Suffering Is Never for Nothing

by Elisabeth Elliot

I tell you this because maybe it’ll help you to see that I’ve been forced, from the circumstances in my own life, to try to get down to the very bedrock of faith. The things that are infrangible and unshakable. God is my refuge. Was He Jim’s refuge? Was He his fortress? On the night before those five men who were killed by the Waorani went into the Waorani territory they sang, “We rest on thee, our Shield and our Defender.” What does your faith do with the irony of those words?

There would be no intellectual satisfaction on this side of Heaven to that age-old question, why. Although I have not found intellectual satisfaction, I have found peace. The answer I say to you is not an explanation but a person, Jesus Christ, my Lord and my God. As I shared at the beginning of this chapter, when I came to the realization that my husband was missing, not knowing for another five days that he was dead, the words that God brought to me then were from Isaiah the 43rd chapter, “When thou passest through the waters I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee: when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee. For I am the Lord thy God” (Isa. 43:2–3a kjv). And

Janet Erskine Stuart said, “Joy is not the absence of suffering but the presence of God.”5

Suffering is an irreplaceable medium through which I learned an indispensable truth.

Amen. Solid rock of hope.

God is big enough to take anything that we can dish out to Him. And He even saw to it that Job’s howls and complaints were preserved in black and white for our instruction. So never hesitate to say what you really feel to God because remember that God knows what you think before you know and certainly knows what you’re going to say before you even think it.

It is my life for yours. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the principle of the cross. That’s what Jesus was demonstrating. My life for yours.

Among the great gifts of my life are my husband, my daughter, and my grandchildren—and there are times when I can be very selfish about those gifts. And yet I have to recognize that they’re not just for me. But these, also, that I think of as my own, must be held with an open hand and offered back to God along with my body and all that I am.

What have you got in your hand to give to Him? Is it a gift that you recognize as a gift, a talent for example? Is it the willingness to be a mother and to take the criticism of the women who say that a woman who’s got half a brain will put her children in somebody else’s care and get out and do something “fulfilling”? Is it the willingness to take the flack from the rest of the world about something that you’ve decided to do for Jesus’ sake? Is it the willingness to be unrecognized, unappreciated? You know, we’ve got a very twisted idea of this word ministry. We think that a ministry means just a very short list of things: preaching or singing or doing a seminar or writing a book or teaching a Sunday school class. Of course those are ministry. They’re forms of service. But the word ministry just means service. And service is a part of our offering to God. People would think of my ministry as being my missionary work, my writing, my speaking. But you know, I don’t spend most of my life standing at a podium. I spend most of my life sitting at a desk, standing at a sink, standing at an ironing board, going to the grocery store, sitting in airports, doing a whole lot of things which are not anything for which I expect to get medals. They are moments to be offered to Jesus. Do the next thing.

And it was then that George Mathison wrote those wonderful words, “O love that will not let me go. I rest my weary soul in Thee. I give Thee back”—here we are with this offering—“I give Thee back the life I owe, that in Thine ocean depths its flow may richer fuller be.”23