Suffering Is Never for Nothing

by Elisabeth Elliot

But I’ve read the wonderful letters of Samuel Rutherford, that Scottish preacher from the seventeenth century who seems to have been through just about every imaginable human mill, and he had lost at least one child and I had his letter in my study. And so I looked up one of his letters to a woman who had lost a child. And this is what he wrote to her, so I quoted these words to Phil and Janet after saying to them that I didn’t know what you’re going through but I know the One who knows, and then I sent them Samuel Rutherford’s words. This is what he said after losing two daughters: “Grace rooteth not out the affections of a mother, but putteth them on His wheel who maketh all things new, that they may be refined . . . He commandeth you to weep: and that princely One, who took up to heaven with Him a man’s heart to be a compassionate High Priest . . . The cup ye drink was at the lip of sweet Jesus, and He drank of it.” Janet wrote to me this reply, “The storm of pain is calming down and the Lord is painting a new and different picture of Himself.”9 I saw in her experience that the very suffering itself was an irreplaceable medium. God was using that thing to speak to Janet and Phil in a way that He could not have spoken if He had not gotten their attention through the death of that little child.