Elizabeth Elliot Devotions

[nChrist]

Some of My Best Friends Are Books - Page 2

But of course there was the Bible, in a class all by itself. This was The Book in our home, and we heard it read every day, usually twice a day. The King James English was as simple and familiar to me, with all its "beholds" and "it came to passes," as Philadelphia talk (pronounced twawk). The resonance of the Books of Moses, the cadences of the Psalms, the lucidity of the Gospel of John, the soaring rhapsodies of Paul on the love of God, the strange figures of the Book of the Revelation, all sank deeply into my heart and mind. Everything in life, I believed, had meaning as it related to what I knew of The Book.

There were many books in our home by and about people who lived by the Bible. It was in Amy Carmichael, a missionary to South India, that I found the kind of woman I wanted to be. She was at work for the Lord (an Anglican, she had founded a place for saving little girls from temple prostitution), and she took time in the midst of this to write of her experience as she walked by faith in a place where almost no one shared that faith.

A friend gave me The Imitation of Christ when I was in college, and I read it slowly, finishing it the following summer during evenings in a university stadium where I climbed up to watch the sunset.

One year when I was tutoring I came across, in the library of my pupils, a dull-looking novel called Salted With Fire. I had never heard of George MacDonald, but his writing gave me a whole new vista of the love of God. There was a shining quality to it, and a deep humanity. C. S. Lewis, I later learned, had found it, too, and did an anthology of MacDonald's work.

The biographies of missionaries--Hudson Taylor of China, James Fraser of Lisuland, David Brainerd of early New Jersey, Raymond Lull of North Africa--influenced the course of my life. Sometimes, if we can catch the sound of music that other people march to, we can fall into step.

It was when I lived in the jungle that books were hard to keep. Mold, mildew, crickets, and smoke did their worst, and I did not always have a way to transport more than one or two books at a time, or a place to keep them other than an Indian carrying net hung under the thatch. But they became even more precious, more indispensable in times when I had little contact with English-speaking people. I got around to reading some great books then--Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Teilhard de Chardin's The Divine Milieu, Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa. Each spoke to me in some powerful, personal way.

Kafka said that books should serve as "the axe for the frozen sea within us." Tolstoy showed me my own vulnerability and need of redemption--as Flannery O'Connor does, too, in her "stories about original sin," as she describes them. De Chardin illuminated for me the immanence of God. Dinesen reveals majesty and dignity in human beings and animals as creatures of God, and the laughter at the heart of things. (In one book, Seven Gothic Tales, she touches the courage of the Creator, the power of women, a herd of unicorns, the reason for seasons, the dogs of God, angels and chamber pots, coffee and the word of the Lord, and Mary Magdalene on Good Friday Eve. Imagine the humor and courage it takes to put all that in seven stories!)

A reader understands what he reads in terms of what he is. As a Christian reader I bring to bear on the book I am reading the light of my faith. "All things are yours, for ye are Christ's, and Christ is God's," said Paul. Browning's Fra Lippo Lippi expresses it this way:

. . . This world's no blot for us, nor blank;
It means intensely, and means good:
To find its meaning is my meat and drink.

____________________

This devotional is freely distributed by Back To The Bible.
Did you enjoy this devotional?
Send it on for a friend to enjoy.
FREE E-mail Subscription:
http://www.backtothebible.org/devotions/
____________________

[nChrist]

Title: Flesh Becomes Word - Page 1
Book: All That Was Ever Ours
Author: Elisabeth Elliot


Isak Dinesen in Out of Africa tells how she was sometimes asked to sit in on a Kyama, an assembly of the elders of the farm, authorized by the government to settle local differences among the squatters. After a certain shooting accident she had to write out a statement, dictated by a man named Jogona Kanyagga, regarding events leading up to the accident and proving his own right to claim the victim as his son. When the long tale was told (during which Jogona sometimes had to break off, hold his head in both hands, and gravely slap the crown of it "as if to shake out the facts") the baroness read it back to him. As she read out his own name, she writes, "he swiftly turned his face to me, and gave me a great fierce flaming glance, so exuberant with laughter that it changed the old man into a boy, into the very symbol of youth. Such a glance did Adam give the Lord when he formed him out of the dust, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul. I had created him and shown him himself, Jogona Kanyagga of life everlasting. When I handed him the paper, he took it reverently and greedily, folded it up in a corner of his cloak and kept his hand upon it. He could not afford to lose it, for his soul was in it, and it was the proof of his existence . . . the flesh was made word."

Words are inadequate, we say. So they often are. But they are nonetheless precious. "A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver." In a time of crisis we learn how intensely we need both flesh and word. We cannot do well without either one. The bodily presence of people we love is greatly comforting, and their silent companionship blesses us. "I know I can't say anything that will help, but I wanted to come,'' someone says, and the word they would like to speak is spoken by their coming. Those who can't come send, instead of their presence, word. A letter comes, often beginning, ''I don't know what to say,'' but it is an expression, however inadequate, of the person himself and what he feels toward us.

Before Eve heard the voice of the serpent summoning her to the worst possibility of her being, before Adam heard the voice of God summoning him to his best, the Word was. The Word was at the beginning of things, the Word was with God, the Word was God. That Word became visible in the flesh when the man Christ came to earth. Man saw him, talked with him, learned from him, and when his flesh was glorified and he returned once more to his Father, men declared what they had seen. "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands concerning the word of life . . . we proclaim also to you." That eternal Word had become flesh and through those who knew Christ that flesh had become once more Word. Those who hear that Word today and believe it begin to live it and again it becomes flesh.

If I had a choice, I would not want to do without either the word or the flesh. I want letters from my friends, but I want to see their faces. I see them, but then I want them to say something. I have a guest book in which I always ask people to write their names, explaining that they need not write anything more unless they want to, but I open it after they are gone in hopes that they will have written some word as well. "Say it with flowers," says the advertisement, but when the flowers come how eagerly we look to see what the card says.

======================See Page 2

[nChrist]

Flesh Becomes Word - Page 2

When I come to God I want words. Even though "there is not a word in my tongue but lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether," I want to say something to him. He knows what I look like, he knows my frame, remembers that I am dust. Does this flesh need words to speak to him? It does. There is, of course, a silence that waits on God. There is a lifting up of hands that takes the place of words. But there are times when we want desperately to speak. "Each in his own words" is all very well if you can find them, but often I find them only in the words of others.

I am troubled by the tendency today to assume that one's own words are ''better" or more sincere than someone else's. The bizarre wording of wedding invitations I have received makes me want to go and hide rather than "share the joy.'' I did actually attend a wedding ceremony composed ("created" was what they called it) by the couple themselves, complete with prayers of their own making for the minister to read. This was somehow supposed to surpass the words of the Prayer Book. It didn't. Surely it is possible to repeat in all honesty expressions which others have found to be adequate which are at the same time both noble and beautiful? Doesn't it draw one out of himself, beyond his own horizons, to participate in an ancient ceremony? Does it really follow that the substitution of something ''original" makes the thing richer?

Take the Psalms. They are human cries. Whoever wrote them knew the bottom of the barrel. He had felt his bones rot. He had sunk in slime, been ridden over, torn in two, betrayed, outraged, and bludgeoned. He knew the sweeping barrenness of loneliness, the forsakenness of grief, the bewilderment of unanswered prayer, and put them all into words that speak to my condition. So I read them back to God--with the expressions of faith and praise that punctuate the howls. "My heart is in anguish within me . . . horror overwhelms me . . . he will deliver my soul in safety from the battle that I wage" (Psalms 55:4, 5, 18); "My wounds grow foul and fester because of my foolishness . . . but for thee, O Lord, do I wait. It is thou, O Lord, who wilt answer my prayer" (Psalms 38:5, 15); "The earth reeled and rocked . . . but the Lord was my stay" (Psalms 18:7, 18).

How poor my own words would be compared to those of the Collect for Evening Prayer: "Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of thy only Son Our Saviour Jesus Christ." I would be hard put to improve on Paul's prayer for the Roman Christians when I am praying for my friends (as an old lady in Canada used to pray for me, and included this prayer in nearly every letter she wrote me): "May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.''

Hymns are a powerful source of strength to me. Who of us can match words like William Williams' "Guide me, O thou great Jehovah, pilgrim through this barren land" or Henry Twell's "Thy touch hath still its ancient power; No word from thee can fruitless fall; Hear in this solemn evening hour, and in thy mercy heal us all"?

In the old words of George Herbert such as "Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back" or in the more modern poetry of Amy Carmichael: "And yet we come, Thy righteousness our cover, Thy precious blood our one, our only plea; And yet we come, O Savior, Master, Lover--To whom, Lord, could we come, save unto Thee?"--in such words my own flesh (empty, dumb, aching, needy as it may be) becomes, to God, word.

____________________

This devotional is freely distributed by Back To The Bible.
Did you enjoy this devotional?
Send it on for a friend to enjoy.
FREE E-mail Subscription:
http://www.backtothebible.org/devotions/
____________________

[nChrist]

Title: Spontaneity - Page 1
Book: All That Was Ever Ours
Author: Elisabeth Elliot


A boy of two was standing in a bright square of sunlight in my kitchen one morning. He lifted his hands in the slanting ray that streamed through the open door. Then he lifted his face to me--a round, sweet face with a broad smile, lit with the sun and the light of discovery. "Look at these sunshine crumbs, Aunt Betty!" he said.

That was a spontaneous remark. Spontaneity may produce some delightful results, but for something to happen spontaneously it is necessary that certain conditions be present.

The little boy's observation does not arise, "out of the blue,'' but from a personality which, even at two years of age, has already been shaped by his parents, where he lives, what he hears, how he is trained and treated.

His mind is ready and eager to receive impressions and searches at once for words to capture those impressions. His vocabulary is limited, but he knows sunshine, and he knows crumbs--so in a flash he has given a name to the thing he sees.

His fingers reach out and touch nothing. Crumbs you can touch. Sunshine crumbs, he finds, you can't touch. He has absorbed all this in a second and has made it forever his own, making it at the same time his Aunt Betty's.

I was in a Laundromat one hot summer morning in Missouri. An old woman in a cotton dress, bobby socks, and thick-soled shoes was doing her wash and greeted me cheerfully. We talked about the weather, and I told her I was from Massachusetts. When her husband came in she told him the lady was from Massachusetts, and he said the weather back East had been bad, hadn't it, and that he had been back East once.

"During the War. We was in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and they made us march on that boardwalk that goes along there by the ocean, you know that boardwalk. Well, the guy in front of me--there was a little bitty patch o' ice on the boardwalk--and the guy in front of me when he come to that patch o' ice he fell right flat on his face. And we marched on down to the end of the boardwalk and turned around and marched back again and that guy fell flat on his face again when he come to that same little bitty patch o' ice."

That was the man's conversation, in its entirety. I thought about it for quite a while afterward. It always interests me to see just what it is that triggers people's remarks. Spontaneous action, the dictionary says, occurs, or is produced, within, of its own energy or force.

The old man's story, called to mind by the ideas of weather or of ''back East" was spontaneous enough--not profound, of course, but the story and the images came out of the rich soil of his vivid experience.

Something had happened to him; his telling of it was straightforward. He wasn't concerned with the kind of impression he might be making on me. He was brief, and so clear that I'll never forget that scene during the war, the man himself, his wife, or even the Laundromat in that hot little town.

Spontaneous action may also mean "without premeditation," and this was true of what both the little boy and the old man said. Too often we are overly self-conscious; we play roles. Recently I saw a young man on television whose performance did not delight me. It depressed me.

He said, "As opposed to for example in other words in terms of borrowing from a loan company, you'd do better at a bank." He hadn't meditated much on that one. He was thinking about the setting, not about the subject.

The conditions which created his "spontaneity" were (1) the talk-show format, where you have to talk, and you have to put on a show; (2) a time allotment, which means the poor man had to keep on talking without pausing to think what he was saying; and (3) the man himself--trained to value such meaningless phrases as "for example," "as opposed to," "in other words," and "in terms of" because he thinks they sound learned.

============================See Page 2

[nChrist]

Spontaneity - Page 2

The man was also quite conscious of his own image in the TV monitors and had little leisure for looking clearly at the matter at hand as my nephew had looked at the dust flecks.

If spontaneity implies the existence of an inner energy to begin with, one felt that his energy had petered out by the time the man delivered his remark.

I'm being hard on him, and he was, as I have said, young. Carlyle wrote of nineteen-to-twenty-five-year-old youths that they had reached "the maximum of detestability." We have been telling ourselves that youth is beautiful and spontaneity one of the most beautiful things about youth. I wonder if spontaneity is not sometimes a euphemism for laziness--an indulgence which Carlyle found in youth. Isn't it much easier not to prepare one's mind and heart, not to premeditate, simply to have things (O, vacuous word!) "unstructured"?

If you leave a thing altogether alone in hopes that it will happen all by itself, the chances are it never will. Who learns to play the piano, wins an election, or loses weight spontaneously?

I have just read Jean Nidetch's book on the Weight Watchers, and while it is obvious that her basic theme (that people get fat because they eat) is hardly a world-shaking discovery, her method is one that made her a millionaire: get people to work at their problems together. Reducing doesn't just happen. It isn't a thing the majority succeed in doing all by themselves.

She doesn't let them make up their own diet as they go along--that's what put the fat on them in the first place. She doesn't suggest that losing weight is best done when you feel like it. She doesn't even say that it works only if you are being "yourself."

In fact, I was reminded throughout the book of how many analogies there are between losing weight and practicing Christianity. There are rules to obey. You will to obey them. Some people insist that the devotional life is somehow purer or better if it is pursued only when we feel like it. Worship for some is thought to be an "experience" rather than an act. Losing weight is also an experience--there's no doubt about that--in fact, the expression "being born again" occurs in the testimonies of those who have done it. But losing weight most certainly has to begin with an act.

It is an act of the will. You decide to do this and not to do that. You must arrange, prepare, and carefully carry out your plan. The combustion of those daily calories will happen without fail, but only when the conditions are properly set up.

Love is another thing. ''But I want it to be spontaneous," people say. They think that if nothing is happening it is good enough reason for a divorce. "If it isn't spontaneous, it isn't love," they tell us. Where did that idea get started? Do we understand what spontaneity requires?

The kind of love the Bible talks about is action, and it comes from a force and an energy within. That energy is the love of Christ. His love creates the condition of heart (it does not come from nowhere) which enables us to do things: to give a cup of cold water, to go a second mile, to "look for a way of being constructive," as Phillips' translation puts 1 Corinthians 13:4. "It is, in fact, the one thing that still stands when everything else has fallen."

Christian love is a far cry from a misunderstood spontaneity which is merely unstructured. This love is a very firm and solid thing indeed, requiring will, obedience, action, and an abiding trust in the "Strong Son of God, Immortal Love."

____________________

This devotional is freely distributed by Back To The Bible.
Did you enjoy this devotional?
Send it on for a friend to enjoy.
FREE E-mail Subscription:
http://www.backtothebible.org/devotions/
____________________

[nChrist]

Author: Elisabeth Elliot
Source: All That Was Ever Ours
Scripture:
The Path of Lonliness


Thinking - Page 1

Question-and-answer is a vanishing art. We are so drowned and smothered and deafened by panels, dialogues, rap sessions, discussions, talk shows, and other such exercises in the pooling of ignorance that, far from developing the art of asking questions and giving answers, we have very nearly lost it altogether. The time allotted for a program must, it seems, be filled--it doesn't much matter with what.

When is the last time you heard a clear, short question asked and a straight answer given? My heart sinks when it is announced that, following the lecture, there will be time for discussion. People put up their hands, but it turns out that it is not information they are after at all. They want the floor. They go on and on.

I was one of the panel of experts (i.e., married women) discussing the subject of marriage in a college women's dormitory a few years ago. Afterward there were lots of questions. But it was hard to figure out just what the questions were. Here is one of them (verbatim--I did not make this up. It was taped and then transcribed):

Um--like--um--I have a couple questions. Do you think--like--that--uh--do you think a woman could have a call just to be--like--a wife, but not--like--not just to be a wife--like, say, you know--if you're gonna be personal--like--my own engagement--like--I have a gift of--you know--a talent in music, you know--like--I mean, I know you're not saying--like--you know, especially in that case, I mean, you're saying more like--you have--like--I think our greatest thing in common probably is--um--is that--you know--is the dedication to serve God--you know--in the desire to, to follow--you know--to do his leading and--like--neither of us, you know, and especially in this kind of life you don't have a blueprint of what you--what he's gonna be doing necessarily, you know--and I'm just kinda concerned because like--you know--I've even thought about that cause I've kinda had a conflict--you know--growing up that way--you know--I'm talented musically--you know--so therefore I should probably look for somebody that's talented musically but he--he likes it--you know--I mean, he doesn't understand it totally but I'm sure we could live happily together with it, you know, but I don't expect him to have a--you know--yearning to go to all the Beethoven concerts or anything--you know--but I mean--I've heard of very happy marriages where--you know--there's quite different--you know--interests--you know--there.

(I apologize for not knowing the rules of punctuation for this kind of English.) Nobody on the panel knew what the girl was asking. She was confused--that came through loud and clear, but she might have seen through some of the fog simply by making the effort to clarify and shorten her question.

Sometimes I have been tempted to tell the audience that only questions of twenty-five words or less will be entertained. But I don't want to put people off any more than I can help.

William Strunk, Jr., in his wonderful little book, The Elements of Style, gives this advice:

To air one's views at an improper time may be in bad taste. If you have received a letter inviting you to speak at the dedication of a new cat hospital, and you hate cats, your reply, declining the invitation, does not necessarily have to cover the full range of your emotions. You must make it clear that you will not attend, but you do not have to let fly at cats... Bear in mind that your opinion of cats was not sought, only your services as a speaker. Try to keep things straight.

=========================See Page 2

[nChrist]

Thinking - Page 2

Americans dearly love to be polled for opinion. They feel that they ought to have opinions, to "hold views," on everything, and polls give them a chance to let fly. It is interesting to note how small a percentage of those polled admit to having "No opinion."

If the answer is Yes, say Yes. If it's No, say No. (The Bible will back me up here.) If it's I don't know, say that--if you possibly can. My daughter had a classmate in the seventh grade who, when asked a question by the teacher, never raised his chin off his hand, but looking into space said glumly, "I don't know." To a second question he replied, in the same laconic tone, "I don't know that either." I couldn't help wanting to know which boy that was. I liked him. It was discouraging for the teacher, I'm sure, that he didn't know, but it was not nearly so discouraging to hear him say so in three words as it would have been to hear three hundred words which came to the same thing. Every day in the mass media we have to listen to palaver, twaddle, and balderdash which, when interpreted, means "I don't know."

Some people are constitutionally incapable of admitting they don't know. "Well, let's just say I don't know the answer to that one," a woman once said to me.

Great people, however, can often disarm us completely with a candid acknowledgment such as Samuel Johnson's when asked by an indignant woman whatever made him define pastern as he did in his lexicon. "Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance!"

The Quechua Indians of Ecuador have a way of dropping the corners of their mouths, thrusting out their chins, and gazing off across the treetops, saying "Hmm hmm?" which is supposed to convey the impression that the matter is a mysterious one which they are in on but which would really be beyond you. At other times they come up with ineluctable answers like the one a missionary got when he wanted to know the name of a tree with yellow flowers on it. The Indian studied the tree for a little while, shading his eyes with his hand, and then said earnestly, "Well, I'll tell you, Senor Eduardo. That tree over there, the one you point to, the tree with the yellow flowers on it--that tree, Senor Eduardo...we call The Yellow Flower Tree."

The late W. H. Auden once appeared on a television interview and it was delicious to see his interviewers thrown completely off balance by the clarity and the brevity of his answers. They had their questions carefully worked out and the timing approximated, but long before the show was over they were casting about for new questions. When they asked if he thought of poetry as a means of self-expression, he said, "No, not at all. You write a poem because you have seen something which seems worth sharing with others." The ideal reaction from the reader is, 'I knew that all along, but I never realized it.' He could, I am sure, have lectured for an hour on that one subject, but he didn't. He had a sense of occasion.

"You will be living in Oxford, England, Mr. Auden. Do you expect to be teaching there?"

"No."

"You won't be teaching. (Pause.) Well, Mr. Auden, as you move into the more--shall we say--mellow years, would you say that you have any unfulfilled ambitions?"

"No."

One of my unfulfilled ambitions was to hear a simple answer on a TV talk show. Thank you, Mr. Auden.

____________________

This devotional is freely distributed by Back To The Bible.
Did you enjoy this devotional?
Send it on for a friend to enjoy.
FREE E-mail Subscription:
http://www.backtothebible.org/devotions/
____________________

[nChrist]

Author: Elisabeth Elliot
Source: All That Was Ever Ours
Scripture:
The Path of Lonliness


Observation and Silence - Page 1

On a beautiful cool morning last July, Lars and I left behind all our usual work and chugged out of Gloucester harbor in Massachusetts on a fifty-foot fishing boat. There were about twenty of us aboard, all of us in high spirits until the captain announced that the marina we had just left as well as the restaurant behind it and the lobster packing plant next to it had been bought the previous day by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. This lowered our spirits momentarily, but they soon shot up in anticipation of what we were about to see. It was not the cormorants that flocked on the tiny island at the mouth of the harbor, or the reef of Norman's Woe where the Hesperus was wrecked, or the lighthouse on Eastern Point.

We noted all of these things with interest (the oldest paint factory in the country did not rouse us much), but none of them were what we had paid our fifteen dollars apiece to see. Lars had called the week before to inquire about the advertisement. Did they guarantee anything? No, that was impossible, but in the twenty trips made so far that summer they had seen them every time. We decided it was well worth risking the price of tickets if there was even an outside chance of seeing them: whales. Not captive in Marineland, not doing tricks in the zoo, but real live full-sized unbelievable wild whales out in the open Atlantic Ocean, free-swimming, God-glorifying giants of the deep.

Our on-board whale authority turned out to be a man of about twenty wearing a T-shirt and cutoffs, with a baseball cap clamped over his long hair. He stood up in front of us with a chart and proceeded to show us pictures of "the whales we'll be seeing."

Well, I thought, he sounds wonderfully confident. Will we be so fortunate as to see even one spout in the distance? Sometime after half-past nine, he assured us, we might begin to spot them. We would understand the lookout's directions if we imagined the boat as the face of a clock, its bow representing twelve o'clock, its stern six. He then explained that the whales most likely to be in the area were the humpback and the finback, each having a characteristic "blow." Whales, being mammals, breathe air. They surface every few minutes, exhale a great column of vapor (the finback's is twenty feet tall, straight up into the air), inhale in a split second, and then dive.

They do their mating in the area of the Dominican Republic in the wintertime but eat little then. In the summertime they come north and do most of their eating off the coast of Massachusetts, occasionally going as far north as Newfoundland, depending on where the food animals are swarming. Instead of teeth these two species of whale have what is called baleen, a double series of triangular horny plates on each side of the palate (as many as six hundred all together) which fray out into a sort of hairy fringe to form a sieve which filters out of the ocean's soup all the nourishing tidbits such as plankton, krills, copepods, herring, sardines, and copelin.

The most remarkable of the tidbits is a creature called a diatom. These microscopic machines behave in some ways like animals (they swim and dig) and in other ways like plants. Scientists cannot agree on how to classify them, but whales love them and they provide more food than any other living thing, nourishing not only whales but a variety of infinitely smaller creatures like krills (I confess I had never once wondered what krills ate). Diatoms come in several thousand species, in marvelous shapes (pinwheels, spirals, stars, triangles, chandeliers, discs, rods, ovals), and the largest of them measures a mere millimeter. A humpback whale consumes rather large helpings of diatoms, netting several hundred billion every few hours, taking in several tons of water with each gulp and straining these vast torrents through his baleen, as much as a million cubic meters of seawater a day.

==========================See Page 2

[nChrist]

Observation and Silence - Page 2

Among our fellow passengers was a very large lady wearing a knit tank top and slacks which she filled to bursting. She had a shopping bag on what there was of a lap. We had not left our moorings before she had reached into the bag and switched on a radio, then began foraging for something to eat. Most of her crackers and bananas were gone, she had downed a Pepsi or two and inquired in vain if there was food to be bought, by the time the lookout cried, "Blow at eleven o'clock!'' We rushed to the bow in time to see a distant geyser. The captain made for the spot, and soon we saw the huge glistening back and dorsal fin of a humpback roll to the surface and heard the surprisingly powerful phooh from the blowhole before it vanished.

Within a short time we had sighted other spouts, other fins, and then, to our great excitement, the monstrous tail or fluke splendidly flashed clear of the water so that we could see its markings and the clinging barnacles.

"There's your fluke, now," the captain's assistant remarked laconically.

Our knowledgeable young man had described something he called a "bubble net" which he hoped we might see. A whale goes down about thirty feet, blows a twelve-foot circle of bubbles so that the surface of the sea turns effervescent turquoise. No one is quite sure why or how this works, but it seems to have the effect of confusing the small fish and other creatures so that they are "caught" in this net. About ten seconds elapse (the gulls have time to flock to the scene screaming, the eager watchers also scream and focus their eyes and cameras). Then, suddenly and awesomely, the whale's cavernous mouth explodes from below and swallows the "net" (and sometimes, the man said, an unwary seagull or two). We had seen perhaps three or four whales surface, blow, and disappear some dozens of times before the lookout shouted "Bubble at seven o'clock!" We raced to the stern, found a great green pool not many feet away, and held our breath as the enormous square warted snout of the humpback shot out of the water, the entire pool poured through the billowing mesh of baleen, and before we could blink in disbelief, the ocean was as faceless and empty as ever. I don't think anyone said a word unless it was "Wow. " There would have been complete silence if it hadn't been for the sound of the radio in the shopping bag.

The lookout called our attention some minutes later to what seemed to be a patch of dim, pale-green light moving smoothly alongside the boat, perhaps four or five feet beneath the surface. It was the gray sidepatch of the finwhale. If he had not pointed it out, our uneducated eyes would never have noticed it, for there was not the smallest ripple, there was not the least sign to indicate that a fifty-foot giant weighing some sixty tons was accompanying us.

The fat lady, I think, missed it. She was eating another banana. Not long after we had made this trip I received another of those letters from an aspiring writer. A young woman wrote, "I often yearn to be a writer but after reading books like yours, I feel that all the important things have already been said!''

They have indeed been said, and long before I said them. If a thing is true it is not new, but the truth needs to be said again and again, freshly for each generation. I have often been introduced to some seventeenth-or eighteenth-century writer by a nineteenth-century writer. If I quote what I learn from the ancients, a twentieth-century reader is sometimes helped when he would not by himself have found Crashaw's poem or St. Francis' prayer or St. Paul's Love chapter.

===============================See Page 3

[nChrist]

Observation and Silence - Page 3

What of the twenty-first century? Which of the young people I know are now laying the groundwork for being the writers or artists or, as I like to think of any who show truth in any form, the prophets for my grandchildren's grandchildren?

I wrote to the young woman:

Don't give up that yearning. During these busy years while you take care of small children and give yourself to being a godly wife and mother, lay the firm footing on which good writing must be built. Read great books if you have time to read anything at all. Get rid of the junk that comes in the mail, eschew all magazines and newspapers if your reading time is limited, and by "hearing" the really great authors, learn the sound and cadence of good English.

There are two other things required of "prophets." Observation ("What do you see?" Ezekiel and John were asked) and silence. ("The word of the Lord came to me.") Obviously we (I, at least, and most others, I suppose) are not anything like the biblical prophets. Ours is a different assignment. But we are charged with the responsibility of telling the truth, and I don't see how this can possibly be done without opening our eyes to see and our ears to hear. There must, there simply must, be time and space allowed for silence and for solitude if what we see and hear is to be "processed."

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author of Wind, Sand, and Stars, said in a conversation with Anne Morrow Lindbergh, "The great of the earth are those who leave silence and solitude around themselves, their work and their life, and let it ripen of its own accord."

If any of the crowd we saw fishing from a breakwater as our boat entered Gloucester harbor again are among the "great of the earth," it will be against terrible odds. They, like the lady on board, were also listening to a shrieking radio.

ln the cry of gulls, in the blow of a whale, in the very stillness of an early morning, it seems to me, we are more likely to hear the Lord's quiet word.

Speak, Lord, in the stillness,
While I wait on Thee.
Hushed my heart to listen
In expectancy.

____________________

This devotional is freely distributed by Back To The Bible.
Did you enjoy this devotional?
Send it on for a friend to enjoy.
FREE E-mail Subscription:
http://www.backtothebible.org/devotions/
____________________

[nChrist]

Author: Elisabeth Elliot
Source: All That Was Ever Ours
Scripture:
The Path of Lonliness


The Shock of Self-Recognition

Most of us are rather pleased when we catch sight of ourselves (provided the sight is sufficiently dim or distant) in the reflection of a store window. It is always amusing to watch people's expressions and postures change, perhaps ever so slightly, for the better as they look at their images. We all want the reflected image to match the image we hold in our minds (e.g., a rugged, casual slouch goes well with a Marlboro Country type; an erect distinguished carriage befits a man of command and responsibility). We glimpse ourselves in a moment of lapse, and quickly try to correct the discrepancies.

A close-up is something else altogether. Sometimes it's more than we can stand. The shock of recognition makes us recoil. "Don't tell me that's my voice!" (on the tape recorder); "Do I really look that old?" (as this photograph cruelly shows). For me it is a horrifyingly painful experience to have to stand before a three-way mirror, in strong light, in a department store fitting room. ("These lights--these mirrors--they distort, surely!" I tell myself.) I have seen Latin American Indians whoop with laughter upon first seeing themselves on a movie screen, but I have never seen them indignant, as "civilized" people often seem to be. Perhaps it is that an Indian has not occupied himself very much with trying to be what he is not.

What is it that makes us preen, recoil, laugh? It must be the degree of incongruity between what we thought we were and what we actually saw.

People's standards, of course, differ. Usually, in things that do not matter, we set them impossibly high and thus guarantee for ourselves a life of discontent. In things that matter we set them too low and are easily pleased with ourselves. (My daughter came home from the seventh grade one day elated. "Missed the honor roll by two C's!" she cried, waving her report card happily.) Frequently we judge by standards that are irrelevant to the thing in question. You have to know what a thing is for, first of all, before you can judge it. Take a can opener--how can I know whether it's any good unless I know that it was made for opening cans?

Or a church. What is it for? Recently the one I belong to held a series of neighborhood coffee meetings for the purpose of finding out what the parishioners thought about what the church was doing, was not doing, and ought to be doing. The results were mailed to us last week. Eighty people participated and came up with 105 "concerns and recommendations." These revealed considerable confusion as to what the church is meant to be about. "Should have hockey and basketball teams." "There is too much reference to the Bible in sermons.'' ''The ushers should stop hunching at the doors of the church and seek out unfamiliar faces.'' "The rear parking lot is messy." "A reexamination of spiritual goals should be carried out." I was glad there were a few like that last one. The range of our congregational sins was pretty well covered (we didn't get into the mire of our personal ones), and as I read them over I thought, "If we just managed to straighten out these one hundred and five things we'd have--what? Well, something, I suppose. But not a perfect church. Not by a long shot. If by our poor standards (some of them obviously applicable to things other than churches) we picked out over a hundred flaws, how many were visible to God, 'to whose all-searching sight the darkness shineth as the light'?''

There are times when it is with a kind of relief that we come upon the truth. A man passing a church one day paused to see if he could catch what it was the people were mumbling in unison. He moved inside and heard these words: "We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws."

Hmm, thought the man, they sound like my kind of people.

"We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done."

This is the church for me, he decided. (I don't suppose a basketball team or a blacktopped parking lot would have persuaded him.)

"Put up a complaint box and you'll get complaints," my husband used to say. There is something to be said for airing one's grievances, and there is a great deal to be said for not airing them, but one thing at least seems good to me--that we be overwhelmed, now and then, with our sins and failures.

We need to sit down and take stock. We need mirrors and neighborhood coffees and complaint boxes, but our first reaction may be despair. Our second, "Just who does so-and-so think he is, criticizing the church when he never even comes to church?" And we find ourselves back where we started, setting our own standards, judging irrelevantly and falsely, excusing ourselves, condemning an institution for not being what it was never meant to be, and so on.

The church, thank God, has provided for us. There is Lent. It is a time to stop and remember. All year we have had the chance in the regular communion service to remember the death and passion of the Lord Jesus, and this once during the year we are asked, for a period of six weeks, to recall ourselves, to repent, to submit to special disciplines in order that we may understand the meaning of the Resurrection.

We are indeed "miserable offenders.'' We have done and left undone. We are foolish and weak and blind and self-willed and men of little faith. We run here, we run there, we form committees and attend meetings and attack the Church and its organization and its isolation and its useless machinery and its irrelevance and ineffectiveness. But all the time it stands there, holding the cross, telling us that there is forgiveness, that we have not been left to ourselves, that no matter how shocking the image that we finally see of ourselves in the light of God's truth, God himself has done something about it all.

"He was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquities." For the very things we've been discussing. For the things that make us moan and groan and ask, "What's the use?"

And so Lent, simply because it is another reminder of him who calls us to forgiveness and refreshment, makes me glad.

____________________

This devotional is freely distributed by Back To The Bible.
Did you enjoy this devotional?
Send it on for a friend to enjoy.
FREE E-mail Subscription:
http://www.backtothebible.org/devotions/
____________________

[nChrist]

Author: Elisabeth Elliot
Source: All That Was Ever Ours
Scripture: 1 Corinthians 2:9 1 Corinthians 2:11
The Path of Lonliness


Inklings of Ignorance - Page 1

The sign that faces us as we arrive at the station says Spor 1. Let's see. I refrain from asking Lars this time--he must be weary of four weeks of my persistent questions about his language. In Norwegian o's are usually pronounced oo. Spoor. Related to the English word spoor? Of course: Track 1.

It's time to leave my husband's hometown of Kristiansand. The station is mobbed with kids with backpacks. The mobility of the student generation astonishes me. When I was their age I dreamed of a trip to Norway. Of all the countries of the world, it was Norway I most longed to see. Surely an impossibility. But here I am, and here they are, hundreds of them, chewing gum, none of them looking particularly wonderstruck. Their bright orange or red or blue packs crowd the platforms and waiting room. They wear colored striped jogging shoes, blue jeans, nylon hooded parkas.

A little boy with platinum-blond hair and apple cheeks eats popcorn while his mother buys the tickets. After a few fistfuls he carefully pours the rest on the floor. His mother turns, says something brief and mild, and walks out the door. He scoops a handful from the floor, stuffs it into his mouth, and follows her.

We board the train. Immaculately clean, windows sparkling, reclining seats with footrests and plenty of legroom.

Norway. The country that shaped my husband's childhood. He was like that little boy. His aunt, Tante Esther, showed me some snapshots of him at that age--the same round face, the same towhead. We have spent part of our time at Tante Esther's house, walking around the places of Lars' memories. We saw where the house and church once stood, saw the building where he, at the age of six or seven, plummeted over the bannister and down three floors on his head. We saw the park, the bakery, the bridge, the offices of Faedrelandsvennen, the newspaper he used to hawk on the streets. The rest of the time we were in a little cottage a few miles away on a beautiful inland waterway, Topdals Fjorden, where he fished many years ago with his uncle.

The train begins to move. We are in a tunnel in a minute or two and pass through many more as we travel westward toward Stavanger across a series of lovely valleys (Mandal, Audnedal, Lyngdal--dal, I conclude must mean valley). Rivers, rocky mountains, broad green meadows, forests of spruce, aspen, birch, fir. Alongside the tracks I see bracken, buttercups, bluebells, lupine, and daisies as well as many bright-colored flowers I cannot name. Now and then we pass a small lake with grasses and water lilies growing around the edge. Moose country. I see a highway sign warning of a moose crossing.

It is not long before the passengers begin opening up their lunches. A man and woman across the aisle hand buttered rolls to their two grandchildren. They squeeze mayonnaise, shrimp, and caviar pastes onto the rolls from tubes, and gulp down large-sized soft drinks, warm from the bottle.

We watch the children, we smile, but they try not to look at us. You do not speak to strangers in Norway. Even Lars, open and friendly as he learned to be in Mississippi and Georgia, becomes Norwegian again, cautious, silent.

The four hours pass quickly. The roadbed is well maintained, as everything in Norway seems to be. The ride is very smooth. Lars dozes.

In the rocky pastures are sheep and cows. In the fields, curtains of hay drying on long poles supported at each end by X-poles. Stone walls separate the fields.

There are brooks tumbling through deep ravines and broad, smooth rivers meandering through the valleys. Two children skip in the shallows of a pebbly stream. Again I see Lars, and his cousin Bjørg, in the two children.

========================See Page 2

[nChrist]

Inklings of Ignorance - Page 2

We arrive in Stavanger in time to see the Queen Elizabeth II just leaving her moorings and being towed slowly between the docks and oil tankers out to sea. We board a hydrofoil for the trip to Bergen. There is as much noise and vibration as there is in a bus, and the narrow seats, twelve abreast, allow as little legroom.

It is raining as we leave the docks. On all sides we see the monstrous dismembered anatomy of marine oil rigs. The man next to Lars points to the upturned feet of the one that capsized in the ocean some months ago, killing many men.

The vessel threads its way through miles and miles of nearly treeless, forbidding-looking islands, barely discernible through the cold fog that wraps us round. The islands are rocks, massive and smooth, rising abruptly out of the sea with a rim of black three or four feet high above the tide line, topped by a band of white--salt? guano, perhaps? A little greenery struggles for life in a few protected places in the rocks.

Is there ever any sun here? Who lives in these lonely places? There are very few houses. A man in yellow oilskins (only plastic, I suppose) passes us in a little outboard. His dog balances himself on the bow, ears flattened in the wind, muzzle lifted.

It is a scene from countless paintings, evoking a strong sense of melancholy, of "Northernness." Latitude works, I am sure, secretly and powerfully within the personality of the artist. Also, it occurs to me, of my husband. Is this a clue to the deep reserves in him?

At every port there are storage tanks: Norol, Esso, Shell. Tankers pass us, all sizes, coming and going to the North Sea platforms. People in tiny rowboats ride their wakes.

The two children who were on the train with their grandparents are in front of us. They have started on a fresh round of rolls and pastes.

A beautiful blonde teenage girl with heavily made-up eyes sits on the arm of the seat across the aisles, bouncing in time to whatever it is she is listening to on earphones connected to a black box held by her boyfriend. She is wearing a splotchy faded denim jacket covered with American obscenities printed in colored ink, Wrangler jeans, cowboy boots, a T-shirt advertising Norwegian beer. She closes her eyes, rocks her head with the music, snaps her chewing gum. Then she speaks to her friend-- in Norwegian.

Four old ladies sit in a row with shopping bags at their feet, clutching large pocketbooks, wearing the ubiquitous brimless hats of their age group. (Somebody told me Queen Mother Elizabeth made these popular. They were designed so that her subjects could see her face from all angles.)

What are the old ladies talking about? I can hear them, but I cannot understand a syllable. It brings back the feeling of desperation in missionary days when a "sound barrier" stood between me and the Indians, a great chasm I could not bridge. Lars understands them. His ability to speak with perfect ease a language I am perfectly ignorant of fills me with awe. He laughs at this, of course. "An easy language." Here is a whole world where he is at home and I am a stranger.

In the three-hour voyage there is no change of light. Clouds, gloom, yet we can tell that the sun has not gone down. At nine o'clock it is as light as it was at six.

We stay in the Bibelskolen Sommerhotel in Bergen. On each bed are a pillow, a bottom sheet, and an eiderdown encased as a pillow is encased, a wonderfully cozy arrangement we have found wherever we have slept in Norway. Breakfast is a feast--bread, cheese, goat cheese, salami, tomatoes, pickles, corn flakes, hot rolls, marmalade, jam, coffee and tea, all you can eat, included in the price of the room.

=======================See Page 3

[nChrist]

Inklings of Ignorance - Page 3

We wander around the open-air markets by the waterfront. They are filled with flowers, vegetables (one cauliflower costs five dollars), and oh, heavenly fish! Lars would rather smell fish than flowers. He cannot tear himself away from the beautiful clean rows of crab, shrimp, salmon, haddock, cod, and other varieties of seafood laid out on stainless steel. The men who sell them are no-nonsense types who wear rubber aprons and boots and wield wicked knives.

We board another train for Oslo. The station teems with thousands more backpackers. In fact, it is difficult to find anyone dressed as we are in street clothes or carrying suitcases. We both feel foreign now.

Again it is raining. We travel along a fjord where rock walls rise sheer above us. The spruces and firs drip with rain. The hay we see in an occasional small field is green and sodden on the racks.

Now a rushing river with weirs, now a green meadow where a lone fisherman casts his line at the edge. Bluebells, larkspur, cowslips, wild raspberry. I wish someone would open a window so we could smell them.

Dim, misty forests with open, moss-carpeted floors. No wonder Norsemen believed in trolls and hags! I expect to catch sight of them myself in this mysterious land.

Suddenly we see, through breaks in the clouds, patches of snow on the peaks above us. Then the view is blocked repeatedly by tunnels and snowsheds. The Bergensbanen (Bergen Line) has two hundred tunnels, three hundred bridges, and eighteen miles of snowsheds, the brochure tells us. The country between Mjølfjell and Myrdal is like the high bare country of the Andes or Scotland, a wild wasteland of snow, broken only where the wind has swept some of the black rocks clean. As we approach the lake at Taugevatn, where the altitude is over four thousand feet, a hiker moves slowly across the snow and two men in orange parkas huddle against the wind, mending a snowscreen. It is hard to realize it is July.

Then down toward Oslo. Miles of river, farms, valleys, fields of green things and bright yellow oilseed rape. The sun comes out intermittently, bringing campers out of their blue or orange tents along the riverbanks.

I will be glad when we board the plane tomorrow for London and Boston. I will soon be back at the desk in the corner of the bedroom, I hope a little humbler because, having seen a piece of Norway, I have received a little larger vision of God who made it and who loves and understands its people. New places of vision give me inklings of the magnitude of my ignorance--of the language, for instance, and of "things beyond our seeing, things beyond our hearing, things beyond our imagining, all prepared by God for those who love Him" (1 Corinthians 2:9 NEB).

I hope that I will have as well a little larger heart to love and respect the Norwegian I live with, who baffles and excites, nettles and amuses, annoys and cherishes me. A world I have barely glimpsed is home to him. What other worlds are in him that I have not begun to suspect? What revelations of glory do I have to look forward to in the man whose meals I cook and whose laundry I do, when finally the image of God is fully restored?

"Who knows what a man is but the man's own spirit within him? (1 Corinthians 2:11 NEB).

____________________

This devotional is freely distributed by Back To The Bible.
Did you enjoy this devotional?
Send it on for a friend to enjoy.
FREE E-mail Subscription:
http://www.backtothebible.org/devotions/
____________________

[nChrist]

Author: Elisabeth Elliot
Source: All That Was Ever Ours
Scripture:
The Path of Lonliness


Early Lessons - Page 1

When I was five years old I started to attend Miss Dietz's kindergarten, which was in a Methodist church just around the corner from our house in Philadelphia. On the first day of school my mother walked with me to the church. When she said good-bye she explained that when it was time to come home for lunch I was not to cross the street, but must wait on the sidewalk opposite our house and call her to come out and ''watch me across."

Two things that I learned there (besides one song, "Here's the Baby's Ball") are clear in my memory now. I learned that life is unpredictable. The girl in front of me as we lined up for roll call suddenly threw up, covering Miss Dietz's desk and roll book. I learned also that people, myself included, are sinful.

I picked out a white china cat from the toy box and played with it every day, building a house for it with wooden blocks. One day another girl got the white cat first. I tried to snatch it away but she got up from her little wooden chair at the play table and raced around the room with the cat in her hand. I raced, shrieking, after her. My insistence that the cat was mine was of course not accepted by Miss Dietz, and I was, I think, punished--made to stand in the corner or something. Perhaps I was only reprimanded, but although I had been scolded and spanked many times at home, this was my first public humiliation and acknowledgment of guilt. No doubt that is why I remember it. I had expected to be known as, I had every intention of being, a good little girl, and I turned out to be a naughty one. Let no one laugh it off with "But you were only five!'' or "A silly little thing like a china cat?" I knew very well that I was in the wrong.

The next year I began the first grade in Henry School. It was more than a mile from home and I covered this distance four times a day because I walked home for lunch. It was a solid, dismal brick building with a high black iron fence with spikes on it and a solid concrete school yard. I became acquainted with loneliness and fear. I started out with the unshakable conviction that everybody knew everybody else, everybody knew what they were supposed to do and where they were supposed to go. I felt that somehow I ought to know, too, but I did not know. I was lonely. I was also afraid. I was sure that I would not be capable of doing first-grade work and often lay awake at night crying about arithmetic.

Our teacher was always called "Mith Thcott" by the girl who sat next to me. Miss Scott was a lovely woman with a soft voice, soft white hair, blue eyes, and a gentle manner. As I remember, she wore only blue dresses. Sometimes when the sun shone through the high sashed windows Miss Scott would tilt and turn a crystal prism that hung on one of the shade pulls, thus casting a thousand rainbows around the dismal room. Occasionally she would give us permission to try to "catch'' the rainbows and that forbidding schoolroom was transfigured into a place of color and laughter as we darted and lunged after the reflections.

Despite my fears I did learn where to go and what to do, and I managed to grasp first-grade arithmetic. But, I used to think, I could never do it without Miss Scott. Well, I was not required to do it without Miss Scott. Miss Scott was the teacher. Miss Scott was there precisely to teach me what I needed to know. It has taken me a good many years to realize that in the School of Faith, what I am required to do I am enabled to do. Provision has been made. I am not alone and there is nothing to fear, for "God can be trusted not to allow you to suffer any temptation beyond your powers of endurance. He will see to it that every temptation has a way out, so that it will never be impossible for you to bear it."

=========================See Page 2