Elizabeth Elliot's Insights About Suffering #2

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, she 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 doing up-front or out-in-front activities for Jesus' sake. Elliot spent her adult career in those public kinds of ministry, but she wrote, a lot of her ministry was spent standing at a sink, standing at an ironing board, going to the grocery store, sitting at airports, waiting. No one pays attention to those ministries, but they were given to her just as much as the public ministries. They were just as significant. And they were always part of her "next thing" to be done.

Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Hebrews 13:8). Elliot wrote "Jim died yesterday. But the same Lord was with me today." 

Her second insight about suffering was to accept it with gratitude. Because we trust God, therefore we accept the things, good and bad, he brings in our lives. "Your suffering is never for nothing. You either believe God knows what he is doing or you believe he doesn't. He's worth trusting or He's not."

If we trust God, the next thing for us to do is to accept suffering with gratitude. "Does it make sense to say, 'Accept this suffering?' Isn't it contrary to human nature?" (she added, "I'm not talking about things which can and ought to be changed, such as abuse of persons.") It's okay to pray for the suffering to be removed. The Apostle Paul suffered with a thorn in his flesh and prayed for it to be removed. Even Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane prayed for the cup of dying on the cross to be removed. In other words, Elliot wrote, there is nothing wrong with praying for God to solve our problems, but when his answer is No, then we know that "God has something better at stake. There is another kingdom that we cannot see now but toward which we move and to which we belong." So, the logical response is to do the next thing.

But accepting the sufferings we receive is the easier part. The harder part--in my opinion-- was gratitude. "It's not the experiences of our lives that change us. It is our response to those experiences...The response of a Christian should be gratitude." Paul wrote that in everything we ought to give thanks (1 Thes 5:18). I have long known that Paul said that and I even sought to practice it by often saying "Thank you, Lord," in a rather routine way. But as I read Elliot's writings I realized that gratitude was the hard part.

When a CT scan discovered Jean's cancer in December 2023, she and I discussed the probable implications of cancer. Though we were uncertain of the timing and the steps ahead, we accepted that we now knew how she would die (assuming something else didn't take her life first.) Suddenly we had to rethink our future plans. She had been the healthy one in our marriage. We had planned and dreamed of a long time together with vacations and attendance at the graduations and weddings of our grandchildren. And sometime I would die first-- that was how things worked for most couples our age. we had expected that Jean would outlive me, and become a widow. But her cancer caused us to rethink our future. We accepted this new reality very quickly. We didn't go through five stages of denying or negotiating or seeking miracle cures in order to avoid death. We had always accepted that death was normal and inevitable, so now we just had to reschedule hers a little sooner, according to God's new plan. We trusted God and accepted his control of our lives as his right. Jean began talking frequently about wanting to go to be with Jesus and to see her parents in heaven. Her faith was an inspiration to me, our family and friends.

For both of us, acceptance was easy. But the second implication of Elliot's lesson was the hard part, at least for me. I now accepted that Jean might die before I would, but I had not yet thanked God that this could happen. Elliot wrote that if we can accept it, we can be grateful to God for it. That was hard for me. As I tried to speak the words "Thank you, Lord," I cried. Jean was in the next room cheerfully doing something else. When I came to her with tears on my face, it took several seconds for her to understand that I was sad, and then over a minute to understand why I was sad. She read the lesson but it affected her differently. Gratitude was harder for me than for her.

Elliot wrote, "I have never thanked God for cancer [her second husband died of cancer]. I have never thanked God that certain Indians murdered Jim. But I do thank God that amid those very situations the world was still in His hands. The One who keeps all those galaxies wheeling in space is the very hand that holds me." 

Those hands also hold Jean and me, and they hold you in whatever situations you have faced, are facing, or will face. Therefore, we can accept AND be grateful.

In the next post, we will share about the time these insights led Jean to cry.