with the Japanese language. In 1895, she stopped a little bit in what is today Sri Lanka, and uh she didn't stay there for very long before going off to India in 1895. 1895 she landed in India and felt that that was exactly where God was calling her. Once she landed in India, she never left. Never left. 55 years. I just let that sink in. 55 years. That that's her entire lifetime, and she never left. She discovered that the temples, the the temples were um taking children, people would sell their children to these temples, and uh they became temple prostitutes, especially the little girls. They became temple prostitutes, and um it was devastating, and she her heart was torn for these little children. Now, sometimes it was little boys also, but it was mostly little girls, and so um what she would do, she would dress up in uh asari, which was the traditional dress for uh an Indian woman. She would dress up in asari, she would take tea leaves or coffee grounds, and she would dye her skin and her fake her face and her arms, she would dye them into a browner color, and then because she already had brown eyes, she blended right in as an Indian woman. She would go into these temples and she would scoop up these children at night, these little girls, and she would rescue them. She would take them out of the temple. Well, she had to have somewhere to bring them. She couldn't just rescue them, she had to give them a home, provide a home for them because they had nowhere to go. So she started something called the Donaver Fellowship. And uh it was a place, it became a city of its own, so much so that they had their own dialect of the Tamil language. Over the years, they had their own dialect. She had this Donover Fellowship, it had schools, it had hospitals, it had uh whatever these children needed, it it provided for them. She rescued girls and boys, she trained uh staff members to take care, help take care of these children. Over the 55 years that she uh lived in India, she rescued over a thousand children, and they called her Ama, which simply meant mother. There's a quote. This is found in the book Edges of His Ways, which she wrote. It's a collection of her poems. There was a poem that she wrote, Let me not sink to be a collade, make me thy fuel, O flame of God. See, what her dearest desire was, her deepest longing, was that she would spend her entire life working and uh just rescuing these children, working for the Lord, and then at the end of her life to die, but not to be a burden on anybody. That was her hope, and that was her prayer that that's how her life would go. Well, in 1931, there was a pit in the Donover Fellowship. She was working and she fell into a pit and she hurt herself. If I remember right, it was um her leg or her foot, but she injured her, she injured herself so badly that it never healed, and she was bedridden from 1931 until she died in 1951. So for 20 years, the last 20 years of her life, she was bedridden. It's not what she wanted at all. And I know that she was very frustrated and she questioned God and she wondered why God allowed her to be bedridden and not to be able to do anything that she wanted to do. She couldn't rescue children, she couldn't do any of the work that she wanted to do. She had to rely on the staff members to take care of her and to take care of the children. What could she do in that 20 years? Well, let me tell you what she did in that 20 years. She wrote. She wrote letters, she wrote notes, and she wrote books. In that 20 years, she wrote 35 books, and we still read them today. Uh, you might not have heard about her books, but they're still published today. One of the little books I quoted already. I quoted that uh poem, Make Me Thy Fuel, O Flame of God. That was from the book Um Edges of His Ways. There's another book that's probably more famous, it's called If, and it's a collection of her poems. She was a um a prolific poet. She wrote poems all the time, and they were gathered into little books, just little skinny books, and um they they were gathered in little skinny books of poems, and it is one of those little skinny books of poems, and so there'll be links to these in the description. Another book that she wrote was called God's Missionary, which is a fabulous book if you're interested in missions. If you're thinking about being a missionary or you are a missionary, you'll want to get a hold of God's Missionary. It's in the description. And then if you are interested in uh finding out more about her, you want to learn about her life, there's a book called A Chance to Die. I've got it right here, A Chance to Die. I don't know if you can see that. Maybe if I zoom out, right there, A Chance to Die by Elizabeth Elliot, who we already talked about in another podcast. Uh, Jim and Elizabeth Elliot. She was a hero to Elizabeth Elliot, and Elizabeth Elliot went to the Donover Fellowship and researched Amy Carmichael and found out all she could because the Donover Fellowship still exists today in 2026. It exists. That's over a hundred years later, and it's still going strong. You can look up about the Donover Fellowship, and I'll put a link to that in the description. You can find out what is what's happening today with the um little community that Amy Carmichael started. But Elizabeth Elliott went there and did research on Amy Carmichael and then wrote this book, A Chance to Die, all about her hero. And she's just a fabulous um role model for anybody that wants to find out about her. So that book will be in the description also. Now, Amy Carmichael, I told you that she died in 1951. Uh her life can be summed up in one sentence. You can't give without loving, and you can't love without giving. She loved deeply, she gave everything she had, all because of her love for the Lord Jesus Christ. Her life was marked by suffering and by loneliness. It was all because she loved Jesus. But it was also marked by love and sacrifice and dedication, and she found God in everything she did. She died in the dawn of her fellowship. Remember, I told you she never left. So she died in 1951 in the Don of her fellowship. She requested that there be no gravestone where she was buried. She didn't want any grave marker, no tombstone, nothing to mark her grave at all. What she would allow was a bird bath. So she allowed one bird bath so that birds could come and bathe and drink water where she was buried. See, she had a love of nature. Another funny little story before the end of this, she loved creatures of all sizes and all kinds so much that she wouldn't even allow anybody to kill a bug inside any of the buildings. You could capture the bug and carry the bug outside the building and let it go free. But you couldn't kill the bug inside the building. You couldn't kill the bug outside the building. Don't kill the bug. So she had a love of of all creatures. So she wanted a birdbath where she was buried, and that's what they have. So her legacy is one of radical love and courageous faith and perseverance. How does this apply to you and me? Well, maybe you're in a place of frustration in your own life. And like Amy Carmichael, you find yourself in a pit. Maybe it's a pit of your own, a different kind of a pit. Amy's pit was physical. Maybe your pit is a different kind. Or maybe it is physical. Maybe you don't understand what God is doing in your life. Amy's pit was that she was in bed for 20 years of her life and she didn't know why. One of the reasons that she was in that pit, we understand today, many years later, God wanted her to write. He wanted her to write. If she hadn't have been bedridden for 20 years, she would have never written a word because she wouldn't have had time to write a word. You remember, God is sovereign, he's in control, he has a reason for everything that happens in our life. It's for our good and for his glory. And even though she was in fell in that pit and was bedridden, it was for her good and for his glory. And it is in your situation as well. He never wastes a wound. He never wastes a wound. I love that saying. He'll use your pit just like he used Amy's pit, even yours. Pray, wait, and watch for it. Now, if you enjoyed today's story, share it, subscribe, like it, uh, do all the things because it really does help. It really does. I'll see you next week. And in the meantime, God bless you.