As she flipped through the pages of one particular building journal, her eyes were attracted to an advertisement that contained a drawing of a huge hall made of iron. Beside the drawing was some text that described prefabricated iron buildings that could be built for five hundred pounds. Amy peered at the drawing, trying to imagine what an iron building would look like in real life. Would it be too cold or too noisy? All the buildings in Belfast were made from stone or brick. Would a metal building really work, or was it just a gimmick? She didn’t know; her schooling had been in singing and needlework, not engineering.
If her father had still been alive, he could have told her whether the building was soundly engineered and how it would hold up to the damp Belfast climate. Why, if her father were alive and had not lost most of his money on the flour mills, he might well have paid for the building for her. He’d always given generously to Christian activities, building a hall in Millisle that doubled as a schoolhouse and a church. He had even bought a horse and buggy for the church preacher. But her father was dead, and there was precious little Carmichael money left, perhaps enough to keep the family afloat if they were careful, but certainly not enough to buy a new building.
Amy wondered how she might get the money to buy a building like the iron one she’d seen in the building journal. She could always ask other Christians, of course, but she had asked another Christian for money once, a long time ago, and the bad taste of the experience had never left her. She was ten years old and staying with her grandmother at the time. Her grandmother had been collecting money for charity work, and she had suggested that Amy go down to the new house on the corner and ask the owner if he would make a donation. Amy didn’t mind doing it; she saw the man at church every Sunday when she stayed with her grandmother. She studied the outside of the man’s new house as she knocked on the door. The house had ornate statues in the garden and the very latest trend, a pagoda with wrought-iron trellis work. Surely, Amy thought, someone as rich as this man would be able to spare a lot of money for her grandmother’s charity.
When the man came to the door, Amy explained to him the reason for her visit. To her surprise, the man announced gruffly that he could not spare a single penny for her grandmother’s charity work. Amy was shocked. The man was rich; he’d had enough money to build himself an expensive house. How could it be that he didn’t have a single penny left over? Amy thought about it as she walked back to her grandmother’s house, until it finally dawned on her. The man must have had lots of pennies; he just didn’t want to give any of them away.
A new idea took root in Amy’s ten-year-old mind that day. Real Christian people, she decided, would gladly give money to help others. So why bother to ask people who didn’t want to give?
The incident had happened ten years before, but Amy remembered the experience vividly. She still believed that Christian people would gladly give, and she also believed it was better to ask God to steer those people to give money than it was to ask them directly. At the shawlie meeting the following Sunday morning, she shared with the women the idea of having their own building, and they all agreed to pray and ask God to supply the enormous sum of five hundred pounds for the building and a place to put it.
As the eldest daughter, Amy couldn’t always escape the duties that came with living in Victorian society. One thing Amy couldn’t avoid was “returning calls” with her mother. Returning calls was an elaborate system where upper-class women made appointments to visit each other in their homes. There was no such thing as just dropping by to visit someone. Instead, calling cards had to be left, and specific times to visit were arranged. Amy hated returning calls; they were always the same. The older women would quiz her on any young men she might find interesting or on which of her sisters was learning a new piano piece. Then the hostess would tell Amy about the latest poetry reading she had attended or which young man had paid a call on which young woman. The conversation was so dull, and combined with sitting up straight in an uncomfortable chair balancing a teacup on her lap for an hour or more, Amy found the visits completely boring and time wasting. Still, it was her duty to accompany her mother, so as tiresome as the visits were, she didn’t complain.
Occasionally, though, an unsuspecting hostess would ask Amy what else she was doing. That was the opening Amy needed. She would jump right in and begin talking about the work with the shawlies, the Belfast City Mission, and the YWCA, where she also volunteered with great enthusiasm. She didn’t like talking about herself, but she loved to talk about what God was doing in people’s lives. Often the hostess would slowly steer the conversation back to more “respectable” topics, but every now and then, Amy would find someone who was interested in what she was doing.
One woman who was genuinely interested in Amy’s work was Kate Mitchell, the daughter of a wealthy businessman. Kate listened carefully to Amy and asked her intelligent questions. Amy gladly told Kate all about the work she was involved in around the city. She left the Mitchell house feeling as if she’d made a new friend. And she had. Several days later a letter from Kate arrived that contained some astonishing news. Kate Mitchell wanted to pay the entire price of a hall for the shawlie girls. Amy could hardly believe it. She was so excited. She hadn’t asked Kate for the money, so she knew it was God who had caused Kate to offer the money. Amy could hardly wait for Sunday morning to come around so she could share the wonderful news with the shawlies.
Next there was the question of where to put the hall. A building that big didn’t fit just anywhere. Because her charity work took her all over the city, Amy knew Belfast better than most people. As she thought about where to put the hall, a lot she’d passed on Cambria Street came to mind. The property was part of a large piece of land that belonged to one of the wealthiest mill owners in Belfast. Amy went to visit him and told him about the hall and how she needed some land to build it on. Then she asked him what price he would accept for the land on Cambria Street. She almost laughed out loud when he told her. Had she heard right? The amount the mill owner wanted was about one-tenth of the real value of the land. In fact, the price was so low that the money Kate Mitchell was planning to pay for the building would cover the cost of the land as well. Again God had provided, and again Amy could hardly wait until Sunday morning to tell the shawlies.
Soon an unusual looking iron building that would seat five hundred people was taking shape on the land on Cambria Street. By Christmas it was finished, and on January 2, 1889, it was officially opened by Dr. Park. Amy did not sit on the stage during the opening, preferring to sit in the audience with the shawlies. As usual, she wanted the spotlight not to be on her but to be on what God had done.
Many people came to the opening just to see what an iron building looked like inside. While the building had officially been named The Welcome, most visitors called it the Tin Tabernacle. Amy didn’t really care what people called it. What was important was that the shawlies had a place they could call their own. The Welcome was a place where the shawlies could hear the gospel message, meet with other Christian women, encourage each other, and learn new things.
And meet they did. The weekly schedule that was posted on The Welcome door read as follows:
Sunday 4:30 p.m. Bible Class
Sunday 5:30 p.m. Sunbeam Band Meeting
Monday 1:20 p.m. Lunch Hour Meeting
Monday 7:30 p.m. Singing Practice
Tuesday 7:30 p.m. Night School
Wednesday 1:20 p.m. Lunch Prayer Meeting
Wednesday 7:30 p.m. Girls’ Meeting
Thursday 4:00 p.m. Mothers’ Meeting
Thursday 7:30 p.m. Sewing Club
Friday 1:20 p.m. Lunch Hour Meeting
First Wednesday of the month: Gospel Meeting. All Welcome.
If finding the money to build the Tin Tabernacle had been a challenge to Amy, finding people to staff it proved much more so. Amy wasn’t a person who believed any help was better than no help. Some people offered to help her because they felt sorry for the shawlies. They wouldn’t do. Others offered to help because they felt a need in their lives to “do a little charity work.” They wouldn’t do, either. Amy turned away more help than she accepted. She allowed only those people to help her who would serve the shawlies out of dedication to God. Nothing less was good enough for Amy, who knew that when difficult decisions had to be made she needed godly people around her, not do-gooders.
While the work at The Welcome began to prosper, things at the Carmichael home were not going well financially. Before he died, Mr. Carmichael had invested most of his remaining money so the family could live off the interest. But the investment had gone bad and the money was lost. The Carmichaels no longer had a little money on which to survive; they now had none. Instead of feeling sorry for herself, Mrs. Carmichael trusted that God would work things out, no matter how dark things seemed. She gathered her seven children together and told them the bad news. Then they all knelt down and prayed about the situation and asked God to guide them.
A few days later, Jacob MacGill, an old friend of the Carmichaels, offered Mrs. Carmichael a job overseeing a women’s rescue home in the industrial city of Ancoats, on the outskirts of Manchester, England. He also offered Amy support in starting up a ministry among the mill workers there. After praying about it for a long time, Amy felt she should go with her mother to England, as did her sister Ethel. Norman and Ernest decided to emigrate to North America, while Eva, Walter, and Alfred stayed in Ireland with relatives. Later on, Walter and Alfred also emigrated, one to South Africa and the other to Canada.
With the move to England, Amy would have to leave the shawlies and The Welcome, where she had poured so much of her energy and love. Thankfully, though, Kate Mitchell had been so inspired by Amy’s work that she took Amy’s place as director of the center. Still, it was very hard for Amy to say good-bye. Yet in her heart she knew it had never really been her work; it had always belonged to God and always would.
Amy stood on the stern of the steamer that was taking her, her mother, and her sister to England and took in everything as the green hills of Ireland faded from view. She didn’t know it then, but it was the last time she would ever see her homeland. The ship continued on through the Strangford Lough and pitched and rolled its way across the Irish Sea to Liverpool, England. As sea spray whipped at her face, Amy, still standing on the stern of the ship, prayed that God would open up new opportunities for her to work among the mill workers of Ancoats.
Chapter 5
Out of the Blue
A petite young woman pulled a knitted shawl tightly around her shoulders and braced herself against the chilling wind. She walked northward toward the smoke-belching factories. Nimbly she avoided the huge puddles that stretched across the road. Horse-drawn carriages clattered past, splashing muddy water on her skirt. A bucket of soapy water tipped from a fourth-story window, narrowly missing her as the water splashed onto the cobbled street. The petite young woman was Amy Carmichael, and she had just stepped from her new home.
To anyone passing, Amy looked like just another shawlie, one of the thousands of Irish women who’d come to England to escape poverty only to find more of it. Amy could have lived with her mother and sister in the small cottage they rented just outside of town, but she had wanted to live in the slum. Living in the same place as the people she wanted to help made all the sense in the world to her. In the three months she’d been living there since arriving from Belfast, she had learned many things. For example, she discovered how difficult it was to live without enough sleep. The walls in her room were paper thin, and she could hear every baby cry, every couple argue, every drunken man beat his wife in every room on her floor. But that was nothing compared to the rats and bugs that infested the building. It was hopeless trying to keep them out. For every bug and every rat Amy chased away, more came in to see what all the commotion was about. The pests ferreted through her clothes at night and scurried lightly over her blankets. Amy slept with her sheet pulled tightly around her neck, not wanting to wake up with a rat or roaches crawling inside her bedclothes. While she may have kept the vermin from getting under her blankets, they went wherever else they pleased. She could hear them scuttling across her table during the night, and in the morning she always dropped one of her boots heavily on the floor before lighting the lamp. The loud noise frightened the bugs and rats and sent them scampering into corners and crevices.
