Elizabeth Elliot Devotions

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Early Lessons - Page 2

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Valerie's first schoolhouse was a thatched roof on six poles. It had neither walls nor floors. It had no desks, no chairs, no blackboards. It was an Indian house and her schoolbooks came by mail from the States, delivered to our jungle clearing in a small plane two or three times a month.

I, of course, was her teacher and it was a neat trick to hold her attention when Indian kids hung over her shoulder (What are you doing?), picked up her crayons (What are these?), scribbled in the textbooks (Let me try that), smelled the paper (This is made of wood), and pestered her continually to come and swim or fish or hunt for honey or fly wood bees on a length of thread. It was what Malcolm Muggeridge would call a "scandalously desultory" method of education, and when we had struggled through three years of this I decided it was time for some peer pressure and a little more order. We returned to the United States and Valerie started the fourth grade in a small-town public school in New Hampshire.

I had arranged to have the school bus pick her up, but as she stood at the bottom of the driveway on the first day of school in her new school dress holding her new lunch box (and I stood at the top of the driveway with tears in my eyes), the bus passed her by. Poor little girl, I thought, remembering my own terrors. But she was made of different stuff. I drove her to school and she ran in with a light wave of her hand. "Bye, Mama! I can find my room all right."

It did not dawn on her for a couple of weeks that the teacher was talking to her, and therefore expected her to listen. Because for three years she had had my undivided attention, she assumed that the teacher was addressing only the others. When she got this straightened out she did her work acceptably.

When she was in the fifth grade a classmate inquired as to "what kind of sex" she had had. I gave her a hug (and silently thanked God) when she told me her reply: "I won't answer a question like that."

In the seventh grade she copied an answer from someone else's test paper. In tears she confessed this to me, we talked about the sin of cheating, and I went with her to make it right with her teacher. I was unprepared for the teacher's response of self-vindication. Incredulous that a student would acknowledge such an offense, the teacher assumed at the outset that I had come to accuse her of negligence. It took several minutes before she understood that Valerie had come to say she was sorry and was willing to pay whatever penalty the teacher might set.

In the tenth grade she took a certain amount of ribbing because she wore skirts instead of blue jeans to school. "You mean your mother didn't make you? You really like skirts? Because what? You like being a girl?" She was some kind of nut. When there was only one dissenting vote (Valerie's) when the civics class agreed that the legal voting age should be reduced to sixteen she was asked for an explanation. "Well, I just don't think we know enough to vote." Incredulous stares. Some kind of nut again.

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Early Lessons - Page 3

Valerie's little boy will not be starting school for three more years. I look at the children waiting for the school buses today and wonder what will be dished out to them. Will it be alternate cognitive modes, multithematic creativity programming, subjective time-distortion learning, disinhibiting emotional patterning, kinesthetic self-actualization? Or will they find a few people left in the schools who haven't discarded common sense along with wisdom and morality? Will they learn how to read, how to write a clear English sentence, how to add and subtract? Is there still the possibility that somebody, somewhere will teach them to distinguish right from wrong?

But today's newspaper reminds us that this would be inimical to democratic principle. Morality, usually called "value judgments" nowadays, has no place, we are told, in public-school education, least of all in public-school sex education. Words such as normal, ideal, masculinity, and femininity must be expunged from teachers' vocabularies lest they inhibit the freedom of elementary-school children to choose a life-style, e.g., asexual, bisexual, homosexual, or even heterosexual. These choices are to be made, it is assumed, without any reference whatsoever to ethical responsibility, let alone to religious principles, let alone to any divine design.

Life can be unpredictable, lonely, and fearsome, as I learned in Miss Dietz's and Miss Scott's classrooms, because, as I also learned there, sin has entered into the world. Lest our hearts quail as we "turn our children loose," let us remind ourselves of the nature of the warfare in which we engage: "not against any physical enemy; it is against the unseen power that controls this dark world, and spiritual agents from the very headquarters of evil. Take your stand then with truth as your belt . . . faith as your shield . . . pray at all times." The weapons must be appropriate to the foe.

A prayer written by Amy Carmichael has been my prayer as long as I have been a mother, and I pray it now for my grandchildren:

Father, hear us, we are praying,
Hear the words our hearts are saying,
We are praying for our children.

Keep them from the powers of evil
From the secret, hidden peril,
From the whirlpool that would suck them,
From the treacherous quicksand pluck them,
Holy Father, save our children.

From the worldling's hollow gladness,
From the sting of faithless sadness,
Through life's troubled waters steer them,
Through life's bitter battle cheer them,
Father, Father, be Thou near them.

Read the language of our longing,
Read the wordless pleadings thronging,
Holy Father, for our children.

And wherever they may bide,
Lead them Home at eventide.

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Author: Elisabeth Elliot
Source: All That Was Ever Ours
Scripture: Colossians 3:15
The Path of Lonliness


Christ's Parting Gift - Page 1

Odd things turn up when you are moving. Last month when we packed up the things in the old house and came to this one, I found a slip of paper with my mother's handwriting on one side and Mrs. Kershaw's on the other. One day back in the fifties my parents were going for the day to Hartford, Connecticut (from New Jersey), to visit my aunt in the hospital. Mother wrote a note to leave for Mrs. Kershaw, the dear old lady who would be coming that day as usual to help with housework.

"Please get anything you want from the refrigerator to eat. If you have time perhaps you could roll out some brown sugar cookies. The house is clean so there is nothing to do in that line.... Thanks so much. Have a good day. Lovingly, K. H."

Mrs. Kershaw wrote on the other side, "The Day's Doings," and left it for my mother. Mother is pretty good at throwing things away (lots of people are poor at that), but she also knows what is worth saving. When I read over the scrap of paper I thought of our beloved Mrs. Kershaw. I have written about her before--a widow, stone-deaf, a godsend to our home, utterly without guile or self-pity, unfailingly cheerful, who quite as a matter of course gave herself to all of us all of the time. Her list seemed exactly the paradigm I had been looking for. I wanted to write about peace. Peace is one of those abstracts we refer to rather often, but seldom with much real comprehension. "The Day's Doings" helped me to get hold of what peace is.

The Day's Doings:

   1. put my soiled clothes to soak
   2. had my breakfast
   3. washed clothes
   4. prayed for all and Alice's recovery & home safe
   5. washed up dishes
   6. made a fruit cup good for all
   7. wrote to (her son)
   8. just opened my mail, came 10:30 A.M.
   9. making cookies, rolling in paper
  10. getting nuts ready for top of cookies
  11. resting and prayer for all
  12. fixing pie filling and crust
  13. resting and lunch 2 P.M. I feel lost without you to eat with.
  14. washing up
  15. resting and reading
  16. prayer
  17. making Jell-O
  18. washing up. No more eats.
  19. baking cookies and pie
  20. washing up kitchen floor last. 6 o'clock, not a soul here. I didn't even see a stray dog. Yet happy.

Here was a life without conflict. That is what peace is. It could be argued, of course, that she had it easy: a few little undemanding household tasks to perform, a nice house in which to perform them, people who cared about her, her basic needs met. Plenty of people in this world have that and more, but would give it all for five minutes of peace--the peace that characterized the life of our little old lady.

If she had wanted to look for causes for self-pity or depression, she wouldn't have had to go far. She was old and frail, slightly crippled with arthritis; she could not hear a single sound; she had a son who almost never called or visited her; she had lost her husband; she had very few of this world's goods. But she went through her daily routines with gladness, punctuating them with prayer. She had the peace of God, which is just as Jesus described it--"nothing like the peace of this world." It was his parting gift to the disciples and to any who will simply take it. "I give you my own peace" is what he said.

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Christ's Parting Gift - Page 2

I was thinking of all this as I sat in the living room of the house we have just moved into. My books and notes were spread around me on the sofa, my clipboard was in my lap. In front of me was a vast expanse of Atlantic Ocean, framed to left and right by the fading colors of autumn woods and, at the foot of the slope between them, the raw and ragged edge of New England--a great jumble of giant rocks, bleached by the sun, clean-scoured by wind and tide. The sea itself, miles and miles of it, danced, glittered, and flashed. (''Coruscated is the word," my brother Tom Howard said on the phone when I tried to describe to him what I could see. He's been my thesaurus since he was about five.)

There was nearly perfect silence all day long. I could hear no traffic on the road. Occasionally I heard a plane, circling northeast to land at Boston's Logan Airport, or the soft thub-thub of a lobster boat's idling motor. I heard the lonely cry of seagulls and the thunder and sigh as waves broke and retreated, but it was a day full of peace. I reveled in it. I thanked God in every way I could think of.

But someone I love is in the hospital today, waiting for a diagnosis which, judging by the symptoms we know of so far, could be a grave illness. The kind of peace afforded by the quiet house set in such matchless beauty is not really enough. It is not enough for my heart.

In the same talk in which Jesus spoke of his peace, just before he left his disciples to return to the Father, he said, ''You must not be distressed and you must not be daunted. " How, Lord, can I possibly obey a command like that when trouble--serious trouble--stares me in the face? What does peace mean now? Is it merely a feeling of calm? Does it mean to be soothed or comfortable? Is it a vague sense of well-being?

I don't know anywhere to look for answers but in the same old Book. The Old Testament sense of the word peace is, among other things, perpetual prosperity, security of tenure, health, and freedom from annoyance. The list almost seemed a mockery. It would certainly be a mockery if we could see no further than natural things. The man who sees only those has a "carnal" attitude, Paul says, "and that means, bluntly, death.'' A spiritual attitude, on the other hand, means life and inward peace. The New Testament explains much more about this inward kind. It comes from God. It is a gift, the fruit of faith. It passes understanding. It is Christ himself. "He is our peace."

The peace of God means the absence of conflict with the will of God. It means harmony within, concord with his purpose for our lives.

Mrs. Kershaw was not merely adjusted to herself or her circumstances. She was, in the deepest place of her being, reconciled to God. She never took a sedative or a tonic in her life. Like the weaned child spoken of by the psalmist, no longer frantic for satisfaction, she was at rest. If you had asked her her secret, she would no doubt have given a little shrug and a little chuckle. The sweet old wrinkled face would have looked up quizzically. She would not have known what to say. She simply did what the Christians of Philippi were told to do: "Don't worry over anything whatever; tell God every detail of your needs in earnest and thankful prayer, and the peace of God, which transcends human understanding, will keep constant guard over your hearts and minds as they rest in Christ Jesus."

To make peace with a country or a person or God requires a transaction. To have peace, as people sometimes say, unless it is merely the sense of well-being that commonly goes with getting what you want, must mean that a transaction has taken place. One's will, along with everything else, has been offered up. Peace is the divine answer to our Yes, Lord.

Colossians 3:15 suggests that the peace of Christ is the "arbiter" of our hearts, ruling out all faithless response to trouble, all distress, anxiety, fretfulness, frustration, and resentment. It establishes order. Those who accept the grace of this gift know tranquillity which can withstand all assaults, a stillness unbroken by the world's noise, and a repose in the midst of intense activity--repose which a nerve-racked world cannot possibly give. For only Christ himself, who slept in the boat in the storm and then spoke calm to the wind and waves, can stand beside us when we are in a panic and say to us Peace. It will not be explainable. It transcends human understanding. And there is nothing else like it in the whole wide world.

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Author: Elisabeth Elliot
Source: All That Was Ever Ours
Scripture: Job 28:20-28
The Path of Lonliness


Fear, Suffering, Love - Page 1

I happened to arrive home alone from the airport one night in the middle of what newscasters like to call an "outage." I much prefer to call it a power failure. I could have unpacked my suitcase and found something to eat by candlelight--I lived for years with no other kind--but there was a show going on which I did not want to miss. I sat by the window and watched a storm over the ocean--driving rain and nearly continuous lightning, flashing in a hundred places along miles of horizon. Sometimes great billows of storm cloud were thrown into relief by a bright sheet of light from behind. Sometimes jagged bolts of lightning cracked the heavens, stabbing the skyline of Scituate and Cohasset to the southwest (our house faces south from Cape Ann over Massachusetts Bay). The rain swept the deck and blasted the windowpane while thunder, one of the many voices of God, rolled and crashed.

Where is the place of understanding? God understands the way to it, and he knows its place. For he looks to the ends of the earth. . . . When he made a decree for the rain and a way for the lightning of the thunder, then he saw it and declared it; he established it and searched it out. And he said to man, "Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding."

Job 28 20-28

It is well that men should fear God when they have not yet learned to love him. It is the beginning. People who have loved him, even for a lifetime, do not lose but rather gain reverence and awe, even godly dread.

Lightning is several times associated with the Lord's appearances in Scripture. The face of the man clothed in linen who came to Daniel during his three weeks' mourning and fasting was "like the appearance of lightning, his eyes like flaming torches." The same is said of the angel that rolled back the stone from Jesus' grave. John had a vision of a throne in heaven from which issued flashes of lightning and voices and peals of thunder. When the angel of the Seventh Seal took a golden censer and threw it on the earth, "there were peals of thunder, loud noises, flashing of lightning, and an earthquake."

When Mt. St. Helens exploded, it poured volcanic ash on the Northwest which floated as far as our coast. I woke one morning to find the sea shrouded in a strange pinkish brown fog.

There have been earthquakes in California and Nevada.

People call such things acts of God. They are awesome and often terrifying.

What of the acts of men? A seminary student who was in the navy for ten years told me of weapons now perfected by the Russians which would enable them to win a war without killing millions of people, but simply by knocking out our arsenals and disabling our equipment. I saw a documentary film which graphically contrasted U.S. military strength to Russia's. Our position appeared extremely precarious. A "missile eater" impressed me most--a defense weapon Russia now has which seems to annihilate missiles, snatching them out of the air before they can reach their targets.

I am not afraid for myself. But I confess I am tempted to be afraid for my grandchildren. They are with me now, a boy of three and a girl whose first birthday will be this week. What will they suffer?

The signs God gives us of his power and glory (thunder and lightning, for example), to say nothing of the unimaginable forces which he puts into men's hands and allows them to harness for their own often evil purposes, are in themselves fearsome.

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Fear, Suffering, Love - Page 2

As I watched God's storm that night I thought of his wonderful name, Father of Lights. Then as I saw the distant marine beacons sending their beams across the waves, they reminded me as they do every night of the Father's mercy. We live in a world created by his almighty power but corrupted by man's pride and selfishness. We need a place of safety--as Walter and Elisabeth need a place of safety as they grow up. There is one, but only one. It is the Father's arms. He will not--indeed, if he is to redeem and make us holy, he cannot--protect us from all suffering.

George MacDonald, in his novel What's Mine's Mine, wrote:

There are tenderhearted people who virtually object to the whole scheme of creation. They would neither have force used nor pain suffered; they talk as if kindness could do everything, even where it is not felt. Millions of human beings but for suffering would never develop an atom of affection. The man who would spare due suffering is not wise. Because a thing is unpleasant, it is folly to conclude it ought not to be. There are powers to be born, creations to be perfected, sinners to be redeemed, through the ministry of pain, to be born, perfected, redeemed, in no other way.

I am thankful that there are some earthly fathers who understand this. One of them wrote to me of a visit to the doctor with his three-year-old son who was limping as a result of a fall or a collision with a child in the church nursery.

"Walt was in the backseat as the two of us rode down to the doctor's. There, I told him to wait a minute while I checked to make sure the doctor was in his office. The receptionist told me I could catch him over at the hospital in the emergency room. I came out to the car and drove to the hospital.

"Walt III: 'Where we goin', Daddy?'

" 'We're going to see if the doctor will check your foot out at the hospital. Won't that be neat?'

"(A pause.) 'Uh . . . Daddy, I think it'll be okay if we go on home. Yeah . . . I think it'd be better after while. Whyn't we just go home, 'kay?'

" 'Son, we're going to go see if we can get the doctor to check and make sure everything is okay.'

"(A tiny hint of a whine.) 'Daddy, I'm sure it's gon' be better now, okay?'

"At the hospital: 'Walter, let's get out and go into the hospital. Everything is going to be all right. Just hold my hand.'

"In the emergency room he wanted to sit in my lap. The clerk asked the names and how we were going to pay, etc. Then the wait. We move to a row of chairs against the wall, and Walt III chooses to sit in my lap this time with more enthusiasm. His eyes are big and wide. He's very solemn, head moving around, taking it all in.

" 'Daddy, we've been here before.'

" 'Yes, Walt, we were here. Remember the time your leg was broken and Daddy put you in that green blanket and brought you here? The doctor looked at your leg and then they took you to take some pictures of your leg?'

" 'Hunh.' (That means yes.) 'I 'member dat.'

" 'Shall we pray together?' His head bows quickly.

" 'Kay.'

"A prayer in which I asked for courage for both of us. And thanking the Lord that we could trust him. Walt III much more relieved, even calmed completely.

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Fear, Suffering, Love - Page 3

"A nurse calls his name, and we go into a room to be seen by the doctor. It was hard to keep from carrying him, but I wanted the doctor to see Walt's limp, and too, I kept saying to myself, 'Let's not smother him. Let's help him grow up and learn to lean on the Lord himself.'

"In the room we both sit on the table. I take off his shoe and sock (I was fearful that the original break was damaged again) and we hear a lady crying in the next room. Walt's eyes get wide and he says,

" 'Daddy, what's the matter with that lady?'

" 'She is hurting and she is scared. Are you afraid, son?'

" 'No, Lord Jesus take care of me.'

" 'Well, let's pray for her, okay?'

" 'Kay.'

"A prayer. And sure enough, the lady seems to calm down. And the doctor's there now, asking Walt where it hurts. Then, off to x-ray. A nurse comes to talk to Walt.

" 'Now listen--if we hurt you then you can cry. But if we don't hurt you, you are not to cry, okay?'

" 'Kay.' She picks him up (he holds tightly to her, eyes very wide) and just before she takes him off he says to me, 'Daddy, we've been here before. Where you gon' be? In this room waiting for me?' (The x-ray process had terrified him when the nurse took him from us a year ago.)

" 'Yes, son, I'll be right here, waiting for you.' Fifteen minutes later the nurse brought him back to me, raving about what a neat kid he was. Apparently he had kept talking to them the entire time.

"No bones broken. We go back to the doctor. I tell Walt to be sure and thank the doctor as we leave. Walt goes about twenty feet out of his way from the exit to say, 'Thank you, doctor. We gon' to family night supper at the church.'

"Next night he happily sang to himself in the dark for about thirty minutes. I went to the bedroom to hug him and tell him,

" 'Walt, I'm proud of you for three reasons. One, you were very sweet in the tub when Mom washed your hair. Two, you make me happy singing so nicely to yourself in the dark. Three. . . .'

" 'But Daddy--you making too much racket!' Then he grabs me and hugs me, giggling.

"Thank you, Lord, for that boy!"

And thank you, Lord, for that father, strong in his faith in you, strong enough in his love for the little child to lead him also to trust you.

I am sobered by the response of a tiny boy. With reason enough to fear, he resolved not to. How often my own faith deteriorates into a mere condition, shaped by circumstances, rather than a calm resolve, founded on one whose word I have come to trust. Perfect love casts out fear.

And what of the weeping woman in the next room? Was she calmed? Would she have believed, if told, that the God of Peace had laid his hands on her--in answer to the prayers of a little boy with a hurt foot? The God who rides stormclouds is also the God of Peace. The one who makes darkness his covering is also the Father of Lights.

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Daily devotions for 01-18-2007:

Title: One of Those Nineteenth-Century Missionaries
Author: Elisabeth Elliot
Devotion: Elisabeth Elliot
Book: All That Was Ever Ours
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One of Those Nineteenth-Century Missionaries - Page 1

"All generalizations are false, including this one," yet we keep making them. We create images--graven ones that can't be changed; we dismiss or accept people, products, programs, and propaganda according to the labels they come under; we know a little about something, and we treat it as though we know everything.

I couldn't count the times I've heard nineteenth-century missions and missionaries cited as examples of stupidity and failure. I heard a whole lecture predicated on this assumption. They were bigoted and imperialistic and naive and arrogant and hypocritical. Some of them probably were some of those things. Some twentieth-century missionaries might make the ones of the last century look like paragons by comparison. Missionaries are (and need we go over this again?) human like everybody else, but the world has seen some great ones, some men and women who saw something to which they witnessed with truthfulness and often with real sacrifice.

In a box of old family papers, I found a little frayed booklet put out in 1906 by the Yale Foreign Missionary Society entitled A Modern Knight, by Joseph Hopkins Twichell. It broke up some of my categories. It was the story of John Coleridge Patteson, Missionary Bishop of Melanesia. He was English ("of course," I said to myself--I think of nineteenth-century missionaries as English--my generalization).

He came from a refined English home. He was the nephew of the famous poet Coleridge and the son of an eminent jurist. He had his place "by birth," the booklet says, "in the upper circles of English society." Exactly. No categories shaken by those facts. He grew up in a "praying household, notably pervaded with the spirit of humble piety and with all sweet gospel savors. There is no mistaking the evangelical tone and quality of the religion there prevailing." He went to Eton, was confirmed in the Church of England, and graduated from Oxford, a "rarely accomplished scholar." He was elected fellow of one of the colleges of his university.

But instead of becoming a jurist like his father, John went as a missionary to the Melanesian Islands to work with people who were nearly all savages and naked and cannibalistic--a people marked by "features of repulsiveness and horrible ferocity," according to the chronicler. But it is interesting to note that Patteson himself spoke of them as men. To him they were "naturally gentlemanly and well-bred and courteous. I never saw a 'gent' (by which term I think Patteson meant one who vulgarly tries to imitate a gentleman) in Melanesia, though not a few savages. I vastly prefer the savages."

He saw that they spoke a language, not the "uncouth jargon of barbarians" as many assumed. ("They don't speak a language, do they?" people have asked me of Ecuadorian Indians. "They only make sounds.") Patteson considered some of the Melanesian languages better than English for translating the biblical Hebrew and Greek.

"He gave them his company," writes Twichell. "For years together he scarcely saw any human being save his handful of assistants and his dark-skinned Melanesians. He never married. He adopted that wild race as his family." It is Twichell who thinks of them as a wild race. Patteson "had none of the conventional talk about degraded heathen. They were brethren."

He was ecumenical in spirit, at one time having to assume charge of a mission of another denomination where he scrupulously conformed to the practices of that mission, though he admitted that he greatly missed the Prayer Book.

The nurture of the indigenous church has been thought to be a recent emphasis in missionary work. Patteson made this his primary object. He visited the islands for four to six months of each year, and spent the rest of the time instructing people of both sexes at a central location. He insisted that they return to their homes at the end of the instruction period as a test of their own progress.

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One of Those Nineteenth-Century Missionaries - Page 2

Patteson himself was up against gross misconceptions of the nature of his work, but he wrote truthfully about it. "In these introductory visits scarcely anything is done or said that resembles mission work in stories. The crowd is great, the noise greater. The heat, the dirt, the inquisitiveness, the begging, make something unlike the interesting pictures in a missionary magazine of an amiable individual very correctly got up in a white tie and black tailed coat, and a group of very attentive, decently clothed, nicely washed natives."

Patteson could not abide sentimentality, that lifeless, heartless, and ultimately cruel idol of many Christians. "One who takes a sentimental view of coral islands and coconuts is of course worse than useless," he wrote. "A man possessed with the idea that he is making a sacrifice will never do. A man who thinks any kind of work beneath him will simply be in the way." He was to be found milking cows and cutting out girls' dresses and doing things the people in England thought shocking.

"Integration" was not a word in his vocabulary as we use it today, and he deplored "that pride of race which prompts a white man to regard colored people as inferior to himself. They (the natives) have a strong sense of, and acquiescence in, their inferiority ('Does an ant know how to speak to a cow?' one of them once said) but if we treat them as inferiors they will always remain in that position."

Progress reports? "My objection to mission reports has always been that the readers want to hear of progress, and the writers are thus tempted to write of it; and may they not, without knowing it, be, at times, hasty that they may seem to be progressing? People expect too much. Because missionary work looks like failure, it does not follow that it is. Our Savior's work looked like a failure. He made no mistakes either in what He taught or in the way of teaching it, and He succeeded, though not to the eyes of men."


Patteson saw his own work as seed sowing. He was prepared to wait long and patiently and not to dig up in doubt what he had planted in faith. He gave to the handful of Melanesians whom he was training a care of instruction and discipline that was "deliberate and painstaking beyond measure."

We have heard missionaries of the last century accused of transferring European civilization to the native culture as though it were synonymous with Christianity. Patteson said, "I have long felt that there is almost harm done in trying to make these islanders like English people. They are to be Melanesian, not English, Christians. . . . Unless we can denationalize ourselves, and eliminate all that belongs to us as English and not as Christians, we cannot be to them what a well instructed countryman of theirs may be. . . . Christianity is the religion of humanity at large. It has room for all. It takes in all shades and diversities of character, race, etc."

When he was little over forty, Patteson visited an island he had never been to. He was received from his ship in a native canoe and taken to shore. The crew waited hours for his return, and at last saw two canoes leaving the beach, one towing the other which appeared to be empty. Soon the empty canoe was cast adrift while the other was paddled rapidly back to shore. Cautiously the boat's crew made toward the drifting canoe. As they drew alongside they saw the body of John Coleridge Patteson, wrapped in a mat, a palm frond laid on his chest. It was the year 1871.

The church, for the most part, has forgotten this name in the long list of its martyrs. It forgets most of what has been done and suffered, and thinks it is doing and suffering now as never before. We boast of our progress (from missions to "mission," for example) and criticize those bunglers of one hundred years ago. But criticism is an easy-chair exercise, especially when the critic does not trouble himself to look at the data but relies chiefly on what he himself feels or on "what everybody knows"--on generalizations.


Thank heaven the work of Patteson and all other missionaries, as well as the work you and I have to do today, is subject to the judgment of "a judge who is God of all," who never mistakes the counterfeit for the real, never needs to revise his categories, never lumps men together.

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


Women in World Missions - Page 1

Years ago I had the great good fortune to meet an unforgettable character whose biography is entitled The Small Woman, and whose life story was told, after a fashion, in a movie called The Inn of the Sixth Happiness. She was Gladys Aylward. To hear this little creature of four feet eleven inches, dressed as a Chinese, tell her own story in a stentorian voice was a stunning experience. I remember how she took the microphone and with no preliminary nonsense whatever thundered forth, "I should like to read just one verse. 'And Jehovah God spoke to Abram and he said, "Get out!" ' " She told us the story of Abraham's faith and his move into an unknown land. Then she said, "And one day, in a little flat in London, Jehovah God spoke to a Cockney parlor maid and he said, 'Get out!' 'Where do you want me to go, Lord?' I said, and he said, 'To China.' " So Gladys Aylward went to China. And what a story that was--a train across Europe and Russia, a frying pan strapped to the outside of her suitcase, an angel's guidance in the dead of night onto a forbidden ship, a breathtaking saga of one woman's obedience to the call of God.

Some twenty-six centuries earlier, the word of the Lord came to a much more likely prospect than a parlor maid--he was the descendant of priests--and in a much more likely place than the city of London, Anathoth in the land of Benjamin. Isn't it easier to believe that the word of the Lord might come to somebody in Anathoth than in London? Or in Urbana? The man was Jeremiah, appointed a prophet of the nations, but he was reluctant to accept the appointment. "Ah, Lord God," he groaned. "Behold, I do not know how to speak for I am only a youth." But the Lord said to him, "Do not say 'I am only a youth,' for to all to whom I send you you shall go, and whatever I command you you shall speak. Be not afraid of them, for I am with you."

God's call frequently brings surprise and dismay, and a protest that one is not qualified. Jeremiah hoped he might get out of it by reminding Almighty God (in case Almighty God had not noticed) that he was too young. Gladys Aylward did not strike me as timid, but she might have called God's attention to her limitations: she too was young; she was poor; she had no education: she was no good at anything but dusting; and she was a woman. In the case of both prophet and parlor maid, however, the issue at stake was identical. The issue was obedience. Questions of intellect and experience, of age and sex, were quite beside the point. God said do this and they did it.

What is the place of women in world missions? Jesus said, ''You (and the word means all of you, male and female) are my witnesses. You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world." And there have been countless thousands who, without reference to where they came from or what they knew or who they were, have believed that Jesus meant what he said and have set themselves to follow.

Today strident female voices are raised to remind us, shrilly and ad nauseam, that women are equal with men. But such a question has never arisen in connection with the history of Christian missions. In fact, for many years, far from being excluded, women constituted the majority among foreign missionaries.

Missionary, of course, is a term which does not occur in the Bible. I like the word witness, and it is a good, biblical word meaning someone who has seen something. The virgin Mary saw an angel and heard his word and committed herself irretrievably when she said, ''Behold the handmaid of the Lord." This decision meant sacrifice--the giving up of her reputation and, for all she knew then, of her marriage and her own cherished plans. "Be it unto me according to thy word." She knew the word was from God, and she put her life on the line because of it. The thing God was asking her to do, let us not forget, was a thing that only a woman could do.

The early history of the Church mentions other women who witnessed--by ministering to Christ during his earthly work, cooking for him, probably, making a bed, providing clothes and washing them--women who were willing and glad to do whatever he needed to have done. (And some of you who despise that sort of work--would you do it if it was for him? "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren," Jesus said, "ye have done it unto me.") There was Priscilla, coadjutor of the Apostle Paul. There was a businesswoman named Lydia who opened her heart to what was said and then opened her home to those who said it. There must have been thousands of women like these who did what lay in their power to do because with all their hearts they wanted to do it. They had seen something; they had heard a word; they knew their responsibility.

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Women in World Missions - Page 2

In the conversion of the Teutonic peoples, women played an important role. Clovis, King of the Franks in the fifth century, made the mistake of marrying a Christian princess, Clotilda from Burgundy, and through her was eventually baptized. According to the Venerable Bede's account, King Ethelbert of Kent made the same mistake in the next century, and his queen, Bertha, persuaded him to allow a monk named Augustine to settle in Canterbury. Within a year ten thousand Saxons were converted.

One of the earliest of those who were actually called missionaries was Gertrude Ras Egede, a Danish woman. Although violently opposed to her husband's going to Greenland to try to find the remnants of the Church which had been lost for several centuries, she soon saw that her opposition to him was in reality opposition to God. She repented and went with her husband to what turned out to be a far cry from the ''Green Land" they had expected. It was a frigid godforsaken wasteland, where Gertrude Ras Egede died after fifteen years of hard work--generally called "labor" if a missionary does it. (We all know that missionaries don't go, they "go forth," they don't walk, they "tread the burning sands," they don't die, they "lay down their lives. " But the work gets done even if it is sentimentalized!)

Women in the United States began to swing into action for the cause of world missions in the beginning of the nineteenth century. There was a Boston Female Society for Missionary Purposes founded in 1800, and a Miss Mary Well founded what was called the Cent Society in 1802 "for females who are disposed to contribute their mite towards so noble a design as diffusion of the gospel light among the shades of darkness and superstition." There was a Fuel Society which paid for coal for young seminarians, a Boston Fragment Society which provided clothes for indigent mothers and their babies. Massachusetts and Connecticut swarmed with what were called "female missionary societies" by 1812, and by 1816 three Baptist wives, supported by these societies, were en route to Ceylon as missionaries. "If not deceived in our motives," one of them wrote, "we have been induced to leave our beloved friends and native shores to cross the tempestuous deep, from love to Christ and the souls which he died to purchase. And now we are ready, waiting with the humble hope of being employed, in his own time and way, in building up his kingdom."

I was surprised to learn that the Civil War strongly affected the progress of women in missions. It was an educative force in America, for through it women were driven to organize because of their pity for the fighting men and their patriotism. In the ten years following the war, scores of organizations, including many new missionary societies, were launched.

The nineteenth-century mind boggled at the thought of single women serving on a foreign field. A few widows were accepted, having supposedly profited by the guidance of husbands and therefore being more knowledgeable and dependable than single women could be expected to be. The first single woman on record who was sent to a foreign land was one Betsy Stockton and she was black.

Of Eleanor Macomber of Burma it was said, "No husband helped her decide the momentous question, and when she resolved, it was to go alone. With none to share her thousand cares and complexities, with no heart to keep time with the wild beatings of her own, she, a friendless woman, crossed the deep dark ocean, and on soil never trodden by the feet of Christian men, erected the banner of the Cross." This is typical of the sentimental view of missionaries which makes most of us cringe. This description was written by a man, but don't let his phrases "weak, defenseless woman" and "the wild beatings of her heart" blur the single fact of Eleanor Macomber's action. Don't stay home because you don't like the image. True faith is action. Faith cometh by hearing, and results in doing.

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Women in World Missions - Page 3

I could go on listing what women have done to prove that they have had an important role in world missions. There were Mary Slessor of Calabar, Lottie Moon of China, Amy Carmichael of India, Rosalind Goforth of China, Malla Moe of Africa--of whom it was said that although she could not preach like Peter or pray like Paul, told thousands of the love of Jesus. And besides these names there have surely been tens of thousands of nameless nuns and other anonymous women who have done what God sent them to do--and they've done it without the tub-thumping of modern egalitarian movements. They had a place and they knew they had it because Scripture says they have.

You read in your Bible from Romans 12, "All members do not have the same function." There is nothing interchangeable about the sexes, and there is nothing interchangeable about Christians. God has given gifts that differ. They differ according to the grace given to us. You and I, whether we are men or women, have nothing to do with the choice of the gift. We have everything to do with the use of the gift.

There are diversities of operations, but the same Spirit. There are varieties of personalities, but all are made in the image of God. As a woman I find clear guidance in Scripture about my position in church and home. I find no exemption from the obligations of commitment and obedience. My obligations have certainly varied from time to time and from place to place. I started my missionary work as a single woman with three other single women. There was no church, there were no believers, and there were no male missionaries. Later I was a wife and had to rearrange certain priorities in accordance with what I understood to be my job, as a wife, as a co-worker with my husband in the field, and later as a mother.

When my husband was killed by Indians, I found myself in some indefinable positions. There wasn't one missionary man left in Ecuador at that time who spoke the jungle Quechua language. There was no one to teach the young Quechua Christians, no one to lead the church, no one but women to carry on where five missionary men had left off. The door to the Auca tribe had slammed shut for those men and was, to our astonishment, opened to two women. It didn't look to me like a woman's job but God's categories are not always ours. I had to shuffle my categories many times during my last eight years of missionary work. Since coming back to the States I've had a career of sorts, I've remarried and been widowed again.

But it is the same faithful Lord who calls me by name and never loses track of my goings and reminds us all in a still, small voice, "Ye are my witnesses that ye might know and believe me and understand that I am he. " There's our primary responsibility; to know him. I can't be a witness unless I've seen something, unless I know what it is I am to testify to.

And it is the Lord of the universe who calls you--women and men--and offers you today a place in his program. Your education or lack of it, your tastes and prejudices and fears and ambitions, your age or sex or color or height or marital status or income bracket are all things which may be offered to God, after you've presented your bodies as a living sacrifice. And God knows exactly what to do with them. They're not obstacles if you hand them over. Be still and know that he is God. Sit in silence and wonder and expectancy, and never doubt that the Lord of your life has his own way of getting through to you to let you know the specifics of his will.

And if you know that you've seen something, you can add your voice to the host of witnesses like G. K. Chesterton who, in answer to the historical query of why Christianity was accepted, answers for millions of others: "Because it fits the lock; because it is like life. We are Christians not because we worship a key but because we have passed a door and felt the wind that is the trumpet of liberty blow over the land of the living."

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Author: Elisabeth Elliot
Source: Love Has A Price Tag
Scripture: Revelation 7:17
The Path of Lonliness


Animals, My Kinsman

While driving recently I was listening to one of those "call-in" shows on the radio, and was glad to hear a question that had nothing to do with politics or abortion or the drug problem. A lady wanted to know whether mongrels were ever trained to be seeing-eye dogs. She felt sorry for all those mongrels she saw on the streets, and she thought it would be so nice if they could be trained to help blind people because (and here the host had to ask her to repeat what she had said to make sure he had heard it right) it would give them something to look forward to.

Just exactly what view did the lady take of the minds of dogs? Did they suffer identity crises? Were they bored with life on the streets, finding that there wasn't much future in it?

Then I heard a recording of the songs of whales. I wouldn't have believed it if I had not just read the fascinating article in the New Yorker by Faith McNulty, "Lord of the Fish," in which she says that whales do indeed "sing." A man named Frank Watlington, an engineer with the Columbia University Geophysical Field Station at Bermuda, recorded the songs with a hydrophone. In contrast to birdsongs, which are light and quick, the song of the whale is heavy and slow, a sort of muted trumpeting interspersed with ratcheting and at times with a surprisingly high, thin whining. It is jubilant and boisterous, eerie and sorrowful, often reminding one of an echo. I had the feeling the whale sometimes experimented with different kinds of sound and when pleased with one drew it out, then abruptly reverted to the ones he'd practiced before, even including a loud, rude Bronx cheer.

The question naturally arises as to why whales make these noises. "It must be the mating call," is the first suggestion most people come up with. But that theory doesn't stand up to scientific investigation. The truth is that nobody has figured out why whales make the noises they make. But then, as my husband pointed out, nobody has figured out why human beings make the noises they make either. Miss McNulty believes whales sing so they won't be alone.

I know a Vermont policeman who was on duty as a game warden one day during hunting season. He sat quietly in the woods and heard a stirring in the leaves over a little rise and soon a young bear appeared about thirty yards away. The bear lay down on his side and squirmed around in a circle in the dead leaves, pushing them into a pile in the center of the circle. Then he climbed a tree and jumped into the pile. He did this not once but again and again. Obviously he was having fun.

I have always found animals irresistible. The whole idea of a kingdom of beings utterly separate and distinct from ourselves who nevertheless gaze upon us and think thoughts about us ravishes me. What do they mean? Why are they there? What did God mean by making them? When he made man, he made him in his own image. When he made animals, his imagination ranged wide and free. But we confront them, we breathe the same air and walk the same earth and live and move and have our being in the same Creator. So we seek to understand them, and quite naturally we ascribe to them our own passions and needs--the ambition of the forsaken mongrel who roams the streets, hoping for some useful niche in the scheme of things; the loneliness of the tremendous beast that moves through dark oceans, singing his wistful song on the off chance that there will be ears to hear; the gaiety of the little yearling bear who, all alone, makes his arrangement for joy and then joyfully climbs, plunges, plays and climbs again.

These creatures are, I suppose, unaware (but perhaps I am wrong--perhaps they are profoundly aware) that a human heart goes out, a human ear is tuned, a human eye watches. And perhaps animals are aware of the divine heart and ear and eye. Perhaps they are not so oblivious as we. Even young lions, according to the Psalmist, "seek their food from God." Look at the face of a good dog. There is simplicity and gentleness and reverence in those liquid eyes. Does he behold the face of the Father? It is easy for me to believe that he does.

God meant the animals to instruct us. I am sure that is one of the things he meant. When he had listened to all the arguments and complaints of his servant Job, and all the bombast of his friends, he answered by the revelation of himself. And this revelation, beginning with the dimensions of the universe, the mighty harmony of the morning stars, the phenomena of sea, clouds, snow, hail, rain, dew, hoarfrost, ice and the constellations, wound up with animals.

What Job didn't know then was that God had already identified himself with one of his own creatures, the gentlest, most harmless little animal of all. He was a Lamb, slain from the foundation of the world.

I have often thought that that terrible ash heap on which poor Job scratched and shrieked would have been made so much more endurable if he had had the least inkling of that. He was overpowered, but had he any idea at all of how he was loved? I have been comforted, in the midst of what seemed to me like ashes, by the thought of the Lamb, and even (does it seem absurd?) by the unflagging attention and affection of a little black dog. For I remember that when Jesus was tempted in the wilderness he had two comforters--angels and animals. The record says he was "with the wild beasts," which I once took to mean he was endangered by them as well as tempted by Satan. I now think otherwise. The animals were surely no threat to him. They kept him company in his sore struggle.

When the impact of life seems about to break us, we can put our minds for a few minutes on fellow creatures--the whale, the bear, or things that "take life blithely, like birds and babies," as Martin Luther said--and remember that there is a sacrifice at the heart of it all. The Lamb became the Shepherd, bearing and caring for the sheep, laying down his life for them both as shepherd and as Lamb, and, in the end, the Book of the Revelation promises, "the Lamb in the midst of the throne shall be their Shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of living water, and God shall wipe away every tear from their eyes."

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[nChrist]

Author: Elisabeth Elliot
Source: Love Has A Price Tag
Scripture:
The Path of Lonliness


Those Personality Tests - Page 1

Aristotle said that the purpose of education is to make the pupil like or dislike what he ought. To be educated is to be able to make distinctions. But we are being educated nowadays to believe that distinctions are to be deplored. What you like or dislike has nothing whatever to do with the object. It's merely a matter of taste.

Edwin Newman is one of the few public figures who clings to the quaint idea that distinctions in language are important. It still matters to him whether hopefully means "with hope" or "I hope that," and whether momentarily means "for a moment" or "in a moment."

Distinctions in dress have become fewer and fewer, for the carefully studied "unstudied" look is adopted by most Americans most of the time, whether they're headed for a hike or a party.

Distinctions of race, color, sex and creed are being obliterated as fast as possible, so that we may become a people without identity colorless, sexless and faithless.

I went to a conference a couple of weeks ago sponsored by a mission organization. The psychiatrist who screens candidates for that mission administered to the entire audience, purely for their own interest (he said), five of the simpler personality tests which he uses. I, like everybody else, dutifully filled in the blanks. It was my first experience of this sort of thing. Nobody had thought of it as a prerequisite for missionaries back in my day, and my missionary friends at the conference agreed with me that no one of the five of us would have made it to Ecuador if they had.

Each question on the "temperament" test began with words like: "Do you feel," "Are you easily tempted to," "Do you tend to," "Is it difficult for you to," "Do you prefer," "Are you regarded as," "Do you like," "Are you comfortable with," "Do you appear"--every one of them questions for which there could be no absolute answers. The doctor assured us that there were no "right" or "wrong" answers." It's just a matter of what's right for you."

Very soothing. No moral distinctions have any bearing on this test. That was what the psychiatrist was saying. The difference between right and wrong really has nothing at all to do with a person's temperament. A simple matter of "pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold." We're not concerned here with what ought to be but simply with what is. Not with what I ought to like but with what I do like, for whatever reasons. Learning "who I am" requires merely the listing of traits--true enough, I suppose, but is there any place for judgment of them as faults or virtues?

But as it turned out, I was categorized at once by my answers. Distinctions were made, all right, whether the tester chose to call them moral ones or "value judgments" or not. If I admire what, in a less analytical age, were called virtues and am "upset" by what were once called faults, I am classified as "R"--regimented, regular, reserved, rigid. To like punctuality, neatness, thrift and self--discipline is to be regimented. To dislike tardiness, slovenliness, profligacy and self-indulgence is to be hostile. (My "hostility scale" was dangerously high.) To be upset by punctuality, neatness, thrift and self-discipline is not regarded, I found, as any index of hostility but rather of geniality, and to "feel comfortable with" tardiness, slovenliness, profligacy and self-indulgence is to be classified as "Z" which, we were informed, means you've got "zip, zing, zest, and zowie"! The conclusion is that discipline and joy are mutually exclusive. (Not certain that I had understood, I inquired whether a person who is rated "pure R" therefore has no zip, zing, zest and zowie. The solemn reply: "That is correct.")

There are a number of questions to be raised about this kind of "testing."

What are the presuppositions which underlie the test questions themselves?

First, that people's behavior is governed by their feelings. For the Christian, at least, this is not necessarily true. If my answer to the question Are you irritated when someone is late for an appointment? is yes, this does not always mean that I shout at him when he finally arrives. Paul said, "Be angry and sin not." He said, "Never act from motives of rivalry or jealousy." Jesus said, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto," not, "Inasmuch as ye have felt it toward one of the least of these..." If I say yes when asked if I find it difficult to discipline myself, this does not mean that I therefore do not discipline myself.

Second, that traits of character are--with two notable exceptions--morally indifferent. We are all conditioned or constituted as we are and therefore O.K. We are told to express ourselves, tell the world how we "really feel," and "hang loose." We need not encourage any course of action on any ground other than our own (even "gut-level") feelings.

But there is one unarguable virtue toward which some effort (I gather) needs to be directed. That is tolerance. And there is one thoroughly damnable fault which must be eradicated. That is intolerance. We are encouraged to be tolerant of just about everything and intolerant of almost nothing. (We are permitted to be intolerant of just one thing--intolerance.)

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Those Personality Tests - Page 2

Do certain kinds of behavior merely receive, or do they also merit, certain kinds of response? Are certain reactions more just or appropriate than others? Are there things which are actually in themselves pleasurable, admirable, likable or tolerable, and other things which are painful, detestable, unlikable and intolerable? The Bible makes clear distinctions. Behavior is not merely a question of taste. It speaks of "the activities of the lower nature," which include sexual immorality, impurity of mind, sensuality, hatred, jealousy, bad temper, rivalry and envy. Nowhere does it admonish us to tolerate such activity. (Loving all others certainly does not imply an inability to distinguish between the lovable and the unlovable. How then could we tell an enemy when we saw one?)

Over against that list is the fruit produced in human life by the Spirit of God: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, fidelity, tolerance and self-control. "And no law," the Bible says, "exists against any of them." No law, perhaps, except the norms of the personality testers. They like most of the things in the second list, though they won't stand for too much fidelity or self-control. Qualities such as those reveal a tendency to rigidity and are, by the testers' standards, unlikely to occur in the same list with tolerance. But in the world where one quality of personality is as good as another, what need do we have for peace, patience, kindness and generosity? If I am to repay evil with good I must first discern evil.

The total effect of the tests was to diminish responsibility. I found that I was a "type." Everybody's a type. So there we are. Accept it. Like it. Like all the other types. We're all O.K. No need to condemn anything. No need to feel guilty. Don't distinguish between personality traits; that's a "value judgment" and value judgments are always bad. So what if you're a fidgeter, an underachiever, a social boor, a spendthrift? Don't let it upset you. Nothing matters, finally--a messy house or a clean one, work done or work undone, appointments kept or missed, bills paid or unpaid, health guarded or ruined, feelings soothed or ruffled--just be yourself. Here I am, everybody, good old lovable me. Take me the way I am. Love me. If my habits annoy you, there's something wrong with you, not me. You're the one who needs help. You're "uptight."

But no. As I was driving home, mulling over the whole thing, I saw that it wouldn't do. Of course we're meant to love people. Love bears anything, believes anything, endures anything. But we're not meant to ignore distinctions. I saw that if I need not condemn anything neither need I praise. There is nothing to strive for, nothing to emulate, nothing to prize. "Can you be righteous," Traherne wrote, "unless you be just in rendering to things their due esteem?"

It seemed a frightening thing to me to know that the servants of God might be screened by tests which would place the highest value on being easy on oneself and others. Candidates who were easy to live with simply because nothing really made much difference to them would prove, by these methods, to be most desirable. But when Jesus called disciples he asked them to deny--to "give up their right to"--themselves.

Would the apostle Paul have passed those tests? It was he who said, "Endure hardness," "Submit yourselves one to another," "In humility think more of each other than you do of yourselves," "Be strong," "Take your stand," "Live lives worthy of your high calling." He even had the courage to say "Let my example be the standard by which you can tell who are the genuine Christians"!

"Here is a last piece of advice," he wrote to the Philippians. "If you believe in goodness and if you value the approval of God, fix your minds on whatever is true and honorable and just and pure and lovely and praiseworthy. Model your conduct on what you have learned from me, on what I have told you and shown you, and you will find that the God of peace will be with you."

Our faculties must be trained by practice and taught by the Spirit of God to make the strong and sharp distinctions so essential to Christian character.

It is not our experiences which in the final analysis change us, it is always and only our responses to those experiences. In any of the holy places I could have responded with cynicism, rejection, even outrage. Their mysterious power then would have been lost on me. I found it possible instead to enter in by faith, giving myself in each place to the One who was there before me and who, despite all that worldly-minded humanity had done to those places, was still there if I sought him.

Near one of the olive trees in Gethsemane one of the Darmstadt Sisters of Mary has put up a small plaque: "O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me, nevertheless not as I will but as thou wilt. Thou, O Jesus, in the darkness of night and grief didst utter these words of surrender and trust to God the Father. In gratitude and love I will, in my hours of fear and desolation, say after thee, My Father, I cannot understand what thou art about but in thee do I put my trust."

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