The Gift of Suffering

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,...