Lessons from Elisabeth ElliotНамуна

DAY 4: Lessons from Suffering  

God’s sovereign will was a mystery that could not be mastered, an experience that could not be classified, a wonder that had no end. It wove together strands of life, death, grace, pain, joy, humility, and awe. — from Becoming Elisabeth Elliot

Of course Betty Howard (Elisabeth Elliot) knew the glorious, huge themes of life trumping death in the end, as in Jesus’ triumph over the grave. Her view of the end of history, of the new heaven and the new earth, of Jesus’ ultimate victory, was unaltered. But in her life experience, particular earthly events of suffering and loss just seemed like an inefficient waste for the Kingdom of God, with no explanation that could make anyone, particularly Betty, feel better, let alone “victorious.” 

It was Betty’s “lesson one” in the graduate school of faith . . . “my first experience of having to bow down before that which I could not possibly explain. Usually we need not bow. We can simply ignore the unexplainable because we have other things to occupy our minds. We sweep it under the rug. We evade the questions. Faith’s most severe tests come not when we see nothing, but when we see a stunning array of evidence that seems to prove our faith vain. If God were God, if He were omnipotent, if He had cared, would this have happened? Is this that I face now the ratification of my calling, the reward of obedience? One turns in disbelief again from the circumstances and looks into the abyss. But in the abyss there is only blackness, no glimmer of light, no answering echo. 

“It was a long time before I came to the realization that it is in our acceptance of what is given that God gives Himself. Even the Son of God had to learn obedience by the things that He suffered. . . . And His reward was desolation, crucifixion.” 

Amy Carmichael wrote of a believer asking God why one’s hopes would come to ashes. “But these strange ashes, Lord, this nothingness/This baffling sense of loss?” to which the Lord asks, in return, “was the anguish of my stripping less/Upon the torturing cross?’

Betty mulled over it all. “Each separate experience of individual stripping we may learn to accept as a fragment of the suffering Christ bore when He took it all,” she wrote. “...This grief, this sorrow, this total loss that empties my hands and breaks my heart, I may, if I will, accept, and by accepting it, I find in my hands something to offer. And so I give it back to Him, who in mysterious exchange gives Himself to me.”

Betty saw a similar lesson in an apocryphal story told about Jesus and His disciples. Walking along a rocky road, Jesus asked each of His friends to carry a stone for Him. John chose a big one; Peter selected a small one. They all climbed a steep mountain path. As they rested at the top, famished, Jesus commanded that the stones become bread. When Peter was still hungry after his small portion, John shared some of his. 

A while later, the group set out on the path again, and Jesus asked each man to carry a stone for Him. This time Peter chose the largest. After a long walk, Jesus took them to a river, and instructed them to cast their stones into the water.

They looked at him, bewildered and sweaty. 

“For whom,” asked Jesus, “did you carry the stone?”

Even in the light of loss, Betty began to learn the mystery and secret of her ancient faith . . . it was not about outcomes, inspiring results, personal fulfillment, or even coherent answers. It was about obedience to the One whose stone she carried.