The Gift of Suffering

  “Cast your burden on the Lord and He will sustain you.” (Psalm 55:22)   What do you do after God gives you something? You give it back. This is true even for our sufferings. (Insight #3).   In her book Suffering is Never for Nothing , Elizabeth Elliot makes two observations based on the verse Psalm 55:22, quoted above. She wrote, “To my amazement and delight I discovered that burden in the Hebrew is the same word as the word for gift . This is a transforming truth. If I thank God for this very thing which is killing me, I can begin dimly and faintly to see it as a gift. I can realize that it is through this very thing which is so far from being what I would have chosen, that God wants to teach me His way of salvation.”   Upon reading that the word burden also means gift, my wife Jean started to cry. It was not hard for her to think of her cancer as a burden, but to simultaneously think of it as a gift—that was not an easy idea. Cancer was not a gift she woul...

This is the post about the time I cried.  What did Elizabeth Elliot do the day after she learned her husband Jim had been killed by Ecuadorian Indians? I probably knew the answer to that question years ago when I read her book Through Gates of Splendor , but I had forgotten this insignificant detail. But in Elliot's understanding of suffering, what she did next was not insignificant. In her book, Suffering is Never for Nothing, s he told us that the next day she returned to her mission station and resumed her work. Previously, she and Jim had worked there together, now she carried on alone: running a school and a clinic, learning a language and translating the Bible, overseeing a new church which as yet had no baptized believers, keeping the generator running, and most important, caring for a ten-month old baby girl. In other words, she did the next thing. And when she completed that, she did the next thing after that. There was always a next thing. We usually think of ministry as ...

Suffering is a Gift Who better to write a book about that subject than Elizabeth Elliot! I assume most readers know her story: she and her husband Jim Elliot were missionaries to Ecuador, trying to make contact with a jungle tribe. When Jim and 4 colleagues tried to make first contact they were all speared to death (The missionaries had guns but chose not to use them.) A few years later Elizabeth took her daughter and moved in with that tribe and was used to bring them to Christ. A few years later she married again. After several years of marriage her husband developed cancer and died fairly quickly. She later remarried, but that husband outlived her. During her life she wrote many wonderful books, including Suffering is Never for Nothing , the one which is the basis of my sharing in this blog. So Elizabeth Elliot is qualified to write about suffering. Many people have endured terrible suffering and could have written a book about what the Bible says about suffering as a gift from God,...