Brown Eyes Blue - Amy Carmichael

1867–1951

As a young girl, Amy Carmichael learned an important lesson about prayer. But she didn’t really get it until decades later.

Her parents were solid Irish Presbyterians, and they had been teaching young Amy to trust the Lord. If you pray, they always said, God will answer. Well, as the story goes, young Amy was dissatisfied with her ordinary brown eyes. She wanted dazzling blue eyes.

You guessed it. Amy prayed fervently all night, begging the Lord to turn her brown eyes blue. In the morning, she rushed to the mirror and let out a mournful wail. Still brown. In this teaching moment, her mother explained that sometimes God answers by saying no. Sometimes he has a better idea about what we should have.

Flash forward a couple of decades. An adult Amy Carmichael is serving as a missionary in India, doing everything she can to fight the scourge of child prostitution in the Hindu temples. She wants to find out what’s going on, to visit the temples, to talk to people in the know, to get the inside story. She knows the doors will be closed to a meddling missionary from Ireland—so she tries to pass herself off as an Indian, wearing a sari and even dyeing her skin with dark coffee. And that’s when she realizes it’s a good thing my eyes are brown, not blue.

Prayer confuses us sometimes. How can we get what we want? Jesus talked about praying in his name and about being persistent. In various Scripture passages we are told that God will give us the desires of our hearts, that we should make our requests known with thanksgiving, and that the prayer of the righteous can be very effective. But what’s the secret to successful prayer?

Depends what you mean by success.

If prayer is, at its most basic level, a connection with God, then there is great value in telling God what we want, in waiting for his response, and in submitting to what he wants. A connection is made. We learn, we grow. Jesus himself concluded a prayer with “not what I want but what you want” (Matthew 26:39, NRSV).

Amy Carmichael learned this connection early, and all her life she kept connecting her desires to God’s desires. The same thing can happen with us.

Take delight in the LORD, and he will give you your heart’s desires.

Psalm 37:4