"Every inch of the road"

"The word is 'Trust me.'"

Today Elisabeth Elliot has gone to be with Jesus. I am so thankful to God for her life and her testimony and her writings. So my GCSE scripts are getting pushed aside for half an hour while I gather together a few of my favourite Elliot passages.

Personally, I find Elliot's voice to be incredibly compelling and comforting.  She makes very bold claims about God's good, deliberate and redemptive control over all the details of our lives:

"When our plans are interrupted, his are not. His plans are proceeding exactly as scheduled, moving us always (including those minutes or hours or years which seem most useless or wasted or unendurable) toward the goal of true maturity" (Passion and Purity).

And yet she never glosses over loss, mess, and the emptiness of apparent futility:

'God's providence is inscrutable, .... apparent tragedy, frustration and waste are the lot of God's servants no less than of other men (perhaps, indeed more)... God exalts himself by putting us down (No Graven Image).'

She never pretends to have answers. She doesn't have some triumphant  - 'And then we realised that it had all happened for this reason and now all is well' overarching message to ram home.  Instead she writes from a place of steady humility:

'It is not for us to claim to see the meaning of all that happens' (No Graven Image).

You don't find answers in Elliot. But you find Jesus. 

You find the Jesus who

'is not a High Priest who cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities. He is one who has been over every inch of the road. I love that old hymn from I think the seventeenth century by Richard Baxter: “Christ leads me through no darker rooms than He went through before." (Radio interview).

You meet the Jesus who invites you to share in the fellowship of his suffering:

'Jesus learned obedience by the things which He suffered, not by the things which He enjoyed. In order to fit you for His purposes both here and in eternity, He has lent you this sorrow. But He bears the heavier end of the Cross laid upon you' (Keep a Quiet Heart).

You collide squarely with a God who can handle all of your questions, who can absorb all of your pain, and who uses the process to free you:

'Leave it all in the hands of the one who was wounded for you' (Keep a Quiet Heart). 

'She finds herself an outsider, unable to identify with the phony streak in what she embraced before. But in so doing, she finds 

Herself free, God real and life good." (No Graven Image).