Elizabeth Elliot Devotions

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A Convention, a Winter Storm, and a Wedding - Page 2

When I returned to my hotel room that evening I watched some of the television coverage. There were hours of IWY, with now and then a minute or two of Pro-Family. Viewers could only conclude that the Pro-Family rally was a fringe group of dissidents, far out-numbered by the allegedly representative group at the IWY. What view President Carter and the lawmakers of the nation will take of what happened in Houston remains to be seen. Many thousands of American women pray for the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment and the preservation by law of sexual distinction so essential to freedom of religion, freedom to build Christian homes, and freedom to be whole men and whole women under God.

The snow has turned to freezing rain now, and the trees bend with the weight of the ice which forms on their branches. Every twig is glazed; every frond of evergreen is cut crystal. I hope my pink dogwood and my two poor little peach trees, so wounded by last year's storms, will not be done in by this one. A small hope and a trivial fear by comparison with my hopes and fears for this beloved country of ours, but I bring both kinds to him who alone can do something about weather and human nature. Psalm 147 is a song of praise:

"He showers down snow, white as wool, and sprinkles hoar-frost
thick as ashes;
crystals of ice he scatters like breadcrumbs;
He utters his word, and the ice is melted.
O praise the Lord."

Ice, hoarfrost, snow. The earth, its realms, its cities. The wounds and broken spirits of his people. All of these subject to his command, affected by the word. He who heals and binds up, who brings peace and sends his command, who scatters crystals of ice like breadcrumbs and then speaks to melt them--he is still in charge.

He is in control of the other event which absorbs my attention with more urgency now than did the Houston convention. It is a wedding. And the wedding is mine. One week from today in a small Gothic chapel with a few friends and family members I will be entering into what the 1662 Prayer Book calls "Holy Matrimony, signifying unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his Church . . . not by any to be enterprised, nor taken in hand, unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly, but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God."

And, may I add, with unspeakable thanksgiving. For me it is the third time for me who was sure she was a "one-man woman," for me who thought it a miracle even the first time that any man would want her. But God, whose judgments are unsearchable, gave two and took away two in death, so that his giving a third seems beyond all imagining. I will be making those vows advisedly and soberly, to be sure: "To obey, serve, love, honour, and keep him in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all other, keep me only unto him, so long as we both shall live." Even for the third time, there are thrills; because it's the third time, there is also a deeper solemnity.

I know why vows, not pleasant sentiments, are required. G. K. Chesterton said they are "a yoke imposed by all lovers on themselves. It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word. Modern [Chesterton wrote more than seventy years ago] sages offer to the lover, with an ill-flavored grin, the largest liberties and the fullest irresponsibility; but they do not respect him as the old Church respected him; they do not write his oath upon the heavens as the record of his highest moment. They give him every liberty except the liberty to sell his liberty, which is the only one that he wants. . . . It will not work. There are thrilling moments, doubtless, for the spectator, the amateur and the aesthete; but there is one thrill that is known only to the soldier who fights for his own flag, to the ascetic who starves himself for his own illumination, to the lover who makes finally his own choice. And it is this transfiguring self-discipline that makes the vow a truly sane thing."

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[nChrist]

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

Never Frustrated - Page 1

The first time I saw her she had her back to me as she stood washing dishes at the kitchen sink. She was wearing a dress with a small black and white print, and an apron. She had a slight hump between her shoulders, gray hair, and I could see the wire for her hearing aid running down over her left shoulder. I said something to her but she did not respond.

"She's deaf," my sister said in a loud voice. I thought it was rather too loud a voice, and asked (softly), "You mean she can't hear a thing?" "Not even if you shout!" Ginny shouted. It was true. Mrs. Kershaw couldn't hear even if you shouted--unless you shouted directly into the tiny microphone she kept pinned to her dress.

I touched her shoulder, and she turned to me and smiled. "Oh, here she is!" she said, in a flat, nasal tone and a slight lisp. She had heard about the daughter who was away at college, and her smile of welcome was pure radiance in the wrinkled sweet face.

Mrs. Kershaw was a widow who had come to help my mother. She was quite literally a godsend. Over the years Mother had had a succession of "helpers" who were usually more liability than asset. (One of them met her at the front door when she came home after a shopping trip with, "Oh, Mrs. Howard, I have a surprise for you!" Mother's heart sank. The girl had spent the day, instead of at the tasks assigned, painting her room--woodwork and furniture--shiny chocolate brown.)

God must have seen that Mother had learned her lessons of patience and humility and deserved at last one of his saints, a woman utterly without guile, ambition, touchiness or egotism of any sort. Dear Mrs. Kershaw! When we get together for family reunions we always talk about her. We remember how . . .

She lived alone in a big old wooden house a couple of miles from our home. One of us would pick her up in the car every morning and take her home in the evening. Usually she was at the door, ready to come out when the car arrived. Once in a while we went to the door. There would be a sign on it: "I am home. Please come in." She could not, of course, hear a knock or a doorbell or the telephone. If you wanted her, you had to walk in and find her. She was never afraid the wrong person might want her.

When she got into the car she said what a nice day it was. If the sun shone she said, "Folks can do things outside, work in their gardens." When it rained she said, "Gives folks a chance to do what they wants."

We were sitting at the lunch table in the kitchen one day when a painter was climbing around outside the window. "Gets around pretty soup-le!" she remarked, meaning supple.

One evening at dinner (she always sat at the table with us) the discussion was about Bible names. Five out of us six children had Bible names and Mrs. Kershaw thought this was such a nice idea. My father kept her in on the conversation by speaking into the microphone which she held out to him. She smiled and nodded. Next evening, apropos of nothing, she said, "Harrison isn't in the Bible. I looked him up." Bless her heart! Her only child was named Harrison, a middle-aged man by then.

We always had family Bible reading after dinner. One evening my father said he would read from 1 Thessalonians. "That's a nice book," Mrs. Kershaw said. Nobody answered her remark, partly because we were supposed to be quiet for the reading, and partly because nobody could easily reply--we would have had to ask for the microphone. She looked around the table inquiringly; then, supposing that our silence might indicate disagreement, she said, "I don't know whether it's any good or not, but I like it." We smiled and nodded our agreement and she settled back with a contented sigh.

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[nChrist]

Never Frustrated - Page 2

She often took care of a man who was in his nineties, and she would tell us about him. He was inclined to be a bit crotchety and unpredictable, but she said, "When they gets old they gets that way sometimes. Hope I'm not that way when I get old." She was in her mid-seventies but not, in her mind, even approaching "old."

She would spend hours sitting with my step-grandmother who lived with us and was confined to her room upstairs. Nana was quite deaf, too, so the two of them would chatter away, often at cross-purposes, but not minding, Mrs. Kershaw doing her best to cheer up an otherwise very gloomy lady not much older than herself. Once my father overheard a conversation between Mrs. Kershaw and a Belgian lady who was visiting us who did not speak English. The answers did not match the questions at all, but he let them alone until he heard Mrs. Kershaw repeating several times, "What is your name?" The Belgian lady, by guesswork, figured out what she was asking and replied, "Victorine." "Oh," said Mrs. Kershaw, "Freda. That's a nice name." At that my father felt it was time to help out.

Mrs. Kershaw was not a great cook, but she knew how to make applesauce and brown sugar cookies. The gallons of the former and dozens of the latter were consumed as fast as she could turn them out. She could do plain country cooking--meat, potatoes and vegetables--and she loved to see us eat. One of my brothers spurned the cabbage on his plate. She begged him to eat it. "Why don't you like cabbage? You like chicken, don't you?" she said. Often her comments amused us beyond concealment but she always laughed with us, looking eagerly around the circle for any clues, confident, I feel sure, that she knew we were all crazy about her.

She did get old, finally. I suppose she was well along in her eighties when she had to go and live with Harrison in a tiny cramped room, so packed with her furniture and boxes and things that she could hardly move. I visited her there in a little town some distance from ours. "They calls it a clam town," she said of the village near the New Jersey shore. "Well, I call it a clam town, too--the people just kinda clams up, you know. Yes. Not friendly. They're not friendly at all." They don't know what they missed.

If ever a woman accepted the demands of her own life with simplicity and grace, it was she. It was a positive and active acceptance of the given. Words which have taken hold of our minds today like some noxious fungus--hassle, frustration, hang-up, put-down--were never in Mrs. Kershaw's vocabulary, nor could they have been. She wasn't interested in herself. She had nothing to say about herself or her own feelings. She lived for us.

I think of the contrasts Paul speaks about in 1 Corinthians 4. It is illuminating to set them in two lists and read straight down one list, then read down the other and ask oneself which describes his own life.

handicapped--never frustrated
puzzled--never in despair
persecuted--never have to stand it alone
knocked down--never knocked out

"We know sorrow, yet our joy is inextinguishable. We have 'nothing to bless ourselves with,' yet we bless many others with true riches. We are penniless, and yet in reality we have everything worth having."

For Paul to have said that--Paul, who had suffered the loss of all things--ought to shake up our categories of what is "worth having." Mrs. Kershaw would have said the same. I doubt that it ever occurred to her that she had been deprived of anything in her life that really mattered. The Lord had made his face to shine upon her and had given her peace, and she brought that shine and that peace to our house every day.

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[nChrist]

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


Darkness Never Conquers Light - Page 1

"I spent all day today at the Shore Country Day School Annual Fair and Sale. A huge bash, enormous fun, all the parents pitching in enthusiastically to sell hot dogs and manage games. There were balloons, pompoms and crepe paper all fluttering about, music playing, pie-eating contests, cream-pie-throwing contests (the teachers volunteered their faces as targets), raffles, etc. My job was to oversee the antique car ride. The car in question was a three-quarter size scale model of a 1903 car with a tiny gas engine that putted along at six miles per hour. The tots drove it, with one of the fathers 'riding shotgun' on the running board...."

This is from a letter I received from one of my four brothers not many weeks ago. I hear from all of them, and from my sister and mother as well, quite regularly. Few people, it seems, correspond regularly with anybody nowadays, let alone with their own relatives. Crowded lives, expensive postage and the convenience of long-distance phone calls are the usual excuses.

But we have always kept up with each other, thanks to our mother who when we first went off to boarding school began sending copies of our letters around to the others. As the years passed we began to make it a little easier for her by making carbons of our letters, and week after week, year in and year out, she takes a good-sized chunk of her time to sort and stuff copies into envelopes, which she addresses and stamps and sends off around the world--always including her own cheerful newsy page, on which nearly every sentence is an exclamation! Or a double exclamation!! Or contains words written in CAPITAL LETTERS!!!

There was another paragraph in my brother's letter, very different from the first: "This week I drove to Children's Hospital in Boston to chauffeur a mother and her little boy, who has acute leukemia. The child is having (1) radiation on the brain, (2) chemotherapy and (3) some dreadful spinal injections in the bargain.

"The scene in the playroom where all the little children come with their mothers to wait for their 'medicine' (that seems to be the term) is too much: all these little, bald, gray, elfin phantoms, peering out of brown-ringed eyes. One tiny girl with a cane. Little tots with stuffed frogs and teddy bears clutched under their arms. Bone-chilling screams coming from the room labeled 'Special Procedures' (read spinal taps and marrow scrapings, I guess).

"A whole room full of beds where they sit, propped up, while the lethal chemicals drip through plastic tubes into their veins. One teen-age girl lying on her side in that room, quietly, with tears dropping slowly across the bridge of her nose. One colored baby with just enough hair left for her mother to have arranged two pigtails exactly the thickness of twisted black sewing thread about three inches long."

A letter came in that same mail from another brother: "'Twas the eighteenth of April in seventy-five....' Yet two hundred years later I am sitting in a hotel almost in sight of the infamous Berlin wall that represents the opposite of all that Paul Revere stood for. Yesterday I crossed that wall into East Berlin, and from the time I entered with stony guards carefully scrutinizing me and my passport until I came out--again under the cold eyes of sullen-faced guards--I never saw a smile from one official.

"By contrast I spent lunch and all afternoon with a group of six joyful, hearty pastors and Christian leaders who hugged me, gave me strong handshakes, joked, prayed earnestly, spoke words of encouragement to me (yes, not vice versa), promised to pray for me, pronounced a benediction on me at our parting.

"One man said, 'Everything is gray here, no color.' That is both literally and symbolically true. Very little color on the streets, buildings still pock-marked with shells from street fighting at the end of World War II. Gray, sad faces. Another said, 'You can only be a happy man in this country if you know Jesus.' 'Here you are either a Christian or not a Christian. No middle ground. When we don't have outward liberty we learn more of true liberty in Jesus."'

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Darkness Never Conquers Light - Page 2

The juxtaposition in a few paragraphs of these scenes--gaiety, anguish, persecution--read through hurriedly one morning as I opened a pile of mail, brought once again the insistent question of God's meaning and purpose. What does he want of us? How, finding himself in such starkly opposing frameworks, is the Christian to respond to God? Is it best, perhaps, to try not to think about him when one is watching a pie-throwing contest? Ought one to try not to think--better still, to try not even to see anything at all--when one has to enter a children's cancer ward? Shall we not even read about the suffering on the other side of the Wall? But that is not accepting life. It is evasion. Those Eastern European Christians are not evading, they are rejoicing. How can it be?

Another letter came to me, this one from a young woman I do not know: "This year the Concerts and Lectures Committee at the college I attend has sponsored a series of lectures concerning the topic, 'What Future for My Generation?' Yesterday the guest speaker was the black activist Stokely Charmichael. Although I have been upset about the direction our world seems to be heading, his talk along with the others has prompted me to write to you.

"I am getting married in June. My question is this: What responsibility do you feel a Christain couple has in regard to having children? . . . I know the Lord is totally in charge of the future, but it frightens me to think of my part in bringing a child into an unhappy and unstable world."

Music, balloons, cream pies. Brain tumors, barbed wire, death. This is the world we live in. Ever since the Garden of Eden was sullied by evil it has been an unhappy and an unstable world. Has it ever been right to bring a child into such a world? For the Christian it is right--a thousand times right. For it is the will of God that married people accept the responsibility of children. It is the will of God that we live in the world--this world of light and darkness, of gladness and suffering--for it is this world that Jesus Christ came to redeem. Christianity, alone among the religions of the world, looks steadfastly at the facts, whatever they may be, and says there is an ultimate explanation, an ultimate purpose, a glorious answer.

"Everything belongs to you!" Paul said. "The world, life, death, the present, or the future everything is yours, for you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God."

We cannot protect the child we bring into the world. ("This, this is the victory of the grave; here is death's sting, that it is not strong enough, our strongest wing," wrote the poet Charlotte Mew. "But what of His who like a Father pitieth? His Son was also, once, a little thing....") But we can bring him to the Cross, where all longings, all hopes and failures, all sin and sadness and pain and fear are gathered up in everlasting love and transformed for us forever into glory and beauty and Joy.

So what about the country fair? Try to keep God out of it? Why? He is watching it. He sees us watching it. Does he mind that we have a hilarious time? "Everything belongs to you!" Try thanking him.

And what of the children with the tubes running into them? He sees them. He loves them. He has not finished yet with their redemption. Can we watch with him-- watch and pray and hold them up to everlasting love?

And the prisoners and exiles--they, too, are in his plan. "God has no problems," Corrie ten Boom says, "only plans." We suffer with them because they are members of the same Body, but our Christian faith enables us to look steadfastly and not hide our eyes, to pray earnestly and not despair, because Jesus commanded us: "Be of good cheer. I have overcome the world!"

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[nChrist]

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


Junk Food - Page 1

If you're hungry, the airport in Fayetteville, Arkansas, is not a good place to be. The selection of "snacks" in the vending machine is impressive, but there is nothing at all that one could call food. You can insert your quarters, nickels and dimes (no pennies) and get chocolate chip cookies, potato chips (plain), potato chips with "bar-B-Q" flavor, potato chips with sour cream and onion (artificial) flavor, potato "Stix," pork rinds, corn chips, "Cornies," "Pub Fries," "Cheddar Fries," "Cheetos," "Cheese Smackers," and things called "Doritos," "Bugles," "yammers" and "Dunkums."

Alongside that machine is another one offering brightly colored aluminum cans of sweet fizzy stuff with which to wash down all those snacks or, I suppose, to Dunkum. I don't like to contemplate what state your blood sugar or your nerves or your sanctification would be in if your supper comprised a Tab and a package of Jammers, but on second thought, a look around the boarding lounge of almost any airport--at the facial expressions, the behavior of the pre-school-age tots, and the remarks overheard--give a clue. We are a nation "overfed but undernourished," to borrow the title of Curtis Wood's book.

Junk food is not nourishment. It's easily available (if you have the right coins). It is packaged up in eye-catching wrappings, presumably untouched by human hands. It can be transported to plane, to beach, to movie theatre, to school, to bed. It can be grabbed in a moment, wolfed down on the run; and there are no preparations to make, nothing to clean up except greasy fingers. It does away altogether with the ritual of eating--the laid table, the attractive presentation of a dish, the fellowship with others, the leisure to enjoy. In a world that has lost or discarded nearly all other rituals, what will become of us if we do away with even this one?

But worst of all, junk food feeds (feeding will make you fat) but does not nourish. Nourishment makes you strong. I sat on the molded fiberglass seat in Fayetteville, waiting for the small plane which would take me to Tulsa, and wished for a few crunchy fat Bing cherries or a slice of the wheat-honey bread that I make regularly at home--real food.

Don't misunderstand. I like potato chips. I like Cheetos. I haven't tried the commercially packaged pork rinds, but I certainly enjoyed the kind the Indians gave me in South America--fished out of a cauldron of hot fat bubbling over an open fire in some jungle clearing, eaten with a chunk of steamed manioc or a plantain roasted in the ashes.

We are people of our times and culture. Because of the "schedule" I seem to be obliged to keep, I am always looking for ways to use my time more efficiently, and one of them is to listen to tapes while I do my hair and face. I switched the recorder off the other day, disgusted with what I told my husband was spiritual junk food. A man was rambling on about his own feelings, his "meaningful" experiences, and how he got in touch with himself, with other people, and with God. No doubt he was telling the truth, but there wasn't a single reference to Scripture, and not much there that would nourish me.

Christian bookstores usually carry some real "meat," if you can find it. It is not likely to be up front where the paperbacks, the tapes and the records are, which display on their jackets color photographs of the author, the speaker or the singer, often taken in an open meadow, in a soft, misty light, and with a few wildflowers. (Are there any analogies here artificial color, perhaps, or flavor? What about preservatives? I understand preservatives are used in foods to give a longer "shelf life." The booksellers have thought of some tricks, I'm sure, to keep their wares in the public eye for a few weeks longer, but no trick takes the place of quality for preserving a book's shelf life.)

Tastes are developed. Solzhenitsyn, in his speech at Harvard a few months ago, deplored the "TV stupor" in which Americans live. He spoke of the decadence of art, of intolerable music, of mass prejudice, spiritual exhaustion, material luxury, and a morally inferior happiness. He is right. Alas, his own experience of totalitarianism and concentration camp gives him the perspective and the authority to judge our society. We must hear him.

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Junk Food - Page 2

Doctors have been learning of the physical exhaustion that can result from artificial or refined or highly sugared foods. Might not one cause of the spiritual exhaustion which Solzhenitsyn observes be the spiritual junk food we consume? What shall be done for the child fed on the snack-pack, the soft drink and the TV dinner? Will he never choose, let alone enjoy, vegetables? Will the Christian whose spiritual sustenance has been limited to the mass-produced, who is accustomed only to "snacking," whose tastes have been conditioned by the majority, ever choose what is truly nourishing?

What it comes down to, with regard to spiritual things, is that we ought to learn to do some of our own cooking. Granted, it is much easier to grab a package. But sometimes we ought to start from scratch.

Let us start with silence. That may be the hardest thing to achieve in our world. But it is not impossible. For one thing, it takes the will to be quiet. It is possible to be quiet on a crowded subway or in the kitchen when the bacon is frying, the washing machine is running and the baby wants more milk. It is easier by far to be quiet when things around us are quiet, and for most of us this means getting up early.

I was in my study this morning before the traffic had started up on Route 1A. No sound came from the road or the house. Only the sweet susurrus of the crickets in the grass and the cawing of a crow in a beech tree broke the silence, yet it took also an act of the will to be still and know that He is God. My mind races quite naturally over things done yesterday (burying a beloved friend's beloved little dog, getting my sister from the hospital, swimming in the ocean, writing a page or two) or things to be done today (writing more than a page or two, having a friend to tea, getting my mother from the airport). Be still. It is a command. The Hebrew word used in Psalm 46 can mean "Shut up."

The great books that have been spiritual meat and drink for me have been produced, I feel sure, out of great silence. Men and women of God have learned of him by being quiet and allowing him to speak to them in their solitude. They have been willing to be alone, to shut up, to listen, and to think and pray over what they have heard. In our modern world most people choose noise. Go to the beach or a forest camp and find portable radios, television sets, record players. Sit down in a waiting room and listen to what Malcolm Muggeridge calls that "drooling melange" of Muzak. People want noise. They would far rather discuss than think, talk over their problems than pray about them, read a paperback about what somebody else thinks about the Bible than read the Bible.

We cannot stand stillness. Yet we need it. I wonder if the popularity of transcendental meditation is due to this felt need. Whatever may be said about TM's being a religion or not, the measure of success it seems to enjoy could be attributed in part to the simple fact that its devotees spend a certain amount of time daily in motionless silence. That can't hurt anybody.

As one of those who write the stuff that is for sale in the bookstores I referred to, I know that responsibility is laid upon me to provide real food. So I speak to myself-- I must do my own "cooking." It is not fast food that I ought to provide for my reader. I must feed him, but in order to do that I must myself be fed. What I speak or write must come out of silence where only a still small voice can be heard.

I speak also to my reader. Seek what is good for the soul, even if it doesn't come in paperback. Read an old book once in a while. (Try P. T. Forsyth, The Principle of Authority, or Luther's Letters of Spiritual Counsel.) And once in a while lay aside the books and the tapes. For a set period of time be alone, be still. "The man who lives on me will live because of me," Jesus said. "This is the bread which came down from heaven."

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[nChrist]

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


Little Black Dog - Page 1

It is a late October morning of glorious sunshine in New Hampshire and I sit in an antique rocking chair by the window of an old house which was once a barn. The gray rocks on Mount Lafayette's broad summit are dusted with snow, and the sky is as blue as a sky can be. All that is still green today is the evergreens. Between them are the black line drawings of the thin leafless maples, wild cherries, aspens and birches. The feathery tamaracks are dark gold. Little yellow apples hang on one of the gnarled old trees of the orchard. I keep hoping a deer will come for them.

My friend Miriam and I drove up yesterday from Boston for a few days of quiet at my brother's place. Both of us brought a load of desk work. No one else is here except Daisy, Miriam's new friend, a little white Pekingese. (Her old friend, Pity Sing, died a few weeks ago.)

MacDuff, my six-year-old Scottish terrier, is not here this time either. We went for a short climb yesterday afternoon, up a rocky wooded trail that he used to love. He would race after the chattering chipmunks, bound up the steep granite slabs, and wait, panting, at the top for us to catch up. I missed him yesterday on that trail. I miss him today when I look out of the window.

MacDuff died of cancer last week. I knew he was sick during the summer when his routines changed. He sat in the middle of the back yard one morning, instead of in his usual place by the fence, looking bewildered instead of in charge. One rainy day he was not on his chair in the screened porch, but I found him lying in a hollow place under a bush. He no longer leaped for his Milk-Bone at the breakfast table. But he kept his ears and tail up, and thus kept my hopes up.

The vet said he had an infection and gave us pills. MacDuff got very cagey at detecting where those pills had been hidden in his food, so I had to try ever sneakier methods of getting them into him. They worked fine. He was well again--for a while faithfully putting in his self-appointed barking time each day, letting neighbor dogs know who was in charge, and keeping off trespassers, some of whom must have been demons since none of us humans could see them.

But I saw that he was losing weight. I could feel the shoulder blades and spine through his heavy, ragged coat. I bought new kinds of dog food, special hamburger, yogurt. He was apologetic when he couldn't eat it, his eyes limpid with a plea for understanding, his stiff brush-tail quivering to explain.

"Little Duffer, little black dog--could you try this?" I would ask, offering some tidbit that would surely be irresistible. He would lift his black nose, take it slowly and delicately in his teeth, hold it for a moment hoping I would look away, and then place it on the floor as tactfully as he could. He did not want to disappoint me.

His suffering was a hard thing to watch. He was alone in it, as all creatures, human or animal, are alone in their pain. "The toad beneath the harrow knows exactly where each sharp tooth goes." There is no qualitative or quantitative measurement for pain. It is simply there sharp or dull, shooting or stabbing, bearable or excruciating, local or general, it is unexplained, uninvited, unavoidable. It takes command. It is all-encompassing, implacable, exigent. But of course I am speaking only of what I know of pain. How was it for MacDuff?

He expected no special treatment. He did not pity himself. He took for granted that he would be able to go on about his accustomed terrier business and when he found that it was somehow not working well, he made his own adjustments as unobtrusively as he could. It was still the supreme object of his life to see that I was happy. I think he lay under the bush in the rain not in order to wallow in solitary self-pity, but in order that I might not see him in trouble. He liked to please me. He delighted to do my will.

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Little Black Dog - Page 2

Is animal suffering different from human suffering? I hope so. Animals surely must not suffer the agonies of anxiety which accompany much human pain. "How shall I carry out my duties? What am I to do if this doesn't clear up quickly? Can I bear it if it gets worse?" The element of time is not a philosophical torment to them. They live as we have to be told to live--one day at a time, trustfully. I don't know whether it is accurate to say that "faith" is required of them, but if it is, they fulfill the requirement perfectly. They look to God, the Psalmist tells us, for provision for their needs. They are watched over and cared for by a kind Father. Not the least sparrow falls without his notice. Surely MacDuff was of more value than many sparrows!

I watched him try to lie down on his side, but something obstructed his breathing. When he was asleep he would begin to pant and would waken to change his position, sometimes with little muffled groans. This fellow-creature, I thought, formed by the Hand that formed me, suffers for my sin--for I am of the race of men who brought evil into the world, and without evil there could be no pain, no death. A Scotty would not have had cancer.

His wonderful face bearded, with tufts of eyebrows springing and black eyes shining--had reminded me of George MacDonald's belief that dogs always behold the face of the Father. MacDuff knew things--what did he know? What were the mysteries he saw--too deep or too high or too pure for me to be entrusted with yet? I think they helped him endure the pain. He was not bewildered, of course, by the questions that needle my mind--the origin of evil, God's permission of an animal's or a child's suffering. He was a dog, and to ponder such questions was not required of him. What was required of him he did, in an authentically, thoroughly dog-like style.

I will not weep more for him. I will be thankful for such a gift of grace. He was, I am sure, "assigned" to me. In the sorrow of my late husband's illness, when life seemed a desolate wasteland, MacDuff was there. Jesus, the Bible tells us, during his temptation in the wilderness, was "with the wild beasts." I used to think of that phrase as descriptive of one of the elements of his dereliction, but it may be that the wild beasts, like the angels, ministered to him. Is it mere sentimentality to believe that? Is it too much to say that Duffer "ministered" to me? He did. He was my little wild beast in that wilderness.

The Bible does not speak specifically of the destiny of animals but there is a promise in the Letter to the Ephesians which surely must include them, "Everything that exists in heaven or earth shall find its perfection and fulfillment in Christ" (Eph. 1:10 Phillips).

Paul expresses his hope in the eighth chapter of Romans (verse 21 Phillips) "that in the end the whole of created life will be rescued from the tyranny of change and decay, and have its share in that magnificent liberty which can only belong to the children of God!"

____________________

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[nChrist]

Author: Elisabeth Elliot
Source: Love Has A Price Tag
Scripture: Luke 16:9 Deuteronomy 1:29-30
The Path of Lonliness


Not One Thing Has Failed - Page 1

I love to read people's journals. Except for one which I was allowed to read in the original handwriting, that of my late husband Jim Elliot, I have had to limit myself to published journals--those, for example of David Brainerd, early missionary to American Indians; Katherine Mansfield, short-story writer from New Zealand; Anne Morrow Lindbergh, wife of the famous pilot; and Mircea Eliade, Rumanian professor of the history of religion at the University of Chicago.

Jim started his journal as a means of self-discipline. He began to get up early in the morning during his junior year in college to read the Bible and pray before classes. He was realistic enough to recognize the slim chances of fitting in any serious study and prayer later in the day. If it had priority on his list of things that mattered, it had to have chronological priority. To see that he did not waste the dearly-bought time, he began to note down on paper specific things he learned from the Word and specific things he asked for in prayer.

"It is not written as a diary of my experiences or feelings," he recorded in his journal, "but as a 'book of remembrance' to enable me to ask definitely by forcing myself to put yearnings into words. All I have asked has not been given and the Father's withholding has served to intensify my desires.... He promises water to the thirsty, satiation to the unsatisfied (I do not say dissatisfied), filling to the famished for righteousness. So has His concealing of Himself given me longings that can only be slaked when Psalm 17:15 ['As for me I shall behold thy face in righteousness; when I awake I shall be satisfied with beholding thy form'] is realized" (From The Journals of Jim Elliot, ed. Elisabeth Elliot. Old Tappan, N.J.: Fleming H. Revell).

"All I have asked has not been given." Not, that is, in the way or at the time he might have predicted. Jim beheld the longed-for Face much sooner than he expected. It is startling to see, from the perspective of nearly thirty years, how much of what he asked was given, and given beyond his dreaming.

In his meditations on the Revelation of John, Jim prayed for a greater love for God's church, which he saw "in a shambling ruins," sadly in need of awakening to her calling. "And where shall an overcomer be found? Alas, they all witness that there is no need for overcoming.... But Christ was among the churches. The tarnish of the lampstand did not send Him away from them; He is still in their midst. Ah, turn me, Lord Jesus, to see Thee in Thy concern for Thy witness and let me write, publish, and send to the church what things I see."

Knowing Jim and the context in which he wrote, I am quite certain it was beyond his dreaming to publish a book. He wanted to witness. He wanted to preach. He was called to be a missionary. But he did not imagine himself a published author. The way this came about (his posthumous notoriety) cannot have entered the frame-work of his prayer.

When Jim prayed for revival he was instructed by reading in David Brainerd's diary how a revival came when Brainerd was sick, discouraged, and cast down, "little expecting that God had chosen the hour of his weakness," Jim wrote, "for manifestation of His strength."

"I visited Indians at Crossweeksung," Brainerd records, "Apprehending that it was my indispensable duty.... I cannot say I had any hopes of success. I do not know that my hopes respecting the conversion of the Indians were ever reduced to so low an ebb . . . yet this was the very season that God saw fittest to begin His glorious work in! And thus He ordained strength out of weakness . . . whence I learn that it is good to follow the path of duty, though in the midst of darkness and discouragement."

Following the quotation from David Brainerd Jim includes in the journal a quotation I had sent him from a book which had encouraged me. At that time I was working for the Canadian Sunday School Mission in the bush country of Alberta. My own journal of the first day says, "It is a new and strange experience and I feel keenly my need of the mighty Fortress." On the second day, "I woke at 4:30 with the farm fowl. Made a small breakfast and cleaned up my little home [a fourteen-foot trailer]. In the hot stillness of the afternoon I felt desolate, helpless, lonely, discouraged. Was helped by Deuteronomy 1:29, 30: 'Then I said to you, Do not be in dread or afraid of them. The Lord your God who goes before you will himself fight for you."'

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[nChrist]

Not One Thing Has Failed - Page 2

Jessie Penn-Lewis's book Thy Hidden Ones showed me God's purpose in my isolation and helplessness. It was her words I sent in a letter to Jim: "In the Holy Spirit's leading of the soul through the stripping of what may be called 'consecrated self,' and its activity, it is important that there should be a fulfillment of all outward duty, that the believer may learn to act on principle rather than on pleasant impulse." It was a spiritual lesson that was to fortify me through countless later experiences when feelings or impulses contributed nothing to an inclination toward obedience. God allows the absence of feeling or, more often, the presence of strong negative feeling that we may simply follow, simply obey, simply trust.

Jim saw, in reading Brainerd, the value of his own journals. He also "was much encouraged to think of a life of godliness in the light of an early death.... Christianity has been analyzed, decried, refused by some; coolly eyed, submitted to, and its forms followed by others who call themselves Christians. But alas, what emptiness in both!

"I have prayed for new men, fiery, reckless men, possessed of uncontrollably youthful passion--these lit by the Spirit of God. I have prayed for new words, explosive, direct, simple words. I have prayed for new miracles. Explaining old miracles will not do. If God is to be known as the God who does wonders in heaven and earth, then God must produce for this generation. Lord, fill preachers and preaching with Thy power. How long dare we go on without tears, without moral passions, hatred and love? Not long, I pray, Lord Jesus, not long." I read these prayers now with awe--new men, new words, new miracles all granted as a result of this young man's death.

The next day, October 28, 1949, when Jim was twenty-two years old he wrote, "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose." This was the lesson he found in Luke 16:9, "Make friends for yourself by means of unrighteous mammon, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal habitations." The lesson had one application for him in that early morning devotional hour. He did not know how poignantly it would be applied in his life, how aptly illustrated in his death, and how often quoted in the years following.

He wrote in 1953 of watching an Indian die in a jungle house. "And so it will come to me one day, I kept thinking. I wonder if that little phrase I used to use in preaching was something of a prophecy: 'Are you willing to lie in some native hut to die of a disease American doctors never heard of?' I am still willing, Lord God. Whatever You say shall stand at my end time. But oh, I want to live to teach Your word. Lord, let me live 'until I have declared Thy works to this generation."'

God let him live another three years and then answered that prayer as he answers so many--mysteriously. Five men from a little Stone Age tribe speared him to death. "We thought he had come to eat us," they told me several years later when I had learned their language.

"Why did you think so?" I asked, holding the tiny microphone of a transistor recorder to the mouth of Gikita, the man who seemed to have made the decision to use his spear first.

He laughed. "Unungi!" "For no reason. For no particular purpose."

But the God who holds in his hand the breath of every living thing had a purpose. He answered Jim's prayer mysteriously, and "exceedingly abundantly above all" that he had asked or thought. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Jim's generation for whom he had prayed were brought to their knees, some of them in lifelong surrender to the call of Christ. Now another generation, born since Jim died, is reading the record of his young man-hood--the days which seemed so sterile, so useless, so devoid of any feelings of holiness, when God was at work shaping the character of a man who was to be his witness; the prayers which seemed to go unheard at the time, kept--as all the prayers of all his children are kept, incense for God--and answered after what would have seemed to Jim a long delay.

I think of the farewell message of old Joshua to the elders, heads, judges and officers of Israel: "Be steadfast . . . cleave to the Lord . . . love the Lord your God.... You know in your hearts and souls, all of you, that not one thing has failed of all the good things which the Lord your God promised concerning you; all have come to pass for you, not one of them has failed."

____________________

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[nChrist]

Author: Elisabeth Elliot
Source: On Asking God Why
Scripture:
The Path of Lonliness


On Asking God Why - Page 1

One of the things I am no longer as good at as I used to be is sleeping through the night. I'm rather glad about that, for there is something pleasant about waking in the small hours and realizing that one is, in fact, in bed and need not get up. One can luxuriate.

Between two and three o'clock yesterday morning I luxuriated. I lay listening to the night sounds in a small house on the "stern and rockbound" coast of Massachusetts. The wind whistled and roared, wrapping itself around the house and shaking it. On the quarter hour the clock in the living room softly gave out Whittington's chime. I could hear the tiny click as the electric blanket cut off and on, the cracking of the cold in the walls, the expensive rumble of the oil burner beneath me, and the reassuring rumble of a snoring husband beside me. Underneath it all was the deep, drumming rhythm of the surf, synchronized with the distant bellow of "Mother Ann's Cow," the name given the sounding buoy that guards the entrance to Gloucester Harbor.

I was thinking, as I suppose I am always thinking, in one way or another, about mystery. An English magazine which contained an interview with me had just come in the mail, and of course I read it, not to find out what I'd said to the man last spring in Swanwick, but to find out what he said I'd said. He had asked me about some of the events in my life, and I had told him that because of them I had had to "come to terms with mystery.'' That was an accurate quotation, I'm sure, but as I lay in bed I knew that one never comes to any final terms with mystery--not in this life, anyway. We keep asking the same unanswerable questions and wondering why the explanations are not forthcoming. We doubt God. We are anxious about everything when we have been told quite clearly to be anxious about nothing. Instead of stewing we are supposed to pray and give thanks.

Well, I thought, I'll have a go at it. I prayed about several things for which I could not give thanks. But I gave thanks in the middle of each of those prayers because I was still sure (the noise of the wind and ocean were reminding me) that underneath are the everlasting arms.

My prayers embraced four things:
1. Somebody I love is gravely ill.
2. Something I wanted has been denied.
3. Something I worked very hard for failed.
4. Something I prized is lost.

I can be specific about three of the things. A letter from a friend of many years describes her cancer surgery and its aftermath--an incision that had to be scraped and cleaned daily for weeks.

"It was so painful that Diana, Jim, Monica, and I prayed while she cleaned it, three times and some days four times. Monica would wipe my tears. Yes, Jesus stands right there as the pain takes my breath away and my toes curl to keep from crying out loud. But I haven't asked, Why me, Lord? It is only now that I can pray for cancer patients and know how the flesh hurts and how relief, even for a moment, is blessed."

The second thing is a manuscript on which I have spent years. It is not, I believe, publishable now, and I can see no way to redeem it. It feels as though those years of work have gone down the drain. Have they? What ought I to do about this failure?

The other thing is my J.B. Phillips translation of the New Testament, given to me when I lived in the jungle in 1960 and containing nineteen years' worth of notes. I left this book on an airplane between Dallas and Atlanta several weeks ago. The stewardess brought my breakfast as I was reading it, so I laid it in my lap and spread my napkin on top of it. I suppose it slipped down beside the seat. (Stupid of me, of course, but on the same trip my husband did just as stupid a thing. He left his briefcase on the sidewalk outside the terminal. We prayed, and the prayers were almost instantly answered. Someone had picked the briefcase up and turned it in to the airline, and we had it back in a couple of hours.) I am lost without my Phillips. I feel crippled. It is as though a large segment of the history of my spiritual pilgrimage has been obliterated. It was the one New Testament in which I knew my way around. I knew where things were on the page and used it constantly in public speaking because I could refer quickly to passages I needed. What shall I do?

I have done the obvious things. Prayer is the first thing--asking God to do what I can't do. The second thing is to get busy and do what I can do. I prayed for my friend, of course, and then I sat down and wrote her a letter. I don't know what else to do for her now. My husband and I prayed together about the lost New Testament (and many of my friends prayed too). We went to the proper authorities at the airline and have been assured that everything will be done to recover it, but it has not turned up. We prayed about the bad manuscript and asked for editorial advice. It looks quite irremedial. I continue to pray repeatedly, extensively, and earnestly about all of the above. And one more thing: I seek the lessons God wants to teach me, and that means that I ask why.

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[nChrist]

On Asking God Why - Page 2

There are those who insist that it is a very bad thing to question God. To them, "why?" is a rude question. That depends, I believe, on whether it is an honest search, in faith, for his meaning, or whether it is a challenge of unbelief and rebellion. The psalmist often questioned God and so did Job. God did not answer the questions, but he answered the man--with the mystery of himself.

He has not left us entirely in the dark. We know a great deal more about his purposes than poor old Job did, yet Job trusted him. He is not only the Almighty--Job's favorite name for him. He is also our Father, and what a father does is not by any means always understood by the child. If he loves the child, however, the child trusts him. It is the child's ultimate good that the father has in mind. Terribly elementary. Yet I have to be reminded of this when, for example, my friend suffers, when a book I think I can't possibly do without is lost, when a manuscript is worthless.

The three things are not all in the same category. The second and third things have to do with my own carelessness and failure. Yet in all three I am reminded that God is my Father still, that he does have a purpose for me, and that nothing, absolutely nothing, is useless in the fulfillment of that purpose if I'll trust him for it and submit to the lessons.

"God disciplines us for our good that we may share his holiness." That is a strong clue to the explanation we are always seeking. God's purpose for us is holiness--his own holiness which we are to share--and the sole route to that end is discipline.

Discipline very often involves loss, diminishment, "fallings from us, vanishings." Why? Because God wills our perfection in holiness, that is, our joy. But, we argue, why should diminishments be the prerequisite for joy? The answer to that lies within the great mystery that underlies creation: the principle of life out of death, exemplified for all time in the Incarnation ("that a vile Manger his low Bed should prove, who in a Throne of stars Thunders above," as Crashaw expressed it) and in the cross and resurrection ("who, for the joy that was set before him, endured a cross"). Christ's radical diminishments--his birth as a helpless baby and his death as a common criminal--accomplished our salvation.

It follows that if we are to share in his destiny we must share in his death, which means, for us sinners, the willingness to offer up to him not only ourselves but all that goes with that gift, including the simplest, down-to-earth things. These things may be aggravating and irritating and humiliating as well as mysterious. But it is the very aggravation and irritation and humiliation that we can offer--every diminishment of every kind--so that by the grace of God we may be taught his loving lessons and be brought a little nearer to his loving purpose for us and thus be enlarged.

Somehow it's easy to understand the principle of control and denial and loss in the matter of self-discipline. It is perfectly plain to anyone who wants to do a difficult and worthwhile thing that he's got to deny himself a thousand unimportant and probably a few hundred important things in order to do the one thing that matters most. Bishop Stephen Neill said that writing is almost entirely a matter of self-discipline. "You must make yourself write." I know. Alas. Sit yourself down, shut yourself up, restrict your enthusiasms, control your maunderings. Think. (Sir Joshua Reynolds wrote, "There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.") Diminishments. Then put things on paper--carefully. Then (and this is the part I resist most strenuously) rewrite. Cut things. Drop things you've spent hours on into the wastebasket.

I lay in bed, luxuriating in the physical bliss, cogitating on the spiritual perplexities. I could not explain why God would restore Lars' lost briefcase and not my New Testament. I could not fathom my friend's suffering or the "waste" of time. But God could. It's got something to do with that great principle of loss being the route to gain, or diminishments being the only way we can finally be enlarged, that is, conformed to the image of Christ.

"Who watched over the birth of the sea?"

The words from God's dialogue with Job came to mind as I listened to the throbbing of the ocean from my bed.

"Have you descended to the springs of the sea, or walked in the unfathomable deep?"

No, Lord, but you have. Nothing in those dark caverns is mysterious to you. Nor is anything in my life or my friend's life. I trust you with the unfathomables.

But you know I'll be back--with the usual question.

____________________

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[nChrist]

Author: Elisabeth Elliot
Source: On Asking God Why
Scripture:
The Path of Lonliness


On Brazen Heavens - Page 1

For about a year now I have been witness to a drama that is all too familiar to us mortal men. Someone finds he has cancer; the medical treadmill begins, with its implacable log of defeat; hope is marshalled, begins the march, is rebuffed at every juncture, flags, rouses, flags again, and is finally quietly mustered out.

And meanwhile, because the people in the drama are Christian believers, everyone is dragged into the maelstrom that marks the place where our experience eddies into the sea of the Divine Will. The whole question of prayer gapes open.

The promises are raked over. And over and over. "Is the primary condition enough faith on our part?" "We must scour our own hearts to see that there is no stoppage there--of sin or of unbelief." "We must stand on the promise.'' ''We must claim thus and such." ''We must resist the Devil and his weapons of doubt."

And we leap at and pursue any and all reports and records of healings. "Look at what happened to so-and-so!" "Listen to this!" "I've just read this wonderful pamphlet." We know the Gospel accounts by heart. We agree that this work of healing did not cease with the apostolic age. We greet gladly the tales of healing that pour in from all quarters in the Church--no longer only from those groups that have traditionally "specialized" in healing, but from the big, old, classic bodies in Christendom-- Rome, Anglicanism, Lutheranism, Presbyterianism, and so forth. ''God is doing something in our day," we hear, and we grasp at it eagerly.

And meanwhile the surgery goes on its horrific way, and the radiation burns on, week after grim week; and suffering sets in, and the doctors hedge and dodge into the labyrinthine linoleum and stainless-steel bureaucracy of the hospital world, and our hearts sicken, and we try to avert our eyes from the black flag that is fluttering wildly on the horizon, mocking us.

And the questions come stealing over us: "Where is now their God?" "Where is the promise of his coming?" "He trusted in God that he would deliver him . . ." and so on. And we know that we are not the first human beings into whose teeth the Tempter and his ilk have flung those taunts.

We look for some light. We look for some help. Our prayers seem to be vanishing, like so many wisps, into the serene aether of the cosmos (or worse, into the plaster of the ceiling). We strain our ears for some word from the Mount of God. A whisper will do, we tell ourselves, since clearly no bolts or thunderings have been activated by our importunity (yes, we have tried that tactic, too: the ''nonfaith" approach).

But only dead silence. Blank. Nothing. "But Lord, how are we supposed to know if we're on the right track at all if we don't get some confirmation from you--some corroboration--in any form, Lord--inner peace maybe, or some verse springing to life for us, or some token. Please let us have some recognizable attestation to what you have said in your Book." Nothing. Silence. Blank.

Perhaps at this point we try to think back over the experience of the people of God through the millennia. There has been a whole spectrum of experience for them: glorious deliverances, great victories, kingdoms toppled, widows receiving their dead back, men wandering about in sheepskins and goatskins--

"Men wandering about in sheepskins and goatskins? What went wrong there?"

"That's in the record of faith."

''But then surely something went wrong."

"No. It is part of the log of the faithful. That is a list of what happened to the people of faith. It is about how they proved God.

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[nChrist]

On Brazen Heavens - Page 2

The whole spectrum of experience is there. The widow of Nain got her son back and other mothers didn't. Peter got out of prison and John the Baptist didn't. Elijah whirled up to heaven with fiery horses and Joseph ended in a coffin in Egypt. Paul healed other people, but was turned down on his own request for healing for himself.

A couple of items in the Gospels seem to me to suggest something for the particular situation described in this article, where deliverance did not, in fact, come, and where apparently the juggernaut of sheer nature went on its grim way with no intervention from Heaven.

One is the story of Lazarus and the other is the Emmaus account. You object immediately: "Ah, but in both those cases it turned out that the dead were raised.'' Well, perhaps there is something there for us nonetheless.

For a start, the people involved in those incidents were followers of Jesus, and they had seen him, presumably, heal dozens of people. Then these followers experienced the utter dashing of all their expectations and hopes by death. God did not, it seemed, act. He who had been declared the Living One and the Giver of Life seemed to have turned his back in this case. What went wrong? What did the household at Bethany not do that the Widow of Nain had done? How shall we align it all? Who rates and who doesn't? Whatever it is that we might have chosen to say to them in the days following their experience of death, we would have had to come to terms somehow with the bleak fact that God had done something for others that he had not done for them.

From the vantage point of two thousand years, we later believers can, of course, see that there was something wonderful in prospect, and that it emerged within a very few days in both cases. The stories make sense. They are almost better than they would have been if the deaths had not occurred. But of course this line would have been frosty comfort for Mary and Martha, or for the two en route to Emmaus, if we had insisted to them, "Well, surely God is up to something. We'll just have to wait."

And yet what else could we have said? Their experience at that point was of the utter finality of death, which had thrown everything they had expected into limbo. For them there was no walking and leaping and praising God. No embracing and ecstatic tears of reunion. Only the silence of shrouds and sepulchres, and then the turning back, not just to the flat routines of daily life, but to the miserable duel with the tedious voices pressing in upon their exhausted imaginations with "Right! Now where are you? Tell us about your faith now! What'd you do wrong?"

The point is that for x number of days, their experience was of defeat. For us, alas, the "x number of days" may be greatly multiplied. And it is small comfort to us to be told that the difference, then, between us and, say, Mary and Martha's experience of Lazarus' death, or of the two on the road to Emmaus, is only a quantitative difference. "They had to wait four days. You have to wait one, or five, or seventy years. What's the real difference?" That is like telling someone on the rack that his pain is only quantitatively different from mine with my hangnail. The quantity is the difference. But there is, perhaps, at least this much of help for us whose experience is that of Mary and Martha and the others, and not that of the widow of Nain and Jairus and that set: the experience of the faithful has, in fact, included the experience of utter death. That seems to be part of the pattern, and it would be hard indeed to insist that the death was attributable to some failure of faith on somebody's part.

There is also this to be observed: that it sometimes seems that those on the higher reaches of faith are asked to experience this "absence" of God. For instance, Jesus seemed ready enough to show his authority to chance bystanders, and to the multitudes; but look at his own circle. John the Baptist wasn't let off--he had his head chopped off. James was killed in prison. And the Virgin herself had to go through the horror of seeing her Son tortured. No legions of angels intervened there. There was also Job, of course. And St. Paul--he had some sort of healing ministry himself, so that handkerchiefs were sent out from him with apparently healing efficacy for others, but, irony of ironies, his own prayer for himself was "unanswered." He had to slog through life with whatever his "thorn" was. What do these data do to our categories?

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