Amy Carmichael: Her Story, Legacy & 55 Years in India

A small girl in Northern Ireland knelt by her bed and asked God to change her eye color. She had heard that prayer works, and she wanted brown eyes instead of blue, so she prayed, climbed into bed certain, and ran to the mirror in the morning. Blue. Amy Carmichael never forgot the disappointment, and she never forgot what her mother told her either: sometimes God says no because he is planning a bigger yes.

Decades later, in the south of India, Amy would darken her skin with coffee and slip into places no foreigner was allowed, dressed in a sari, to reach children in danger. Brown eyes would have completed the disguise. Blue ones nearly gave her away more than once. She laughed about it all her life. God had said no to a little girl’s prayer, and the no was part of the plan.

The mill girls of Belfast

Amy’s story did not start glamorous. When her father died and the family money thinned, Amy began working among the “shawlies” of Belfast, the mill girls too poor to afford hats who covered their heads with shawls instead. Respectable church people did not always want shawlies in their pews. Amy wanted them so much that she helped raise a tin hall that seated hundreds, and filled it.

That is the first thing to tell children about Amy Carmichael. Before she crossed any ocean, she crossed a street. The mission field began at the mill gates of her own city, among people others stepped around. She is no different at seventeen in Belfast than at fifty in India. The pattern was set early: find the ones nobody wants, and want them.

Fifty-five years, no furlough

Amy reached India in 1895, after a short first assignment in Japan. She was twenty-seven. She would die in India at eighty-three, having never gone home, not once, not for a wedding or a funeral or a rest. Missionaries call a trip home a furlough. Amy never took one.

In 1901 a little girl named Preena escaped to her, a child who had been given to a Hindu temple, and Amy learned about the children no one talked about: girls handed over to temples, their childhoods sold. Rescuing them was dangerous and sometimes illegal, and Amy did it anyway, for decades. The children called her Amma, the Tamil word for mother. The home she built for them, the Dohnavur Fellowship, grew into nurseries, schoolrooms, gardens, and a hospital. It is still caring for children today, more than seventy years after her death.

In 1931 she fell into a pit on a dark evening and was injured so badly she spent most of her last twenty years in bed. From that bed she ran Dohnavur and wrote thirteen of her thirty-five books. The woman who had moved across oceans finished her race without leaving her room, and the work did not shrink. Paul wrote to the Corinthians that God’s power is made perfect in weakness, and Amy’s bedroom became the proof.

Amy’s life at a glance

Year	What happened
1867	Born in Millisle, Northern Ireland, eldest of seven
~1870s	Prays for brown eyes; God says no
~1886	Begins work among the Belfast mill girls
1893	Sails for Japan, her first mission field
1895	Arrives in India, her home for the rest of her life
1901	Preena escapes to her; the rescue work begins
1901 onward	Founds and grows the Dohnavur Fellowship
1912	Nurseries and buildings rise at Dohnavur
1931	The fall that leaves her bedridden
1931-1951	Writes 13 books from her bed; leads Dohnavur
1951	Dies at Dohnavur, age 83, buried under a birdbath marked only “Amma”

She asked that no headstone be raised over her. The children set a birdbath there instead, with the one word that says everything.

Read it aloud: the five-minute version

Once there was a girl in Ireland who prayed for brown eyes and got to keep her blue ones. When she grew up, she sailed to India, where she found out a terrible secret: some little girls were being given away to temples, where no one would love them or keep them safe. Amy decided God wanted those children found. She dressed in a sari, drank her tea dark, and went where she was not allowed to go. One by one, the children came: first Preena, then ten, then hundreds. They lived together in a place called Dohnavur, with gardens and goats and schoolbooks, and every child called Amy by the same name: Amma. Mother. When Amy was older she fell and hurt herself so badly she had to stay in bed for twenty years. Do you think the work stopped? It did not. She wrote books from her pillow, prayed over every child by name, and ran the whole busy place from one quiet room. When she died, the children did not carve a fancy stone. They put a birdbath on her grave, where living things come to drink, and wrote one word: Amma. If you visit Dohnavur today, there are still children there, still safe. That is what one yes to God can do, even a yes from a girl whose first prayer got a no.

Talk about it

• Amy’s prayer for brown eyes got a no. Why was the no kind?
• Amy loved the mill girls in Belfast before she ever loved the children of India. Who are the people near us that others step around?
• The children called her Amma. What name would you want to have earned by the end of your life?

Pray together

Father, thank you for Amy and for every no that hides a bigger yes. Give us eyes that notice the children others forget, near our home and far away. And if you are planting a long yes in one of us, even now, make us brave enough to keep saying it for fifty-five years. Amen.

Amy spent her life among one people in one corner of India. There are thousands of peoples still waiting for their Amy. If your family wants to meet one of them each month, that is exactly what a Wonder Letter brings to your mailbox.

God still says no to small prayers. He is still planning bigger ones.