Amy Carmichael :: Nor Scrip—20. Interior Conversations

It is extraordinary how often the father of lies overreaches himself in his untruth-telling. We ought to write down these disproved statements of his sometimes, for the benefit of those whom he persistently worries; but life is full, there is hardly time to live, much less to set down all that is in it. Still, sometimes such episodes are distinct in emphasis, and looking back we remember the years of the right hand of the Most High, and are reinforced in faith.

Such an hour stands out now as I write. It lay in one of the spaces between the lighting of the stars.

'Most of your friends at home are getting old.'

'Well, so is everybody.'

(We have a dear little girl here who regularly sets these occasions forth as interior conversations. I am following her example.)

'But there will soon be nobody left at home who cares in the least for you.'

'God can give us new friends.'

'Oh, but old friends are far better.'

There are some points it is difficult to argue and I forget how this was countered, perhaps by the happy fact that new friends grow into old friends in time; but the last shaft was, 'Well, look at your Gift Book. There is hardly a name now that was there when you began.'

'There is So-and-so, and So-and-so,' a few dear names rose in the heart's affections.

Within a week one of the dearest of them was gone.

'I told you so,' said the devil.

He then talked much: he assured me the husband, a retired Indian Colonel, would never think of us again. Of course, as we do not count that a gift, or twenty-five years of gifts, contain the promise of even one more, he was quite out in this kind of talk, and yet it had a little worrying sting in its tail. We should miss the faithful friends when they passed. I could not say that we should not.

Almost at once from that lonely old man the flow of gifts began again. We receipted them to her name as well as to his, writing the two together on the little 'Inasmuch' receipt slip as of old. Why not? She was more alive than ever.

And these gifts continued, everything in connection with the wife who was on the other side of death seemed to remind the husband of the little place she had loved for so many years. And it did seem as if the tempter, prince of prevaricators, had his completest answer when a money-order came for the amount which she would have spent on her year's dress, had she not put off her mortal clothing and put on the immortal.