Evie Brand – Joy in Serving

“Let me be like that Lord, flowering best when life seems most dry and dead.” Evie Brand

Some of the most beautiful flowers in the world are desert flowers. The Lord must have really enjoyed creating this contrast, placing incredibly gorgeous plants in brown and dusty backgrounds. These plants can only be enjoyed by those who search them out.

How many of us wouldn’t rather be a rose or a carnation grown in well-tended gardens and admired by everyone. But Evie Brand was willing to go where the Lord would send her, even to one of the hardest places in the world to be a missionary.

Evie Harris was born in 1879 in England to a well-to-do merchant. She received a good education and was treated to the finer things in life, including fancy hats and frilly dresses. She loved to sketch and paint.

When she was in her twenties, she began to feel an emptiness in her soul. She went to visit her sister in Australia, and on the voyage home she felt a calling to be a missionary. Evie’s father was a good man, but he was very protective of his daughters and she did not know how she was going to tell him about her divine call.

God helped her out with this. A young missionary from India named Jesse Brand had come to speak at a conference which she attended. Afterwards, she went to her father and told him. He was dismayed! He was not sure why his daughter should go so far away from home, but he could see her earnestness and agreed to let her go, and he even provided her total support.

Evie was assigned to Madras, in the plains of India. She soon found out that Jesse Brand had been assigned there also. After working with him daily for some time she fell in love with him. She was enraptured with his vision to take the Gospel to the Mountains of Death – a desolate place where few missionaries went. There were five ranges of mountains that Jesse wanted to win for Christ – the Kolli (where they were), the Pachais, Kalryan, Peria Malai, and the Chitteris.

Evie found out that Jesse was engaged to someone else and felt very embarrassed that her feelings for him had shown so plainly. She was transferred to the hill country to do language study. While there, Jesse wrote to her to tell her that his engagement had been called off. He asked Evie to marry him and work with him in the Mountains of Death.

Missionary work is hard in India. Jesse and Evie had only one convert for the first seven years of their ministry. There was strong opposition from the Hindu priests. Though the people appreciated the medicine of the man who followed the Swami Yesu (Jesus), they were too scared of the priests to adopt the new religion. This did not stop Jesse. He continued to treat the sick, teach better methods of farming, build houses, import seeds for better crops, and fight unjust taxes for the people.

Evie and Jesse traveled together from village to village preaching the gospel and tending the sick. Out of fear of the Hindu priests, the people always pulled back until one day a breakthrough finally came. A Hindu priest, dying of fever, entrusted his children to the Brands. Only Evie and Jesse had come to visit him in his sickness, and so he decided that the Christian God must be the true one. Of course the Brands adopted the children, much to the amazement of the Hindu people who could not understand why they would help the children of their enemy instead of abandoning them to die.  Evie would become the mother to many orphaned Indian children and so a small Christian community was formed.

During this time the Brands had two children. It was very sad for them to send them to England for their schooling. Evie said that it was the hardest good-bye that she ever said, but she willingly sacrificed her own feelings to continue God’s mission.

A few years later, God called Jesse Brand home. He had contracted blackwater fever and died. Many mourned for him, both Hindu and Christian. They loved this man who had shown them so much love for so many years.

Evie continued the work alone until a replacement was found for Jesse. She returned to England to visit her children and talk to the mission leaders. She wanted to return to the Kollis Mountains. The new missionaries did not approach the work as Jesse would have. There was some tension and she asked to be assigned to start a new work on a different mountain. The mission leaders refused. Mountain work did not show good returns, they said.  Evie was assigned to a work in the plains. She stayed with this work until she was supposed to retire.

When she was sixty-eight years old, she asked the board to assign her for another five-year term. They really did not think it wise to send an old, frail lady out for that long. She had spent years of her life sacrificing comforts and family for the sake of the mission. It was time for her to stay home.

But Evie and Jesse had had the dream of reaching the five mountains. They had only reached one. She wanted a chance to go to the others. She fully believed that God had called her to do this and that He would enable her to carry on the work. So she pleaded with the mission board to just let her go out for one more year. They agreed reluctantly. They assigned her to a mission in the plains again and she was back in India in 1947.

Then she began to work her plan that she had secretly devised before she left England. She spent her vacations camping in one of the other four ranges – the Kalryan range. Her son had designed a little house for her and she gathered all of the building materials that she would need. Workers carried them up the mountains and built her future home.

When it came time for her “retirement party” there were tearful good-byes. Evie’s fellow missionaries had bought her a nice lamp as a parting gift. She thanked them and then gleefully informed them that she was retiring all right. But that she was only going to move to her new home and start a new work in the mountains! She was determined to fulfill the dream that she and Jesse had for many years. They tried to dissuade her. But their protests fell on deaf ears; as far as Evie was concerned, life was just beginning.

By this time she was known as “Granny” but somehow she looked younger than before. And she felt young. She traveled around on pony, camping, teaching, distributing medicines, and rescuing abandoned children just as she had done so many years before. Everywhere she went, she proclaimed Christ.

As she aged, she became more frail. She suffered fevers, broken bones and other infirmities, but she labored on. She almost eradicated the parasitic Guinea worm from the Kalryan range.

Eventually she did realize her dream to take the Gospel to the five mountain ranges. She didn’t stop there. With God’s help she added two more mountain ranges to her accomplishments. She gave God the glory for all of this marvelous work.

In 1974, Evie tore some ligaments in her knee and had to go to the plains to get treatment. While there her health failed and she died on the same day as her birth, December18. She was ninety-five years young!

The next day, she was taken to the hills and her body was laid to rest next to Jesse’s. Many people wept. This courageous woman who was told she was too old to go back to India, stayed for twenty-four more years, carrying the Gospel through seven mountain ranges and praising the Lord until nearly the day of her death.