From Elizabeth Elliot's biography of Amy Carmichael, " Chance to Die." Chapter "Grey Jungle, Crystal Pool."
Ponnammal with Two of the Orphans
"It was a solemn meeting around the sickbed, the women dressed as usual in their handloomed saris, but white ones for this occasion. They laid a palm branch across Ponnammal's bed as a sign of victory and accepted whatever answer God might give, certain that whether it was to be physical healing or not, He would give victory and peace. It sounds like a simple formula. It was an act of faith, but certainly accompanied by the anguish of doubt and desire which had to be brought again and again under the authority of the Master."The answer that came was that Ponnammal, from the very day of the anointing, grew rapidly worse. She lay for days without speaking, her dull eyes half-open, seeming to see nothing. The pain was violent, kept under only by large doses of morphia. "She has been walking through the valley of the shadow of death. I never knew how dense that shadow could become, for I never before watched anyone dying in this slow, terrible way ... Nothing was visible but the distress and depression of this most fearful disease.""Once when she seemed to be in unimaginable misery she told Amy how she had longed to be allowed to stay. She thought she could help a little "if the pain did not pass this limit." "It seemed to me the most unselfish word I had ever heard from human lips." Ponnammal touched the limit at least - the limit divinely set to pain- and her "warfare was accomplished" on August 26, 1915. She would never be replaced. She had been among the best. But "we shall have our best again, purified, perfected, assured from change forever." That was the ground of hope."
Reading things like this assure me that though I lost my parents when I was under 25, I never had to observe this sort of suffering with them.
Radical acceptance requires Total Surrender to the Holy Spirit.
