We Are Not the First

For new readers: The Compass is a weekly newsletter on spiritual formation. “We Are Not the First“ is one of its recurring series, arriving each Sunday to introduce you to a pilgrim who traveled this road before us. These are the guides who learned, often at great cost, how to find their way to a deeper life with God in the middle of noisy, hurried, distracted living, which, it turns out, is not so different from our own. This series is a way of noticing them, thanking them, and learning from the road they walked.

We are not the first to follow Jesus.

Others have gone before us. Did they always get it right? No. Neither do we. Our goal is to follow Jesus, not those who have gone before us. But we have much to learn from those who have followed far on the way to a deeper life with Jesus.

A decade ago, I walked the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage in Spain. I followed a guidebook by John Brierly who had walked the Camino six times. I benefited from his insights that he had discovered by walking himself. That is the spirit of these Sunday posts: to introduce you each Sunday to someone who, before us, found the way to a deeper life with Jesus and later shared with us what they learned as they navigated the interior journey.

This week, a person worth knowing: Amy Carmichael (born, 1867 (Northern Ireland), died 1951 (Dohnavur, India).

I write The Compass to help you navigate the interior journey toward a deeper life with Jesus. There are lots of options available to you here: just keep showing up an read, or sign up for a free subscription to get The Compass in your email whenever I publish a new resource about the that deeper life. If you’d like to try the paid side of things, there’s a free trial waiting, no pressure, just a chance to see what a month looks like: a spiritual formation practice tool each month, a video teaching aid that expands it, and a live conversation to walk through it together. If you want to know what it means to become a Waymarker, you can read about it here. What ever works best, you can start here whenever you’re ready.

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Now, Amy Carmichael, missionary to India.

My wife and I first heard about Amy Carmichael while I was preparing for ministry at Asbury Theological Seminary. My wife found her book Gold Cord, loved it, started collecting other books by Amy and told me I needed to read them, also. I did. Even though they now have a place of honor on a shelf on Lorri’s secretary, I still pull off an “Amy book” from time to time and read it.

Later, I read a full biography of her life by Elizabeth Elliot that tells a story that has stayed with me. A young girl wrote to Amy and asked her what it was like to be a missionary. Amy wrote back a single sentence: “Missionary life is a chance to die.” That one sentence traveled with me over my remaining years of ministry. Some seasons I avoided it. Sometimes, I embraced it. I never forgot it.

Her fuller story is worth knowing. The way she stood up to the missionary culture of the time to do something revolutionary and transformative was remarkable. But I want to tell you about a poem that Lorri and I have been reading together ever year on Good Fridays ever since those seminary days in the 1980s: Hast Thou No Scars. It’s short. Three stanzas. It’s been turned into a song. But the reading the poem is the best way to get the full effect. Two lines are unforgettable and seem like the antidote we’ve been needing for platform-growing ministry that has left the church reeling from shallow spirituality:

I hear thee sung as mighty in the land, I hear them hail thy bright ascendant star

and

…Pierced are the feet that follow Me; But thine are whole: can he have followed far Who has no wound nor scar?

Here are some Amy Carmichael resources: Gold Cord, A Chance to Die, Hast Thou No Scar (poem), and Hast Thou No Scar (worship song).

Grateful for those who have walked the road before we did, and left it a little more marked for the rest of us.

— Gene