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

by Elisabeth Elliot

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.