These Strange Ashes

I read "These Strange Ashes: Is God Still in Charge?" by Elizabeth Elliot in less than a day. In it, she tells the story of her first year as a missionary. It's a very easy read, but it is full of insights about the difficulties we face in life. I really like how direct a writer Elizabeth Elliot is. She has learned so much, but at tremendous cost. I plan to read more of her books.

Here are a few treasures I discovered along the way.

"Erik Erikson has said that maturity means maintaining continuity with the past in the presence of growth and change. It is a painful process. ... It was only gradually that I came to understand that some things were meant to be cherished, and not sacrificed. God was responsible for my parentage, my nationality, and my upbringing. He had called me, and He had called me by name, and He would not bypass what I was or the things that had made me what I was."

(In reflecting on the beauty of the jungle and its inhabitants)

"My mind soared, trying to comprehend it all, and I found it easy to worship the God who showed Himself in these things. But were the poisonous snakes and the vampire bats, the cockroach worms and the scorpions, also necessary to the world's harmony? That question took me back to the beginnings of things, to the great Unanswerable: Was sin necessary? Could men have lived in a world without suffering?

I did not know the answer then. I do not know it now. But I think during that first eventful year as a jungle missionary I had my inkling that it is not a tidy world we live in. It is not a world we can deal with sentimentally. The God of the 'pretty, precious little bird' is the God of that fierce creature 'whose sneezings flash forth light,' 'whose heart is hard as stone.' But I was learning, too, in what I saw around me, in the life of the forest, and what I found within me of hope, disappointments, and confusions, that underneath are the Everlasting Arms."

(After the one person who could help her learn the native language was murdered)

"As I look back on that time, I think it was Lesson One for me in the school of faith. That is, it was my first experience of having to bow down before that which I could not possibly explain. Usually we need not bow. We can simply ignore the unexplainable because we have other things to occupy our minds. We sweep it under the rug. We evade the questions. Faith's most severe tests come not when we see nothing, but when we see a stunning array of evidence that seems to prove our faith vain. If God were God, if He were omnipotent, if He had cared, would this have happened? Is this that I face now the ratification of my calling, the reward of obedience? One turns in disbelief again from the circumstances and looks into the abyss. But in the abyss there is only blackness, non glimmer of light, no answering echo.

"When I was sixteen years old, I copied in the back of my Bible a prayer of Betty Scott Stam's, whose visit in our home when I was very small had made such a deep impression on me. Her prayer: 'Lord, I give up all my own plans and purposes, all my own desires and hopes, and accept thy will for my life. I give myself, my life, my all, utterly to thee to be thine forever. Fill me and seal me with they Holy Spirit, use me as thou wilt, send me where thou wilt, work out they whole will in my life at any cost, now and forever.' The cost, for her, was quite literally her life only a few years after she had prayed that prayer.

"I felt like a son who had asked for a fish and been given a scorpion. I had honestly (surely it was honestly?) desired God. I wanted to do His will. ... It was a long time before I came to the realization that it is in our acceptance of what is given that God gives Himself. Even the Son of God had to learn obedience by the things that He suffered. He had come for only one purpose: 'Lo, I come, in the volume of the book it is written of me, to do thy will O God.' And His reward was desolation, crucifixion.

"Each separate experience of individual stripping we may learn to accept as a fragment of the suffering Christ bore when He took it all. 'Surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.' This grief, this sorrow, this total loss that empties my hands and breaks my heart, I may, if I will, accept, and by accepting it, I find in my hands something to offer. And so I give it back to Him, who in mysterious exchange gives himself to me."

Final thoughts as she looked back on the four "kindergarten lessons" she learned that first year:

"Faith, prayer, and obedience are our requirements. We are not offered in exchange immunity and exemption from the world's woes. What we are offered has to do with another world altogether."

"As we learn to know God, we learn that His ways are past finding out. We gaze into the abyss and cry "Why?" Seldom does the Lord of the Universe explain himself in any terms other than those found in His holy Word. 'The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law' (Dt 29:29)."

"God makes no mistakes. he does not fall asleep. He does not forget His loved children. He asks us, every day, no matter what circumstances or adversities we find ourselves in, to trust and obey. He has so arranged things that we may not often fathom His sovereign purposes, but now and then He vouchsafes to us a glimpse of what He is up to."