Amy Carmichael :: Nor Scrip—25. New Moons

This story of supplies is being written in the midst of life, often interrupted life; the interruptions themselves would make a book. The last one was the deliverance from a tangle of troubles in connection with that net for the feet of the unwary, a Court case. The six small jewels upon which that net was to have been spread, are lying upon the table beside me, and the collapse of the trouble which had already eaten up more time than we cared to spend over it, was thus expressed by one of the repentant creators of it, 'For you move with God, therefore is the fear of this offence upon us.' May it be true, that we always move with God.

But sometimes sweeter, cleaner things interrupt, and one such perfectly fits into the page now to be written. Yesterday Veerun, aged three and three-quarters, thus explained the reappearance in the east of the moon which he had seen disappearing over the mountains in the west. It is a glorified game of ball. God takes the moon in His hands when it touches the mountains, and He throws it across the sky; that is how it gets there new every evening; there can be no other way. There have been some who have explained the new every morning coming of our help, by the tossing of a book or a letter across the sea from east to west. It reappears in the form of a handful of silver or a convenient cheque. But is it so? We think it has another, a more enduring explanation.

At the beginning of the war those who felt that anything so invisibly supplied could not go on through such a cataclysm, told us we should be 'finished' (Tamil idiom, and the very word of Lam. iii. 22, 'It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed.' See Young's Analytical Concordance). And we felt to the very marrow of our bones that what they said was true, unless those compassions continued in very marked fashion. And we asked then, so that there should always be little faggots for the fires of faith, that not one mail throughout the war might be empty of help. And it was so. Our Gift Book shows it. Sometimes there was very little; but always there was something. Not a single mail through those five years failed us in this regard, and the gifts came from many diverse places: Australia and New Zealand, China, out-of-the-way corners of Canada, several of her cities and cities of the U.S.A., South Africa and North Africa (this last a gift from Arabian women), Central Africa, and the troubled countries of Europe, even from Germany itself through Switzerland; for nothing, not even such a war, can separate those who love in Christ.

Was it letters brought that? Letters never ask for money, but even if they did, could they have penetrated to Germany? Books do not do so either; and if they could have accounted for its coming we should indeed 'be finished' now, for several of them are out of print. Sometimes when we read the home papers with their advertisements, and money-drawing paragraphs, we feel if we had any to give we could not keep it, the difficulty would be to know which appeal appealed most poignantly, and whether to give it all to that one or divide it among all. The only thing we know is that we could not keep an anna. 'The cruellest man alive could not sit at his feast unless he sat blindfold,' as was said long ago, and even if he were blindfolded he would need to be deafened too. And we wonder, as we ache to help all those piteous needs, how anything ever reaches us, for we cannot jostle in among them, and we cannot even send a photograph that has anything vital in it. You cannot photograph the child's soul that is being slowly murdered. You cannot even describe it in words. They would burn the paper if you tried. How then is it that we are not wholly forgotten, crushed out of memory by these other real and tellable things? Little Veerun and his moon is no help here. Surely the only explanation for the going on, not of one small family only, but of all the families and companies to whom has been given this special charge to keep, is just this:-

'It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not. They are new every morning.' New, as the 'new' moon (the exact Hebrew adjective) old but ever new, for ever and for ever.