Lessons from Elisabeth ElliotSample

DAY 3: Waiting on God  

Oh, how I pray for conforming to the acceptable will of God. I do not want to miss one lesson. Yet I find that events do not change souls. It is our response to them which finally affects us. — Elisabeth Elliot, from Becoming Elisabeth Elliot

Few of us would have had Betty Howard’s patience. Her own trust in God’s leading, no matter what, reinforced her endurance. She hung in there for a five-year courtship that was not for the faint of heart. 

She could endure because she cast all her anxieties on God. She gave up the most enormous hopes of her life and the smallest details of her schedule to Him. If she was cautious in her relationship with Jim Elliot, or reserved with others, she was not so with God. She threw herself open to Him, wholeheartedly, without restraint. 

In this tendency, Betty Howard was the opposite of those of us who’ve thrown ourselves completely open to people who may or may not be trustworthy, yet have held God, the very Lover of our souls, at a discreet and dispassionate arm’s length. 

She was determined not to do what was easy, but to wait for God’s leading, whatever it was. As she wrote many years later, “Waiting on God requires the willingness to bear uncertainty, to carry within oneself the unanswered question, lifting the heart to God about it whenever it intrudes upon one’s thoughts. It is easier to talk oneself into a decision that has no permanence, than to wait patiently.”  

Certainly her love for Jim Elliot made her hope that they might get together and consummate their relationship some time before they both reached retirement age. But her love for God made her willing to give up that hope, should God so ask.