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

by Elisabeth Elliot

Those who only watch and pray and try to put themselves in the place of the bereaved find it almost unendurable. Sometimes they weep uncontrollably, for their imaginations never include the grace.

He is not only alone; he also knows that he is alone. . . . This aloneness he cannot endure. Neither can he escape it. It is his destiny to be alone and to be aware of it. Not even God can take this destiny away from him.

Each, however, was still alone in a profound sense—in a separate body, alone before God, bearing His image, answering to Him, responsible. This aloneness was a good thing, for everything in the Garden was perfect.

The relationship of man with God and of human beings with each other was fractured. Man now knows that he is alone. His aloneness is no longer an experience only of solitude (not by any means a bad thing in itself) but also of deprivation.

We must have a foothold.

To know God, or even to begin to know Him, is to know that we are not alone in the universe. Someone else is out there. There is a hint that there may be a refuge for our loneliness. To stop our frantic getting, spending, and searching, and simply to look at the things God has made is to move one step away from despair. For God cares. The most awesome seascape can reveal a care which is actually tender.

But safety, as the Cross shows, does not exclude suffering. All that was of course beyond me when I was a child, but as I began to learn about suffering I learned that trust in those strong arms means that even our suffering is under control. We are not doomed to meaninglessness. A loving Purpose is behind it all, a great tenderness even in the fierceness.

As Peter Kreeft tells us in his masterful book, Making Sense Out of Suffering, ancient man was preoccupied with how to be good while modern man is preoccupied with how to be happy. To the ancient, goodness leads to happiness. To the modern, goodness leads to anything but. “Everything I enjoy is immoral, illegal, or fattening” is the saying.

She needed to start from the Love of God and understand that that love, revealed on the Cross, does not exclude but must always include suffering.

That is where faith begins—in the wilderness, when you are alone and afraid, when things don’t make sense. She must hang on to the message of the Cross: God loves you. He loved you enough to die for you. Will you trust Him?

In the wilderness of loneliness we are terribly vulnerable. What we want is OUT, and sometimes there appear to be some easy ways to get there. Will we take Satan up on his offers, satisfy our desires in ways never designed by God, seek security outside of His holy will? If we do, we may find a measure of happiness, but not the lasting joy our heavenly Father wants us to have. We will “gain the world,” but we’ll lose our souls. Jesus knew that His joy lay in only one direction: the will of the Father. And so does ours. Pain, as C. S. Lewis said, is God’s megaphone (“He whispers to us in our joys, speaks to us in our conscience, and shouts to us in our pain”). The pain of loneliness is one way in which He wants to get our attention. 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.

O Love that wilt not let me go, I rest my weary soul in Thee; I give Thee back the life I owe, That in Thine ocean depths its flow May richer, fuller be. O Light that followest all my way, I yield my flickering torch to Thee; My heart restores its borrowed ray, That in Thy sunshine’s blaze its day May brighter, fairer be. O Joy that seekest me through pain, I cannot close my heart to Thee; I trace the rainbow through the rain, And feel the promise is not vain That morn shall tearless be. O Cross that liftest up my head, I dare not ask to fly from Thee; I lay in dust life’s glory dead, And from the ground there blossoms red Life that shall endless be.

God never denies us our heart’s desire except to give us something better.

With what misgivings we turn over our lives to God, imagining somehow that we are about to lose everything that matters. Our hesitancy is like that of a tiny shell on the seashore, afraid to give up the teaspoonful of water it holds lest there not be enough in the ocean to fill it again. Lose your life, said Jesus, and you will find it.

Surely it is impossible to love “too much,” for love is from God, who is Love. Usually we love too little and too sentimentally. Our love, God-given though it be, is usually mixed up with possessiveness and selfishness. It needs strengthening and purifying.

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; I fled Him, down the arches of the years; I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears I hid from him . . .

God may have to hurt us, but He will never harm us. His object is wholeness.

It is important to repeat that this acceptance I speak of is not passivism, Quietism, fatalism, or resignation. It is not capitulation to evil or a refusal to do what can and ought to be done to change things. It is a distilled act of faith, a laying of one’s will alongside God’s, a putting of oneself at one with His kingdom and His will.

For in Acceptance lieth peace.

This is a necessary part of the journey. Even if it is the roughest part, it is only a part, and it will not last the whole long way. Remember where I am leading you. Remember what you will find at the end—a home and a haven and a heaven.”

Is it not legitimate, then, to think of loneliness as material for sacrifice?

I thought that I had courage in the house, And patience to be quiet and endure, And sometimes happy songs; now I am sure Thy servant truly hath not anything, And see, my song-bird hath a broken wing.

“I will offer . . . the sacrifice of thanksgiving” (Ps. 116:17 NKJV). It is wonderfully comforting to be absolutely sure that we do the will of God. Here is one matter about which there can be no doubt: “Be thankful, whatever the circumstances may be. For this is the will of God for you in Christ Jesus” (1 Thess. 5:18 Phillips).

When the surrender of ourselves seems too much to ask, it is first of all because our thoughts about God Himself are paltry.

Every renunciation led to glory.

He heard and answered. That is all there is to it. Let the answer be manifested in His own time and way.” I think you will begin to know the strange peace that is not the world’s kind.

We must not demand from Him what He has not promised. Although He is a God of miracles, He does not promise miracles (by which I mean what C. S. Lewis means—an interference with nature by supernatural powers).

Turn your loneliness into solitude, and your solitude into prayer.

The heart which has no agenda but God’s is the heart at leisure from itself. Its emptiness is filled with the Love of God. Its solitude can be turned into prayer.