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

by Elisabeth Elliot

The only way she could learn trust and obedience was to have things happen which she could not understand.

a pure faith would be worth far more to God than all the service she had hoped to render if poor health had not interrupted her plans.

Suffering is a wilderness experience. We feel very much alone and helpless, cut off from others who cannot know how we suffer. We long for someone to come to our aid, be “company” for us, get us out of this. Someone will. Some One will certainly come to our aid. He will be company for us if we’ll let Him.

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.

The power of the Cross is not exemption from suffering but the very transformation of suffering.

My larger family are those who also know Christ in an intimate way.

In His mercy God stands silently by and permits us to agonize. We simply cannot turn to Him until we have nowhere else to turn.

events do not change souls. It is our response to them which finally affects us.

There is no hope for any of us until we confess our helplessness. Then we are in a position to receive grace.

Invisible forces are always at work. The God who made us does not then leave us to fend for ourselves. He is still Emmanuel, “God with us,” even when to all appearances we stand alone against frightening forces.

To love means to open ourselves to suffering. Shall we shut our doors to love, then, and be “safe”?

A hard obedience accepted for Christ is the Cross taken up.