Finding Your Way through Loneliness: Finding Your Way Through the Wilderness to God

by Elisabeth Elliot

We may be earnestly desiring to be obedient and holy. But we may be missing the fact that it is here, where we happen to be at this moment and not in another place or another time, that we may learn to love Him—here where it seems He is not at work, where His will seems obscure or frightening, where He is not doing what we expected Him to do, where He is most absent. Here and nowhere else is the appointed place. If faith does not go to work here, it will not go to work at all.

As well as I could, I laid all my desire once more before Him to whom all desire is known and from whom no secrets are hidden.

Thus the worst thing that ever happened became the best thing that ever happened. It can happen with us. At the Cross of Jesus our crosses are changed into gifts.

Here’s a Person who not only understands me but who fascinates me—a Person whom I have become thrilled to know. Christ calls me out of my natural self-centeredness by listening to my cries and then showing me the bigger picture. The better I come to know Him, the more I become interested in what He is interested in—the more I live and breathe for His Kingdom to come, for things to be done on earth as they are in heaven.

The Bible is a book about the mysterious ways of God with individual men. It shows us on every page that there is a Controller. We have a tendency to dismiss the possibility of mystery in our own lives, even when we are faithful readers and professed believers of the Bible, with remarks like, “Oh, but that was back then.” Jesus Christ is the same. Yesterday. Today. Forever. We have innumerable promises that the Seen is not the whole story. The Unseen is where it is to be finally unfurled.

Think of it: Every one of our human weaknesses is intelligible to Him. He understands. He shares fully.

The ultimate answer goes to the Origin of things. Why am I widowed? Why has God allowed a divorce? Why hasn’t He given me a wife (or a husband)? Why do my friends misunderstand me? Why would God give me a husband who doesn’t accept responsibility? Why can’t we communicate? Why did I lose the person who meant most to me in all the world? Why should I, why should anybody be all alone?

Everything that comes up has something to do with God. It is meant to bring me face-to-face with Him and to teach me something about His ways with us.

life. If I am in Christ I really can’t lose. It is an old, old story. And it’s mine, too. This is my story and this is my song. Jesus Christ has given me Living Water. Jesus Christ is my Bread. Jesus Christ is my Life. He is Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. I am the same body, the same temperament, with the same passions and the same history, but I know that all of those “givens” are capable of transformation. This is why That old rugged Cross, so despised by the world, holds a wondrous attraction for me.

Can God help this child to see beyond the schoolroom and the playground to things invisible? Can He show him this first hard lesson in what it means to take up the Cross? I believe He can. I pray that he will. The fact that his answer to the prayer for a friend has so far been No indicates to me that God does not think he needs the friend now—for God has promised to supply our needs. What we don’t have now we don’t need now. Possibly His very withholding is in order that the boy may learn, at this crucial juncture in his life, to turn to God in prayer for a deeply felt need. When a man or woman, a boy or girl, accepts

answer to our loneliness is love—not our finding someone to love us, but our surrendering to the God who has always loved us with an everlasting love. Loving Him is then expressed in a happy and full-hearted pouring out of ourselves in love to others.