After several hours of praying and thinking, Amy finally decided she knew what the words from the verse meant to her. For one thing, she would no longer waste time on things that weren’t important in God’s eyes. When all the things she’d done in her life were finally judged by God, she wanted them to be found worthwhile. She wanted them to be seen as gold and silver, not hay and stubble. For another thing, she would never again worry about what people thought of her. If what she was doing was pleasing to God, that would be enough for her. If other people, even other Christians, didn’t want to walk with beggars, that was their business, but Amy would walk with them, and she would walk proudly.
When she finally came downstairs for dinner, Amy had a new purpose in her heart, a purpose that would lead to some very unusual changes in her life.
Amy had always been kind. As a small girl, she had once visited Belfast with her mother. During the visit, they had stopped at a tearoom for a cup of tea and some scones. As they ate, Amy noticed a grimy little beggar girl with her nose pressed up against the tearoom window. The poor little girl with no food was looking in at the rich little girl who had a plateful. The gaze in the little girl’s eyes had affected Amy deeply. When Amy got back home to Millisle, she sat down in front of her nursery fireplace and wrote a promise to the girl:
When I grow up and money have,
I know what I will do,
I’ll build a great big lovely place
For little girls like you.
Amy was also kind to animals. She couldn’t stand to see them suffer. Once, on her way to family prayers, she had noticed a mouse drowning in a bucket of water. Without a second thought, she scooped up the mouse and dropped him into her apron pocket. Unfortunately, the mouse had squeaked when her father was praying, and Amy was punished for disrupting the peace. But she had saved a mouse’s life, so the punishment was worth it.
But as kind as Amy had been in the past, there was something different about her now. She wasn’t going to be kind just because that was the right thing to do. She was going to be kind because God had asked her to be kind to those He loved. Amy’s two younger sisters were amazed at the change in her. They called her new attitude “Amy’s enthusiasms.” And Amy was enthusiastic. There was so much to do, so many people she knew God wanted her to love and be kind to.
While Amy wanted to learn more about God, she also wanted to help others learn about Him. On Sunday afternoons she would wander the streets of College Gardens and invite the local children back to the Carmichael house, where she would hold a children’s meeting. The children would sing and clap, and Amy would read them Bible stories and tell them how God loved them. While Amy was busy with the children, Mrs. Carmichael made sandwiches and lemonade for them all to enjoy when the meeting was over.
Some of the children who came on Sunday afternoons wanted to know even more about God, so Amy started her “Morning Watch Club.” The club met on Saturday mornings, and to every child who wanted to join, Amy gave a blank blue card with gold edges. On the card she had the children write out a pledge that they would spend time every day praying and reading their Bible. When they had signed the pledge card, they gave it back to Amy. Every Saturday morning after that they would meet together and discuss how well they were doing keeping their pledges. Everyone, even Amy’s two youngest brothers, looked forward to the Morning Watch Club. Amy seemed to be able to make it so much fun as they talked and learned from each other.
Amy and her friend Eleanor Montgomery also ran a night school for boys. The school met on Monday evenings, and Amy and Eleanor would help the boys who had to work in the factories during the day with their reading and writing. They would finish each night with a short “good night service,” during which Amy read from the Bible and prayed. Sometimes Eleanor’s father, Dr. Montgomery, would come along and help out. He also volunteered at the Belfast City Mission, and he soon noticed that Amy was far more interested in doing God’s work than participating in the normal social activities of eighteen-year-old young women.
Eventually, Dr. Montgomery invited Amy to go with him some Saturday evenings when he visited the slums in Belfast. Amy could think of nothing else she would rather do! And so, on Saturday nights, Amy entered a different world, the world of Belfast’s slums, where she was introduced to things she’d never seen before. She had seen beggars on the streets; she’d even helped some of them, but nobody had bothered to tell her just how desperate these people’s lives really were or what they would do to stay alive. Another thing Amy discovered in the slums was the smells. There was the smell of rotting vegetable peelings that had been thrown onto the pavement from second-story windows, the smell from makeshift toilets created in doorways or stair entrances, the smell from smoky sod fires that drunken men huddled around in the middle of the street. Amy winced at what she smelled and saw. In her wildest imagination she’d never thought human beings could live this way.
One Saturday evening as Amy and Dr. Montgomery made their way around the slums handing out bread and gospel tracts, a small blue-eyed girl wearing a ragged dress walked up to Amy and started begging for food. As Amy looked down at her, an old woman with her head wrapped in a shawl stepped forward and picked up the girl. As the woman turned to walk away with the child in her arms, Amy gasped. The shawl had fallen from the old woman’s face, and the woman was not old at all. She was probably about the same age as Amy. What kind of life has this woman led to make her back so stooped and her face so worn when she cannot be more than twenty years old? After they had given out all the bread and tracts, Amy asked Dr. Montgomery the question she’d been pondering.
Dr. Montgomery told her the women were called “shawlies.” He went on to explain that shawlies, many of them as young as ten years old, worked twelve hours a day in the linen mills that made Belfast famous. Irish linen, Irish shirts, Irish rope were among the best quality in the world, and yet they were cheap to buy. They were cheap because the girls who worked in the mills were poorly paid for their labor. Most didn’t even earn enough money to buy themselves a hat, so they pulled their shawls up over their heads when they went out in the cold, thus the nickname shawlies.
Amy couldn’t stop thinking about the shawlies. Something had to be done for them. Slowly she hatched a plan. Why not start holding meetings on Sunday mornings for the shawlies like the one she held for the neighborhood children on Sunday afternoons? She decided the hall at Rosemary Street Presbyterian Church would be a great place to hold her meetings. The church hall had plenty of room, and Amy was sure everyone in the church would love to see it used to reach out to the less fortunate citizens of Belfast.
Amy visited Dr. Park, pastor of the church, and asked him for permission for the shawlie girls to meet on Sunday mornings for Bible study and prayer in the church hall. Whether Dr. Park thought it was a good idea or whether Amy was impossible to turn down is not certain, but the pastor gave his permission for Amy to hold the shawlie meetings in the church hall.
Some members of the congregation were not happy when they discovered that the riffraff of Belfast were using the church hall. Many church folk, even friends who had known the Carmichaels for a long time, couldn’t figure out why Amy would want to associate with shawlies, let alone bring them to church. Some wondered whether Amy was aware that shawlies smelled bad and had fleas and lice. What if some of their fleas and lice crawled onto the church furniture? Soon Dr. Park was being regularly visited by church members who urged him to withdraw his permission for Amy to use the church hall for her meetings. Each time, Dr. Park refused. Frustrated by his response, some church members went straight to Amy and told her what they thought about her meetings with the shawlie girls. Amy did not care what they thought. Ever since the day she had heard the voice at the fountain she hadn’t cared what anyone thought of her. All she wanted to do was please God and share His love with others.
All her “enthusiasms” and her responsibilities around the house kept Amy very busy. In September 1886, her mother decided that Amy needed a vacation. Amy chose to go to Scotland and stay with an old school friend, Sarah McCullen. While in Scotland, the two girls traveled down to Glasgow for a Keswick meeting. Keswick was actually the name of a place in England, where twelve years before there had been some large, Christian tent meetings. Since that time, the same type of meetings had been held all over the British Isles, and they had become known as Keswick meetings.
Amy had heard a lot about Keswick meetings, and as she sat and listened to the speaker, she expected something wonderful to happen to her. But nothing did. The speaker was interesting, but Amy didn’t think anything he said was particularly powerful. Sarah, on the other hand, sat with her eyes wide and sparkling, staring at the preacher and nodding in agreement at everything he said. While Sarah was totally absorbed in the meeting, Amy sat thinking about how tight her shoes felt. Her stomach was rumbling, and she hoped the preacher would finish soon so she could go to lunch. Amy had heard so many wonderful stories of how people had experienced God during Keswick meetings that she felt disappointed. She wondered if she just wasn’t getting it, or if people had exaggerated about what they’d experienced in the meetings.
Before she could decide on an answer, the preacher finished his sermon, clapped his Bible shut, and sat down. The chairman of the meeting got up to close the service in prayer. “O Lord,” he began. “We know you are able to keep us from falling….”
The words struck Amy like a bolt of lightning. God was able to keep her from falling. Amy’s mind focused tightly on that thought. Even after the chairman had finished his prayer and everyone had begun leaving, Amy stayed deep in thought. Finally, Sarah had to pull her to her feet, but even then, Amy did not want to leave. For the first time since walking with the old beggar woman past the fountain, Amy felt as if God had spoken directly to her heart. He would keep her from falling no matter where she went, what she did, or what happened to her while doing it. God would keep her from falling. And if God would keep her from falling, there was nothing she couldn’t do. Amy could hardly wait to get back to Belfast. She had plans, big plans for the future.
Chapter 4
Tin Tabernacle
After her experience in Glasgow, Amy arrived back in Ireland with one thought on her mind: She would no longer confine herself to doing what she thought she could do; instead she’d trust God and see what He would do through her.
She threw herself into her work with the shawlies, and before long, the group she’d started two years before had grown to be very big. Every Sunday morning four hundred women and girls crowded into the Rosemary Street Presbyterian Church hall. Of course, many church members continued to complain of being “overrun” by shawlies. They spoke about them as though they were rats.
With so many shawlies coming to her meeting, Amy began to think it might be better for everyone if her shawlie group had its own permanent meeting place. And so, while her two younger sisters, Ethel and Eva, scoured women’s journals looking for the latest fashions and discussing what a perfect husband ought to be like, Amy pored over journals about building and engineering. Unlike her sisters and most young women of her era, Amy wasn’t interested in marriage. Perhaps she knew it would be a rare man who would let her do what she felt God had called her to do in life. And so she dismissed marriage from her mind and concentrated on her work among the shawlies.
