Elizabeth Elliot Devotions

[nChrist]

Author: Elisabeth Elliot
Source: Love Has A Price Tag
Scripture:
The Path of Lonliness
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Femininity - Page 1

My late philosopher-theologian husband used to tell his students that the importance of a thing was in direct ratio to the difficulty of defining it. Last year I asked my students in seminary to write a paper defining masculinity and femininity. They were allowed a maximum of two pages in which to do it, but I told them it would be fine with me if they could manage it in two sentences. (None did.) All of them testified that it was the most difficult assignment of the course.

The difficulty has been exacerbated, I am convinced, by the so-called liberation movement, which starts from the premise that there are no distinctions between the sexes other than the purely biological. It seems a strangely naive and cramped view of the fundamental differentiation of our human existence, especially in this day when most physicians acknowledge that illnesses involve more than the body, when psychiatrists acknowledge that mental illness may have physical causes, and when any spiritual counselor knows that spiritual problems often affect both mind and body. Why, in this most obvious area of sexual distinction, should we blandly (and preposterously) assert that it has no implications deeper than the physiological?

One Thanksgiving weekend I attended the Evangelical Women's Caucus in Washington, D.C. A few women who had read some of my writings greeted me with an astonished "What are you doing here?"

"I'm an evangelical woman, am I not?" I said, but of course I knew why they were surprised. The conference was to deal with the question of a "biblical" approach to feminism. Those who attended were expected to be feminists, and I don't belong in that crowd.

I cannot be a "feminist" because, for one thing, I believe in femininity--a category which I see as infinitely deeper than the merely physical, a quality radically distinct from masculinity.

I listened in vain for the word femininity in any of the major addresses, and I looked in vain for any workshop which might touch on the subject. What women feel, what women want, what women do and what they want to do and don't want to do were all discussed with enthusiasm and even with passion, but what women are simply escaped everybody's notice. One workshop leader, Letha Scanzoni, co-author of an evangelical feminist book, All We're Meant to Be, used Ephesians 5 to support her idea of egalitarian marriage, claiming mutual submission to be Paul's point there, thus divesting the analogy of its sense.

One of the planks of the feminist platform is that sexual distinctions beyond the biological ones are all culturally defined. Our ideas of femininity, they say, are purely conditioned. If we try giving dump trucks to little girls and tea sets to little boys, things would be quickly reversed, we are told. The only reason no woman has ever been a Grand Master in chess is that women are not socially conditioned to be great chess players. Sounds believable until you think of Russia, the country from which most Grand Masters have come, and a country in which as many women as men play chess (but we would not dare to suggest that the feminine intellect is in any way different from--not to say inferior to--the masculine). Women are not encouraged to seek positions which require aggression, it is said, and therefore aggression is considered a masculine trait. Society can change all this. Just start interchanging roles, encouraging girls to be plant foremen, boys to be nurses. Insist on husbands doing housework and wives taking equal financial responsibility. Make women pay alimony, conscript them for active military service, let men knit and cry in public if they want to, and we'll see what happens.

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Femininity - Page 2

But all this sort of thing is quite beside the point. The idea of male and female was God's idea. None of us would have thought of it, and God has never defined it for anybody. He's told us what he did--he created them in his own image, male and female and he's shown us how he did it. He made the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into him the breath of life; then, because he saw in his creation the first thing that was "not good," namely a man alone, he made for the man a woman. He made her for the man. To me this is the first constituent of femininity. Then he made her from the man--derived, flesh of his flesh, bone of his bone, like and yet wondrously unlike. This is the second constituent. Finally, he brought her to the man, designed exactly to suit his peculiar need, prepared to meet that need for a helper, and then, in divine wisdom and love, given. This is the third constituent.

But what is this man, what is this woman? What are these elusive and indefinable but universally acknowledged qualities on which every culture and society has shaped its existence? The question which feminists resolutely refuse to confront at all is one vastly prior to the question of social conditioning. It is this: Why has every society since the beginning of time conditioned its males and females so distinctively? Granted, the ideas of masculinity and femininity have been expressed differently from time to time and from place to place, but the distinctions have without exception been, until the late twentieth century, preserved.

Michael Marshall in his profound little book Gospel Healing and Salvation says, "Modern man is hung up on his identity with others in lengthy counselings. The Christian realizes that his true identity is a mystery known only to God, and that any attempt at this stage on the road of discipleship to define himself is bound to be blasphemous and destructive of that mysterious work of God forming Christ in him by the power of the Holy Spirit. Certainly the Christian does not define his identity by his actions: that is the very ultimate in anti-Christ, for it is in effect saying that I am my own creator.

Feminists, regrettably, ask us to define ourselves not as men and women but as "human beings" (whatever that means), identified only by our function in society. We must rid ourselves, Virginia Mollenkott declared at the Washington caucus, of "all gender-based categories.

Through the centuries the church has seen the soul as "female before God"--that is, the receptor, the one who responds, who is created for the other, the one acted upon, the one who gives herself. The structure of the female body, designed to carry, to bear and to nurture--surely it is but the material evidence of the mystery of femininity, a physical sign of metaphysical realities with which we tamper only to our own peril. Femininity is indisputably bound up with the concept of motherhood. This is not social conditioning. It is not a lamentable prejudice of which we ought to try to purify ourselves. It is most certainly not, as some feminists cry, "barbaric." The physical signs, far from being extraneous frills we would do well to ignore or overcome, point to the invisible truth of womanhood, exemplified for all women forever in that simple peasant girl, the virgin Mary, utterly feminine, utterly ready to give herself up to the over-shadowing Holy Ghost in the will of God, ready to receive, to bear, to nurture "that holy thing," the Lord Christ, ready to go down into death to give him life, ready to have even her own soul pierced by a sword.

This is an example, I say, for all women forever--not only for those who are the actual mothers of children, but for all who seriously contemplate the Creation Story and accept their place as it is described there, not a competitive one, not even (heaven forbid) an "equal" one, but a different one, mysterious, defined at last only by God the Creator himself, with its own divinely designed kingdom, its own power, its own glory, and all in perfect complement to that other mystery which every real woman recognizes when she sees it--recognizes but cannot define: masculinity.

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[nChrist]

Author: Elisabeth Elliot
Source: Love Has A Price Tag
Scripture: Matthew 5:5-24
The Path of Lonliness


As We Forgive Those... - Page 1

A young minister leading a Bible study recently cited a reference in the Psalms to sin.

"I don't care what you say!" a middle-aged woman blurted out. "I'm not going to forgive my mother-in-law! What she did to me I could never forgive."

The minister had not mentioned forgiveness, or any specific sin, but the Word of God, sharper than any two-edged sword, had pierced the woman's heart. Her outburst was a dead giveaway of the resentment that smoldered beneath the surface.

A girl I'll call Sandra phoned several months ago to tell me that she had just been asked to be godmother to her friend Vicky's child. It was impossible, Sandra said, to consider such a thing since Vicky, once a close friend, had hurt her very deeply. The two couples had vacationed together and their friendship disintegrated over a series of trivial but unforgivable hurts. They had hardly seen each other since, and now here was Vicky expecting Sandra to be her child's godmother. What was Sandra to do?

"Forgive her," I said.

"Forgive her! But she isn't even sorry. I don't think she even remembers how she hurt me!"

Nevertheless, I told her, if it was her Christian duty she was asking me about, there was no question as to what it was.

"You mean I'm the one who has to make the move?"

"Do you expect God to forgive you for your sins?"

"Well, certainly."

"Then you must forgive Vicky."

"Is there someplace in the Bible that actually says that?"

"Remember the Lord's Prayer? 'Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.' That's followed by a pretty plain statement: 'If you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive you your trespasses."'

I could almost hear Sandra catch her breath on the telephone. There was a pause.

"I never thought of that. And I said that prayer just this morning. So . . . I can't expect to be forgiven unless I forgive?"

She didn't see how she could do that. I agreed most emphatically that she could not--not without God's grace. Everything in human nature goes against that idea. But the gospel is the message of reconciliation. Reconciliation not only to God, but to his purposes in the world, and to all our fellow human beings. We talked for a little while about the absolute necessity of forgiveness. It is a command. It is the road to restoration of ruptured friendships. It releases us from ourselves. I promised Sandra I would pray for the grace of God to work in her and in Vicky, and that she would be enabled freely and completely to forgive.

"But what if she still isn't sorry?"

"We don't pray, 'Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who ask us to.' We say 'as we forgive those who trespass against us.' It's not a matter of ignoring what's been done. When God forgives he doesn't merely overlook our trespasses. He doesn't ask us to overlook others' trespasses either--he asks us to forgive them. So that means our Christian obligation is to forgive anybody who has invaded our rights, our territory, our comfort, our self-image, whether they acknowledge the invasion or not."

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As We Forgive Those... - Page 2

A week later I learned that Sandra's and my prayers had been answered far beyond what either of us had had faith to expect. Not only did Sandra forgive, but Vicky even apologized, and the two were reconciled.

To forgive is to die. It is to give up one's right to self, which is precisely what Jesus requires of anyone who wants to be his disciple.

"If anyone wants to follow in my footsteps, he must give up all right to himself, carry his cross every day and keep close behind me. For the man who wants to save his life will lose it, but the man who loses his life for my sake will save it."

Following Christ means walking the road he walked, and in order to forgive us he had to die. His follower may not refuse to relinquish his own right, his own territory, his own comfort, or anything that he regards as his. Forgiveness is relinquishment. It is a laying down. No one can take it from us, any more than anyone could take the life of Jesus if he had not laid it down of his own will. But we can do as he did. We can offer it up, writing off whatever loss it may entail, in the sure knowledge that the man who loses his life or his reputation or his "face" or anything else for the sake of Christ will save it.

The woman who hates her mother-in-law is wallowing in offenses. Her resentment has grown and festered over twenty-seven years, and it is "fierce in proportion as it is futile," as John Oman wrote. Her bitterness, the minister tells me, has poisoned her own life and that of the church of which she is a member.

The Bible tells a story about a man who, being forgiven by the king a debt of millions of pounds, went immediately to one who owed him a few shillings, grabbed him by the throat and demanded payment. We react to a story like that. "Nobody acts like that!" we say, and then, grabbed, as it were, by the truth of the story ourselves, we realize, "Nobody but us!"

When Jesus, nailed to a Roman cross, prayed, "Father, forgive them," he wielded a weapon against which Caesar himself had no power. The helpless, dying Son of God, a picture of defeat, proclaimed the victory of Inexorable Love. Who can stand up to the force of forgiveness?

Several times people have come to me to confess bitterness which they have felt toward me about which I had known nothing at all. They knew I had known nothing. Were they then taking occasion to air a grievance which ought to have been a matter between them and God? Was this a pious method of expressing sinful feelings which they should have asked God to cleanse? The Bible does not tell us to go to one against whom we have a grievance. It tells us to go to one who has a grievance against us: "If you are offering your gift at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift" (Matthew 5:2-24). We are commanded to forgive anyone who has trespassed. We are not told to call his attention to the offense. We are to ask the forgiveness of anyone against whom we have trespassed. This may be a long journey for us, geographically or emotionally and spiritually. But if we mean to be disciples of the Crucified we must make that journey and slay the dragon of self-interest. We thereby align ourselves with God, acting no longer independently of him or for our own "rights."

Those who bear the Cross must also bear others' burdens. This includes the burden of responsibility for sin as well as the sharing of suffering. What room can there possibly be for touchiness or a self-regarding fastidiousness in the true burden-bearer? Forgiveness is a clear-eyed and cool-headed acceptance of the burden of responsibility.

The life of St. Francis of Assisi exemplified his own profound understanding that "it is in pardoning that we are pardoned."

If we too intend to take up the Cross we commit ourselves to the same quality of life. Then we can with truthfulness sing

I take, O Cross, thy shadow for my abiding place.
I ask no other sunshine than the sunshine of thy face,
Content to let the world go by, to know no gain or loss,
My sinful self, my only shame; my glory all the Cross.

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[nChrist]

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


One Difference Between Me and Sparrows - Page 1

I have, for this month, a very quiet room in the top of a very quiet old house on a quiet hillside in New Hampshire. No sound disturbs my thoughts except that of white-throated sparrows, black-capped chickadees, crickets and some horses who tear quietly at the long grass around the house and occasionally puff or mutter under their breath. My mother is the only other resident, and she is quieter than the sparrows and the rest. She fixes my breakfast and afterward, when I start to carry dishes to the kitchen, she says, "Run along. I'll do these. You get to your writing."

There is only one thing wrong with a situation like this. If what you write turns out to be bilge, you haven't a rag of excuse. You can't tell anybody that it was because you couldn't concentrate. It wasn't because you had so many other responsibilities and unavoidable interruptions. It wasn't because of "the pace of modern life." It was because . . . well, admit it, it was because a lot of what's inside is bilge, God help us all.

The Bible says the just shall live by faith. The "just" is not a special category of specially gifted or inspired saints. It is the people whose hearts are turned toward God. The people who know that their own righteousness doesn't count for much and who therefore have accepted God's. I belong in that category. Therefore the rule for me is the rule for all the rest: live by faith. So I have been pondering, up here in this quiet room, what it means for a writer to live by faith. It was easy enough to come up with some things it doesn't mean. It does not mean that my intellect need not be hard at work. It does not mean that I trust God to do my work for me, any more than for a housewife to live by faith means she expects God to do her dishes or make her beds. It does not mean that I have a corner on inspiration that Norman Mailer, say, or Truman Capote don't claim. (I don't know whether Mr. Mailer or Mr. Capote live by faith--I haven't come across any comments by either on the subject.)

The great prophets of the Old Testament lived by faith, but they were certainly divinely inspired. Does this mean that God alone and not they, too--was responsible for the work they did? Even though they were acted upon in a special sense by the Spirit of God as I don't ever expect to be acted upon, they had to pay a price. Each of them had to make the individual commitment when he was called, and to offer up then and there his own plans and hopes (and surely his reputation) in order that his personality, his temperament, his intellect, his peculiar gifts and experience might be the instruments through which the Spirit did his work, or the console upon which he played. All this, even though I am no prophet, I must take seriously.

But there is one other thing that living by faith does not mean. This is the thing that makes me furrow my brow and sigh, because I can't help wishing that it did mean this. If in fact I have sided with the "just," if I am willing to work as hard as I can, if I arrange things physically to contribute to the highest concentration and if I discipline myself to sit down at the typewriter for X number of hours per day (even when the fresh perfume of the balsams comes through the windows, calling me to the woods; even when the lake glitters in the sunshine and says, "Come on!"), may I then expect that what I turn out will stop the world, bring the public panting to the bookstores, shine as the brightness of the firmament?

I may not. There are no promises to cover anything of the kind.

In an Isak Dinesen story a lady asked a cardinal, "Are you sure that it is God whom you serve?" The cardinal sighed deeply. "That, madam," he replied, "is a risk that the artists and priests of the world must take."

And if they take the risk, they stake their lives on the task and it may turn out to be no more effective than Moses' efforts with Pharaoh, or the words of the prophets to the people to whom they cried. I get this far in my argument with myself and am brought up short with the realization that I cannot take comfort from that, for in the case of Moses and the prophets there was nothing wrong with either the messenger or the message. In my case, there is a lot wrong with both.

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One Difference Between Me and Sparrows - Page 2

Then I think of Abel. And here's comfort. Abel's name is listed in the Hall of Fame of Hebrews 11. Like the others in that list (and a motley assortment it is), he is there for one thing, and only one thing: the exercise of faith. The demonstration of his faith was his offering. The thing that made his offering acceptable while Cain's was unacceptable was faith. Faith did not guarantee the "success" of the sacrifice. In human terms it was no help at all. Abel ended up dead as a result of it. But the manner in which he offered his gift--"by faith"--made it, the Bible says, "a more excellent sacrifice" than Cain's, and qualified him for the roster of Hebrews.

For me, then, for whom writing happens to be the task, living by faith means several things.

It means accepting the task from God (taking the "risk" here that the cardinal spoke of). Here is a thing to be done. It appears to be a thing to be done by me, so I'll do it, and I'll do it for God.

It means coming at the task trustingly. That's the way Abel brought his sacrifice, I'm sure. Not with fear, not with a false humility that it wasn't "good enough." What would ever be good enough, when it comes right down to it? "All things come of Thee, O Lord, and of Thine own have we given Thee." All that distinguishes one thing from another is the manner of its offering. I must remember that the God to whom I bring it has promised to receive. That's all I need to know.

It means doing the job with courage to face the consequences. I might, of course, write a bestseller. Most of us feel we could handle that kind of consequence. (God knows we couldn't, and doesn't suffer us to be tempted above that we are able.) On the other hand, I might fail. Abel was murdered. Jeremiah was dropped into a pit of slime. John the Baptist got his head chopped off. These were much worse fates than being delivered into the hands of one's literary critics ("Much worse?" one of my selves says, and "Oh, come now--much worse," answers another. "Come off it. You're not putting yourself in a class with those towering figures, are you?" "I guess I was for a minute there.") Is the faith that gives me the courage I need based on former literary success? Not for a moment. For each time I sit down to begin a new book I'm aware that I may have used up my allotment of creativity. It's another kind of faith I need, faith in God.

It means giving it everything I've got. Now I have to acknowledge that I've never done this. I've never finished any job in my life and been able to survey it proudly and say, "Look at that! I certainly did my best that time!" I look at the job and say, "Why didn't I do such and such? This really ought to be done over." But "giving it everything I've got" is my goal. I cannot claim to be living by faith unless I'm living in obedience. Even the miracles Jesus performed were contingent on somebody's obedience, on somebody's doing some little thing such as filling up water pots, stretching out a hand, giving up a lunch. The work I do needs to be transformed. I know that very well. But there has to be something there to be transformed. It's my responsibility to see that it's there.

I can hear the white-throated sparrow now. Sending out his pure sweet call, filling the air from his tiny syrinx with the song he was made to sing, an offering "good and acceptable and perfect" to his Maker--a fact which, unless the sparrow is equipped to doubt, he need never struggle to believe.

Like the sparrow, I've got a song to sing. Unlike the sparrow, I must sing mine by faith.

____________________

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[nChrist]

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


The Trail to Shandia - Page 1

There is a road east of the Andes from the little tea-growing town of Puyo, to an unnamed point in the jungle just beyond the mostly Indian town of Pano. When I lived in Ecuador most of the road was not there at all, and it would have taken you three days to cover that distance. I covered it a few weeks ago in the space of a few hours in a jeep driven by a missionary named Ella Rae. We traveled along the south side of the Ansuc River and crossed, on a suspension bridge, the Atun Yacu, which we once crossed by dugout canoe. The road took us through the towns of Napo and Tena and then straight up the middle of what used to be a mission station airstrip in Pano. When the road ended at the Pano River, Ella Rae bade us good-bye and we set out on foot for Shandia, one of the places where I used to live. I had been over the trail from Tena to Shandia many times, but, although the government has laid logs crosswise to make walking easier, horses and cows have been making use of it and the trail was in the worst condition I'd ever seen.

We were two women and one man--he in shorts and rubber knee boots, we in standard jungle garb of blouses, skirts and tennis shoes. As we plowed our way through the mud some spiritual parallels came to mind.

Every step of faith is a step faith. In some places the logs were submerged in mud. Finding one to put your foot on did not make it easier to find the next one.

Each step was a decision, but to make it a problem would have halted progress altogether. Sometimes the choice was to balance on a three-inch-in-diameter log laid parallel to the path and take the chance of slipping off sideways and falling into the mud, or to step deliberately into mud (which was like peanut butter) up to one's knees, or to try to beat one's way through the tangle at the side of the trail (and of course that tangle could always hold snakes). You had to keep moving. Decisions, therefore, had to be snap decisions. If we had let each step be a problem, to be paused and pondered over, we'd still be there. If a decision turned out to be the wrong one, which it often seemed to be, you simply pulled yourself out and kept on.

The trail--always leading us to our goal--took on varied aspects. We were not always in mud up to our knees, or trying to find a footing on logs which were in some places floating and in some places submerged. For short spaces the trail was of gravel. Sometimes there were hills to climb and rivers to wade through where we got the chance to rinse off a few pounds of accumulated jungle soil. At times we were in sunshine where the forest had been cut back to make pasture, at other times in deep shade.

There was a tiny footprint in front of me. You learn when you travel jungle trails to recognize the differences in footprints. A party of Indians had evidently preceded us not long before. One of them was a child no more than three. As we came to what seemed to me impassable sections, I found myself spurred on by the knowledge that where the trail was firmer I would find the little footprint. Sure enough. That little person had made it through what was for him hip-high mud, across the precarious logs, into the streams, up the hills and down the slick ravines. There is something amazingly heartening in the knowledge that somebody else has been over the course before especially if it's somebody who has had manifestly greater difficulties than ours to overcome. Most of the time there was no evidence at all of his going, and I could lose heart. But here and there again the evidence lay, clear and unmistakable. If he had made it, so could I.

We made it. We reached the house my husband Jim Elliot had built twenty-three years ago. The only reason it still stands is that it was built on a cement slab with poured cement walls up to the level of the window sills, boards from there up to the aluminum roof. An ordinary jungle house would have vanished long since. Mary began sweeping out the bat droppings and the dead cockroaches and spiders, tidying up, lighting candles and cooking a simple supper while Frank and I went to visit the Indians in their houses nearby. Thirteen years lay lightly on most of them, but a generation of children had become unrecognizable.

We pulled out some bedding I had left stored in steel drums and stayed the night in the house. A mouse had to be evicted from one of the mattresses. The sound of the Atun Yacu at the foot of the cliff was the same as it had always been. The shadows cast by the candles seemed to take the shapes familiar to me from the nights when I had risen to feed my baby in this very bedroom. Her toy wicker furniture was still there, its upholstery mildewed and nearly colorless.

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The Trail to Shandia - Page 2

Not quite three weeks have passed, and I sit in my green-carpeted study in Massachusetts. The trail--always leading to the goal--does take on different aspects. Soon I will face my seminary students again to remind them that each footstep along the trail matters, not only the goal toward which they aspire. The clean, hard gravel matters, but so does the slough with the floating logs, the hill and the deep ravine. The traveler who makes each decision about where to put his foot is not different from the person who has reached the house and rests at last by the fireplace with a cup of tea and a candle. Are they prospective ministers? Then they must be now, while they are on the journey, true men and women, attending to today's task, living their lives today. They do not see into heaven. They have to live on earth. They must move steadily, putting one foot in front of the other, no matter whether it is the log, the rock or the mire that receives it. They must rightly discharge each small duty, whether it be to a professor, a landlady, a wife or an employer.

I will remind them, too, that the Bible does not speak of problems. As Corrie ten Boom says, "God has no problems, only plans." We ought to think not of problems but of purpose. We encounter the obstacle, we make a choice--always with the goal in mind.

We are conditioned nowadays, however, to define everything as a problem. A little girl on a TV commercial pipes, "I have this terrible problem with my hair! But my mommy bought No More Tangles, and now there's no more tangles!" A group of young wives asked me to speak to them on "The Problems of Widowhood." I declined, explaining in the first place that I did not regard widowhood as a problem, and in the second place that if I did I was not sure I had any warrant for unloading my own problems onto the shoulders of young women who had enough of their own, and in the third place a widow has only one "problem," when it comes right down to it--she has no husband. And that's something nobody can do anything about.

Life is full of things we can't do anything about, but which we are supposed to do something with. "He himself endured a cross and thought nothing of its shame because of the joy." A very different story from the one which would have been written if Jesus had been prompted by the spirit of our own age: "Don't just endure the cross--think about it, talk about it, share it, express your gut-level feelings, get in touch with yourself, find out who you are, define the problem, analyze it, get counseling, get the experts' opinions, discuss solutions, work through it." Jesus endured. He thought nothing of the shame. The freedom, the freshness of that valiant selflessness is like a strong wind. How badly such a wind is needed to sweep away the pollution of our self-preoccupation!

Analysis can make you feel guilty for being human. To be human, of course, means to be sinful, and for our sinfulness we must certainly "feel" the guilt which is rightly ours--but not everything human is sinful. There is a man on the radio every afternoon from California whose consummate arrogance in making an instant analysis of every caller's difficulties is simply breathtaking. A woman called in to talk about her problems with her husband who happens to be an actor. "Oh," said the counselor, "of course the only reason anybody goes into acting is because they need approval." Bang. Husband's problem identified. Next question. I turned off the radio and asked myself, with rising guilt feelings, "Do I need approval?" Answer: yes. Does anybody not need approval? Is there anybody who is content to live his life without so much as a nod from anybody else? Wouldn't he be, of all men, the most devilishly self-centered? Wouldn't his supreme solitude be the most hellish? It's human to want to know that you please somebody.

We visited another place where I lived--Tewaenon-- where the Aucas live. It had been sixteen years since I had seen them, but they remembered me, calling me by the name they had given me, "Gikari," and everybody beginning at once, as was their custom, to tell me what they had done since they saw me. Dabu, with two of his three wives, came walking up the airstrip and began immediately--there are no greetings in Auca--to tell me that when he had heard of the death of my second husband he had cried. This prompted Ipa to remark that she had sat down and written me a letter when she heard of his death, but on rereading the letter said to herself, "It's no good," and threw it away. Sometimes readers of things that I write tell me long afterward that they have thought of writing me a letter, or have written one and discarded it, thinking, "She doesn't need my approval." Well, they're mistaken--for wouldn't it be a lovely thing to know that a footprint you have left on the trail has, just by being there, heartened somebody else?

____________________

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[nChrist]

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


All Creatures Here Below - Page 1

The New Yorker had a picture on its cover in February 1968 of a group of people looking at sleeping puppies in a pet shop window. Every face was alight, and the women, of course, were tapping on the glass, trying to elicit some response from the fetching little beagles in the pen.

What is it we see in the faces of puppies? What else in the whole world instantly softens the expressions of the hardest people as does the sight of a little puppy trotting gaily along the sidewalk? Is there something eternal, some intimation of unutterable sweetness there which we know will be gone in a matter of weeks? We want to get our hands on the softness; we crave response. People who would not dream of addressing a stranger on the street will address a puppy and then often, as though they cannot help themselves, the owner of the puppy as well.

Some years ago my husband and I bought a tiny purebred Scottish terrier. He had a box-shaped body on which black fur grew in the shape of a horse blanket, shaggy and shiny. He had another smaller box for a head, with jaunty chin whiskers, wonderfully bright black eyes and a glistening black nose. His ears pointed sharply, and he moved them up, sideways and back--he could even revolve them--depending on whether he was looking, listening or waiting hopefully to be petted. His tail was a little cone in almost constant motion. His feet were like short flanges at the ends of his unbelievably short legs. His legs were, in fact, just barely long enough to keep his chin off the floor.

The dog's name was MacPhearce. He had a terrier's feistiness and could bark sharply or growl like a tenor gargling, but was putting on an act ("Is he trained to kill on command?" a man on the street asked), for he was really very affectionate and badly wanted friends.

I put a blue collar on him and took him out on a blue leash. (He did not, however, wear a plaid coat or rubbers. It seemed logical to me that the coat he came with was designed for his needs.) People would catch a glimpse of him and stop in their tracks. "Look at this dog!" they would say, if they had anyone with them to say it to, or, "Isn't he adorable?" they would say to me. People under forty often said, "What kind of dog is that?" and people over forty said, "Oh, a Scotty! You don't see many of them anymore!" MacPhearce was not aware that he had gone out of style. He had been succeeded by Boston terriers, then by poodles and boxers and Lhasa apsos. But it never bothered him much, and he behaved as though he was exactly what he was meant to be, which is more than can be said of some human beings. One said, "Ooohhh--I can't stand it, he's so cute!"

I wonder if God felt anything like that on the day he created such creatures. "It is very good" is what he is reported to have said, and I suppose we cannot expect the Almighty to have been thrilled, or even impressed. It was exactly what he had meant. The animal was the living proof of the divine idea.

MacPhearce was not a sinner, theologically speaking, and therefore fulfilled God's intention for him every moment of his life. My husband wrote years ago about a dog he had named Lassie. He believed that she had been "assigned" to him. It was her business to keep him happy, and perhaps of all the marvelous things dogs do for man (herding sheep, retrieving birds, pulling sleds, leading the blind, rescuing the freezing or the drowning), none is more marvelous than this: they are comforters and companions. They think always of their master. What is he doing? Can I accompany him? Is he happy? How can I cheer him?

A woman I know found her teen-age daughter lying on the living room rug one evening, sobbing into the curly fur of their cocker spaniel. The mother had on many occasions wondered if the dog was worth all the fuss and trouble of training, feeding, cleaning fur off the rugs and furniture. She stopped wondering when she saw that the dog was a refuge and a friend to the child when she would have found it impossible to cry on anyone's shoulder. The mother made up her mind then and there that as long as she had children, at least, she would have a dog. (She has since decided that even she needs him.)

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All Creatures Here Below - Page 2

My old friend Dorothy who lives on the Cape has had dachshunds, terriers, poodles and a Scotty. "Oh my, they give so much," she says, "and they ask so little!"

C. S. Lewis had some lovely things to say about animals in his Letters to an American Lady. "I will never laugh at anyone for grieving over a loved beast. I think God wants us to love Him more, not to love creatures (even animals) less. No person, animal, flower, or even pebble, has ever been loved too much--i.e., more than every one of God's works deserves."

In another letter he wrote, "We were talking about cats and dogs the other day and decided that both have consciences but the dog, being an honest, humble person, always has a bad one, but the cat is a Pharisee and always has a good one. When he sits and stares you out of countenance he is thanking God that he is not as these dogs, or these humans, or even as these other cats!"

A dog can gaze with adoration and not be embarrassed, but if he finds himself gazed at by a group not entirely sympathetic, he seems to know this and will often busy himself with licking a paw, or will perhaps decide that he has business elsewhere. He accepts himself for what he is, and us human beings for whatever we may be, and thus teaches us a lesson in the grace of acceptance. Dogs can adapt themselves to whatever treatment we may dish out. If we step on a tail by accident its owner may yelp but will be wagging it at once in forgiveness. A dog's eyes may be filled with reproach if we have left him alone too long, if we go out in the car and tell him to stay, or if his dinner is late, but the reproach is gentle and loving, and he will come and lay his head in our lap seventy times seven.

A truck went by the house the other day labeled Old Mother Hubbard Oven-Baked Dog Foods and Laboratory Diets. The pet food business is an enormous and lucrative one. Any pet shop displays a staggering variety of feeding dishes, foods, toys, medicines, shampoos, flea soaps and powders, beds, baskets, carrying cases, cages, leashes, collars--some of them rhinestone-studded--and garments, including galoshes and raincoats for poodles. We insult our pets by not allowing them to be animals. We violate their being when we try to make them human.

"Love the pride of your dogs," wrote Isak Dinesen. "Let them not grow fat." Put not on them outrageous frippery, I would add. Pamper them not with furniture and food luxurious for people but indecent for animals. Recognize what they are, love them for that, let them love you because you love them for what they are and not because you have made of them a poor facsimile of yourself.

George MacDonald, the Scottish preacher and novelist of the nineteenth century, believed that "dogs always behold the face of the Father." To study a dog's face will make you wonder about the redemption of all creation. Do dogs have souls? We have no clue to that in Scripture. We are told, however, that "everything that exists in heaven or earth shall find its perfection and fulfillment in Christ."

A lady once asked Dr. Harry Ironside of Moody Church in Chicago about the salvation of dogs. She was heartbroken over the death of her little white dog, and was not sure she would be able to enjoy heaven at all if he was not going to be there. "Madam," replied Dr. Ironside, "if when you get to heaven you want your little white dog, I can assure you that he will be there."

What the "perfection and fulfillment" of little white dogs or little black puppies named MacPhearce may mean is not, for us at any rate, a very important question. But it may remind us of unspeakably important questions. Responsibility to our Creator. Obedience to his call. Fulfillment of his purpose for us as men and women who have been given the mandate to take care of the earth. Then we can join with all creatures great and small, and even with the stars of the firmament of which Joseph Addison wrote in 1712:

In reason's ear they all rejoice and utter forth a glorious voice:
Forever singing as they shine, "The hand that made us is divine."

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[nChrist]

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


Three Houses, Three Tabernacles - Page 1

Does the Lord of heaven live in the houses of earth? The prophecies of Isaiah ("Behold, a virgin shall . . . call his name Immanuel") and the Book of Revelation ("Now at last God has his dwelling among man! He will dwell among them and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them," Rev. 21:3 NEB) are fulfilled every day in the homes of those who love God. I've had some glimpses of this lately, and have been blessed by seeing the presence of God in the homes I've visited.

Scene 1: An apartment in Boston. The young wife is pregnant. Her husband, a stock analyst, has made up his mind to get a dog. Not a manageable, apartment-sized dog, but a nice bouncy big golden retriever that he can run and roughhouse with on the Common. "Oh dear," she says to me, "what am I going to do? I'm having this baby, and the apartment is very small."

We had talked on other occasions about the biblical principle of a wife's submission to her husband. There are times, we agreed, when without disobedience to that command, a wife may offer an alternative viewpoint for her husband's consideration. "I don't want to be a shrew," the young woman said. "The dog and the baby in the apartment with me--can I cope?" I wondered if she could. I felt very sympathetic to her.

So we prayed about it, asking God to give his answer. That very afternoon she called me. "Instant solution! Mike has decided not to get the dog until we can move to a house in the country. And I hadn't even said a word, hadn't suggested that I wasn't sure we could manage! Just wanted you to praise the Lord with me, and Mike doesn't need to know."

Scene 2: Early morning. A polished tile veranda on a hillside overlooking a turquoise sea. There is a cool breeze; birds twitter, chirp and dart among the flowers. Heavy perfume rises from the garden. Two black men are talking quietly nearby, speaking the island patois which I cannot understand. From the open door leading into the cool dark dining room comes a man. He is a big man with big shoulders, broad chest, black hair, and a scarred and deeply lined face. He is wearing jeans and a white shirt this morning, not the black in which the public is accustomed to seeing him. He is Johnny Cash. We talk of the beauty of the morning, of what he's been reading in the Bible, and of June, his wife. I speak of how lovely she is (I met her only yesterday). "She's pure," John says. "That woman has a pure heart." John Carter Cash runs out of the house. He is seven years old, the apple of his father's eye, and the three of us go for a ride in a golf cart before breakfast.

Breakfast is served at a glass table on the east veranda by an elegant black man in a white coat. There are six kinds of fruit, including naseberries, an unimpressive brown-skinned sphere with a pulp delectable enough for the gods. The other guests are Billy and Ruth Graham. After breakfast we all go to the beach--John and June, Billy and Ruth, John Carter and Mrs. Kelley who takes care of him, and I. People's faces everywhere light up at once with astonishment and joy--isn't that Johnny Cash? Wow! And--wow again--that's Billy Graham! All of them will carry for the rest of their lives a little of the glow.

Finally two teenagers disengage themselves from a knot of friends. "Mr. Graham, could we have your autograph?" "Sure. Are those your friends over there? Tell them all to come over." They are ecstatic. I take a color photo (and wonder a week later why it didn't occur to me to take the address of one of the kids. How thrilled they would have been to have a picture of themselves with a famous man!). He is gracious and kind to them. When they go I ask if he is ever irritated by autograph hunters. He laughs. "It isn't a very big thing to do for people, is it?" John says that before he turned his life over to Jesus he was sometimes rude. He got sick of publicity and swarms of hangers-on. "But I'm not living for Johnny Cash now. It has to be different."

Evening. We've had dinner and are sitting in the living room. Gleaming dark wood floors and woodwork. White sofa and chairs, with Wedgewood blue cording. Pale blue draperies, white walls, Oriental rugs, grand piano. John Carter sleeps, sprawled on the sofa beside me in the blissful relaxation of childhood. Eight Jamaicans are there with us--cooks, maids, security men. It is the birthday of Miss Vicki, a cook. June has given her a little collection of presents, and Miss Vicki is asked to lead us in prayer. She does so. Without fuss, without hesitation or self-consciousness, she prays for all of us, calling the Cashes and Grahams her best friends, speaking to God of her responsibility to welcome them and help them, speaking then of the Holy Spirit, asking him to bless us, bless her church, bless our communion together.

"'Nothing in my hand I bring,"' she quotes, "'simply to thy cross I cling."' Then, "I'm like a leaf that the wind blows through. Blow, Holy Spirit."

John strums his guitar, talks a little bit about some of the experiences of his life, and goes into a song, "Why me, Lord?"--a favorite of the prisoners, he says, and they always cry when he sings it. Then he sings "One Day at a Time," and "What on earth will you do for heaven's sake?" The servants sing, too. One by one, opening an old hymnal, they stand and sing, "Peace, peace," "Into my 'eart" (islanders seem to drop h's), "Amazing Grace. " Johnny, the "Man in Black," once a drug addict, many times a prisoner, a hard and self-destructive man, listens. He knows well what those simple familiar words mean: "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me." It includes all of us.

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Three Houses, Three Tabernacles - Page 2

Billy reads the Bible--a harmony of the Gospels, giving the Maundy Thursday story since that is what day it is. We pray together. Then June, her great deep eyes earnest, her voice gentle, talks. "Christ dwells in this house," she says, "I know he does. And these people know it." She gestures toward the staff. "When you're here, Elisabeth, you are covered. We're all covered--Billy and Ruth, John Carter, Kelley, John, you and I. We're covered by prayer. These people pray for us, don't you?" The Jamaicans nod. "Yes, mum."

John sings some more at our request. "A Boy Named Sue," "Welfare Cadillac," "I Walk the Line." At 9:30 Billy gets up from his chair. "I don't know about y'all, but for me it's bedtime." Everybody gets up.

Ruth and I pause with June and look down at John Carter on the sofa. "I want to tell you about this little boy," June says. "One time John and I were lying in bed just praising the Lord, thanking the Lord, lifting our hands in praise. John Carter was lying there with us, and he lifted up his little hands and said, 'Mama, I think I'm gonna cry!' We all wanted to cry, we were so happy."

During the night a shutter bangs, a dog howls, rain thunders on the roof, and my sunburn wakes me each time I turn over, but I don't mind. It gives me a chance to luxuriate in the huge antique four-poster, to ponder the unthinkable fact that I am in the Cashes' house in Jamaica, a house built in 1740 by the Barretts of Wimpole Street, now the home of a man utterly transformed by the grace of God, and a woman whose prayers followed him in some of the dark years. ("I wore out the floor praying for him!" June said.)

Next morning we sit by the pool. "I had this passion, this consuming passion, to do something with my life, something besides being a wife and mother." June tells us. "I wanted to be a star. I ruined two marriages because of it and I know it. Well--I gave it all up. I gave it up to the Lord, this selfish ambition, and now I have a husband who adores me." (It is obvious that he does.) "So I tell my daughters (and we've got six of them), 'You do like the Bible says. You submit. You submit to your husband. If he tells you to get down and scrub floors, buddy, you hit it! On all fours if necessary!'"

Scene 3: A doctors' house in San Francisco. In the bedroom are three cribs with three little boys, giggling, cooing, smiling toothlessly, jumping up and down with glee as their mother and I come in. All are about a year old, but they are not triplets. They are adopted and their parents are middle-aged, both of them doctors, the mother nearly fifty. I watch the boys being fed. They get nothing out of baby-food jars. Elizabeth Paeth Lasker (always "Bunny" to me) prepares it herself--pureed chicken and spinach, done in a blender, for lunch, apples and cheese for afternoon snack, salad (salad!) for supper. She lines up three high chairs and starts scooping spoonfuls from a single dish with a single spoon. It is one, two, three, one, two, three. If Number Two spits it out, Number Three gets it. Everybody loves it, everybody is relaxed and exuberant. "Aren't they gorgeous?" Bunny keeps saying. I have never been in a happier home.

Her letter to me last week says, "The children have all had their first birthday now, and so endeth the most eventful and beautiful year of our lives. What a privilege to be this close to these little living, growing persons! There is a constant sacrament of praise as I go through the repeated acts involved in caring for three active little boys. Evelyn Underhill's idea that every temporal act that fills the moments of our day are not just a 'sort' of sacrament but are in fact the real sacrament. And since so much of my day is spent in doing little repetitive activities that seem so mean and small, it is somehow cheering and reassuring to think of each of these (scraping messes off rugs, rerolling entire scrolls of toilet paper, changing diapers, washing clothes, making bread, scrubbing sticky floors, scouring high chairs, ad infinitum) as a sacrament of praise and of worth (incredible!) to the Master."

"The tabernacle of God is with men," and, in the words of John Keble,

"The trivial round, the common task,
Will furnish all we ought to ask;
Room to deny ourselves, a road
To bring us daily nearer God."

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[nChrist]

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


Provision For Sacrifice - Page 1

It took me quite a long time to unwrap my breakfast one day last week. I was flying somewhere I can't remember where because the past two months are a jumble in my memory--checking into TWA, American, Eastern, Delta; plunking my purse and attaché case down on the carpeted counter to be sent through the security scanner; reading the New Yorker in boarding lounges--Atlanta, Cincinnati, San Francisco, Florence, Grand Rapids; buckling seatbelts; drinking tea and ice water and (on Allegheny Airlines) apple juice.

Which brings me back to that breakfast flight, wherever it went. I had to unwrap my breakfast. The cutlery and napkin were sealed in an impregnable plastic bag. The omelet was encased in gold foil, the muffin in a paper cup which clung stubbornly. The butter was protected by a square mold of something nearly as tough as Plexiglass, the orange juice was sealed with a convex foil lid which when pierced squirted a jet of juice in a wholly unpredictable direction, and the fruit cup was fastbound in Saranwrap, the edges, corners and ends of which had been concealed with a cleverness that bordered on the diabolical.

At length, however, the food lay open and exposed to my hunger, and I ate it thankfully. I was thankful, for one thing, to have conquered the wrappings, but genuinely thankful, too, for the luxuries of modern American life the speed of travel, the comfort of the seat (an economy-class airplane seat is infinitely more comfortable than the two boards at right angles which make up a "first-class" seat on an Ecuadorian banana truck, and I've done my stint on those), the temperature of the cabin when outside it is perhaps seventy degrees below zero, the cleanliness, the quiet, the safety.

All these things, some cynic might point out, are relative. The Concorde travels much faster than a DC-10, a seat in first class is a lot roomier than one in economy class, it is sometimes frigid or stifling on planes, occasionally you find crumbs on your tray table and there is the chance of being seated next to some executive who has just had one of those three-martini lunches or some garrulous grandmother who wants to show you the latest Polaroids of the small person she has just visited. And planes crash, don't forget. So says the cynic.

But it is always possible to be thankful for what is given rather than to complain about what is not given. One or the other becomes a habit of life. There are, of course, complaints which are legitimate--as, for example, when services have been paid for which have not been rendered--but the gifts of God are in an altogether different category. Ingratitude to him amounts (let us resort to no euphemisms) to rebellion.

Many women have told me that my husband's advice, which I once quoted in a book, has been an eye-opener to them. He said that a wife, if she is very generous, may allow that her husband lives up to perhaps eighty percent of her expectations. There is always the other twenty percent that she would like to change, and she may chip away at it for the whole of their married life without reducing it by very much. She may, on the other hand, simply decide to enjoy the eighty percent, and both of them will be happy. It's a down-to-earth illustration of a principle: Accept, positively and actively, what is given. Let thanksgiving be the habit of your life.

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Provision For Sacrifice - Page 2

Such acceptance is not possible without a deep and abiding belief in the sovereign love of God. Either he is in charge, or he is not. Either he loves us, or he does not. If he is in charge and loves us, then whatever is given is subject to his control and is meant ultimately for our joy.

I rode horseback this morning through the sweet fragrance of late autumn woods and meadows, fresh with dew. The New England countryside was a softly muted tapestry of fading color. A few apples still clung to the boughs of gnarled trees. The oak leaves, not yet fallen, were golden banners, and the leaves on the blueberry bushes were still blood red. The horses walked, the saddles creaked, a couple of joyful dogs joined us out of nowhere and capered around the horses as we moved through the meadow. Thank you, thank you, thank you was the rhythm of all the world. It was all loveliness, all subject to the will of God, all made for joy.

But I had to come back to my typewriter and remember that there are those for whom today is a burden and a horror. I had intended to write about suffering because on Sunday I was talking to a group of graduate students as we sat in my living room after dinner. "How can we prepare ourselves to suffer?" they had asked, and as I talked one of them said, "Will you write this down for us? Will you do an article on it?" And I thought, yes, perhaps I will do an article. I had been thinking very much about suffering in the past two weeks because it seemed I had encountered more of it in more of its varied forms, in the lives of people I had met, than in any other short period of my life. A couple whose only son had died of bone cancer. A woman who said to me with tears on her cheeks, "I am losing my husband--but in another way from the way you lost yours. But it's all right." A woman with a grotesquely disfiguring disease which had plagued her for more than twenty years. A couple whose two-year-old son choked to death on an almond. A woman whose oldest son died in a motorcycle accident six weeks ago--"and am I angry at God? Oh God, am I angry!" she said. A widow left with millions of dollars in debts. And tonight, only a few hours after that beautiful ride through the woods, I listened to a father tell of appalling things his children have done and are doing which break his heart. His voice broke, his hands tried to find something to do to hide their trembling as he talked.

In the days of Cyrus, when the temple was restored in Jerusalem, he decreed that all that was needed for sacrifice, the young bulls, rams or sheep for burnt offerings to the God of heaven, wheat, salt, wine or oil, should be given "day by day without fail." Is it not reasonable to believe that that same God, the God of heaven to whom all thanks is due, will provide for us today the materials for sacrifice? "All things come of thee, O Lord," we sing, "and of thine own have we given thee."

Sometimes the materials he provides are things of beauty, things for which we give thanks at once with all our being. The glory of the oak trees today was one of these. And sometimes they are things which break our hearts--not gifts in the sense that Almighty God decrees the evil and suffering of the world (we only know that he allowed it, we do not know why), but gifts in that he gives to us himself--his presence, his never-failing love in the midst of our pain. We may offer up those very pains, those inexplicable catastrophes that baffle us to silence. We may even give him our broken hearts, for the sacrifices of God, we are told, are "a broken spirit, a broken and a contrite heart." All of it--the gladness and the sorrow--material for sacrifice, given "day by day without fail." For one who has made thanksgiving the habit of his life, the morning prayer will be, "Lord, what will you give me today to offer back to you?"

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[nChrist]

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


A Convention, a Winter Storm, and a Wedding - Page 1

It is a dark winter morning. The hemlocks outside my window sag with snow, and the driveway is covered. I have just called Mr. Tognazzi to make sure he still has my name on his list for plowing. I shoveled three times yesterday, but only succeeded in clearing the flagstone walk and the steps, and this morning it was hard to tell I had done anything at all.

But I love being shut in with snow. There is a quietness and a more deliberate pace to life. The cars move more quietly and more slowly on the road beyond the hemlocks. MacDuff, my Scottish terrier, limits himself to a few trails he has made in the backyard, and often just sits motionless in a saucer of snow, letting the falling flakes frost his ragged black coat and beard.

This winter morning is a space of peace between two very attention absorbing events. One took place several weeks ago in Houston. On one side of town the International Women's Year Convention was being held. People like Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and Margaret Mead were there, along with thousands (reports ranged from eight to eighteen thousand) of others, some of them delegates elected in the state IWY conventions held earlier. Betty Ford, Rosalynn Carter and Lady Bird Johnson were there, too--but can they have fully apprehended what the convention was about? Did they read the small print of the amendment? The IWY was asking for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, for lesbian rights (which would include the right of homosexual couples to marry and/or to adopt children), for federally funded abortion and other related issues.

Across town fifteen thousand people packed the AstroArena, built to accommodate far fewer, and several thousand were turned away. They were there for a Pro-Family Rally, an orderly attempt to register in the mind of the public an awareness that the IWY was not a true representation of American women. Bella's crowd had a right to speak their piece, but they had no right to speak for all of us. I was one of many speakers at the Pro-Family Rally, and I had been given eight minutes in which to present a Christian view of womanhood. Phyllis Schlafly of Eagle Forum, dedicated to stopping the ERA, spoke, thanking those who had organized the convention, and then thanking her husband Fred for letting her come (italics hers). She went on to explain why the ERA was neither necessary nor desirable, e.g., all the legislation needed to give women equal employment opportunity and equal pay has already been passed; ERA will infringe on the rights of women to be protected from military service and supported as wives and mothers.

Representative Clay Smothers called for "segregation"--from perverts and misfits--in our educational system; Dr. Mildred Jefferson, the first black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School, spoke eloquently against abortion. Banners bore such slogans as Lesbians--you don't represent women! ERA is a turkey! Family rights are women's rights, and a father carried a baby who was holding up a sign, I was a fetus once. A band played, a group of girls dressed in red, white and blue and carrying big black Bibles sang, a soloist wearing a dazzling yellow suit with a red shirt sang, "When you pray, pray for a miracle," and another soloist led the entire mob in singing "God Bless America."

It was my first convention that resembled a political one, and to see the Bible being waved and to hear the shouts of Praise the Lord! that punctuated the speeches surprised me. It even moved me nearly to tears. Where is our country going when the notion of "equal rights" can mean the introduction of homosexual literature into public schools "to give children options in sexual preference"? Somebody from IWY called it a "low blow" when the Pro-Family group ran an advertisement headed, "Mommie, when I grow up can I be a lesbian?", yet it is a true and sobering illustration of what could happen in the kind of world the IWY seeks to create, a murky wasteland, a hideous anarchy where God-given distinctions are obfuscated or even reversed.

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