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81 pages

English

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In one of her most personal books, Elisabeth Elliot shares her own perceptions on the meanings of the events in her turbulent life, including the death of her first husband at the hands of the Auca Indians of South America and the cancer that widowed her for the second time. Undeterred by grief and hardship, Elliot lived a productive life as a mother, missionary, author, and Christian intellectual.The themes of this collection touch on her both her life experiences and the overarching Christian values of overcoming difficulties, taking responsibility, exercising discipline, and the redeeming grace of God which, in spite of trouble, gives us our life, calls us to labor, and grants us our salvation.

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Christianity

Philosophie et théologie

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Publié par	Baker Publishing Group
Date de parution	23 mars 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781493434466
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0264€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Other Books by Elisabeth Elliot

Through Gates of Splendor
Shadow of the Almighty
Love Has a Price Tag
Discipline: The Glad Surrender
Passion and Purity
A Lamp for My Feet
The Savage My Kinsman
These Strange Ashes
The Mark of a Man
Let Me Be a Woman
A Chance to Die

Copyright © 1988 by Elisabeth Elliot
Published by Revell a division of Baker Publishing Group P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287 www.revellbooks.com
Ebook edition created 2021
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4934-3446-6
Scripture quotations identified NEB are from the New English Bible. Copyright © The Delegates of the Oxford University Press and the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press 1961, 1970. Reprinted by permission.
Scripture quotations identified PHILLIPS are from THE NEW TESTAMENT IN MODERN ENGLISH, Revised Edition—J. B. Phillips, translator. © J. B. Phillips 1958, 1960, 1972. Used by permission of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.
Scripture quotation identified RSV is from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, Copyrighted © 1946, 1952, 1971, by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America, and is used by permission. All rights reserved.
Some of the essays in this volume appeared earlier under the title Twelve Baskets of Crumbs.
CONTENTS
Cover
Half Title Page
Other Books by Elisabeth Elliot
Title Page
Copyright Page
Foreword
Making Truth Visible
Hope Is a Fixed Anchor
But I Don’t Feel Called
The Comfort of Discipline
On Asking God Why
Tyrannies and Victories
How to Be Free
All That Was Ever Ours
Truth Telling
In a Hospital Waiting Room
Boredom
Some of My Best Friends Are Books
Flesh Becomes Word
Spontaneity
Thinking
Observation and Silence
Is There a Hero in the House?
The Shock of Self-Recognition
“M” Is for a Merry Heart
Inklings of Ignorance
Early Lessons
Christ’s Parting Gift
Fear, Suffering, Love
One of Those Nineteenth-Century Missionaries
Women in World Missions
Back Cover
FOREWORD
In spite of strong movements in the past few decades, I suspect that what an editor told Dorothy Sayers half a century ago in Britain may apply even now in America: “Our public do not want to be admonished by a woman.”
Most of the time I don’t want to be admonished by anybody. I’d rather just do what feels good without being told it isn’t a good thing to do. When people ask how I feel about an issue, it would be easier simply to answer the question instead of getting down to brass tacks and trying to think about it. I find that my feelings generally change after I’ve thought about something, and even if they don’t I’m convinced that thinking rather than feeling should determine my actions.
Here are essays on great themes—Hope, Truth, Freedom, and such. There are essays on lesser themes—nostalgia, boredom, spontaneity. They rise from the everyday life of one individual who tries to see things, to understand things, to learn from them.
I try to interpret the meaning of the visible in terms of the Invisible, for it is on that level that all things find their ultimate meaning. As a Christian I believe that all my problems are theological ones—that is, that all have meaning on a level much higher than the level on which I live my life. This idea, of course, is anything but new. It is what Christians have always believed, but many of us do not always live and act as though we believe it. I remember once asking somebody whether he believed a certain thing. “Not specially,” was his answer.
I am trying to believe “specially”—in a way, that is, that radically affects everything I do every day of every week. It does make a difference to me that the God who created, names, and numbers the stars in the heavens also numbers the hairs of my head. Such a triviality! I drop quite a few of them in the wastebasket every morning—but God counts them. It makes a difference to me that the God who ordained (which means set in place) the sun, the moon, and all the galaxies, also ordained a worm—to teach a prophet a lesson. He pays attention to very big things and to very small ones. What matters to me matters to Him, and that changes my life.
“You can throw the whole weight of your anxieties upon him, for you are his personal possession,” wrote St. Peter, a man who knew quite a bit about anxieties.
The writer to the Hebrew Christians reminded them of Old Testament times when the people of God had a tabernacle in the wilderness, “a holy place in this world for the eternal God” (Hebrews 9:1 PHILLIPS ). He mentioned ordinary things—a lamp, a table, loaves of bread, curtains—and extraordinary things: a golden altar and an ark, the cherubim of glory, the mercy seat. But all were visible and tangible, and all were “full of meaning.”
My house, my kitchen, my desk, my very body are meant to be holy places in this world for the eternal God. It is from this vantage point that I write.
Because the pieces were written over a period of years, there are occasional irregularities—inevitable repetitions, and the use of tenses which no longer apply, for example when I speak of my mother in the present tense, although she died in 1987. I have made no attempt to expunge or alter these.

MAKING TRUTH VISIBLE
A Talk Given at the Urbana Student Missionary Convention, 1979.
More than twenty-three years ago I was living in a small thatch-roofed house in a small jungle clearing on a small river called the Tiwaenu in the small country of Ecuador. An ordinary day would begin anywhere from three o’clock till five or so in the morning. The low crooning of an Auca song would often fit into my dreams for a while before I wakened and then, gradually, I would come to, and hear the Indians, still in their hammocks in the houses around the clearing, singing their strange two-or at most three-note songs:
Waenoni baronki iñunae. . . .
I have counted as many as seventy repetitions of verse one, but then, before you lose your mind, they go on to verse two:
MiH baronanai aemumae. . . .
While they were singing I could hear the pat-pat-pat of feather fans as the women fanned the fires, and then the soft cracking sound as they tapped manioc with a stick, peeled and split it in preparation for cooking. They would push the glowing log-tips together, set their clay pots on top, and I would hear the pfff-pfff as they blew on the fire. Roosters would crow, the fanning and the songs would go on, and as dawn broke behind the tall trees I would give up pretending to be asleep. I would open my eyes and the two teen-aged boys who slept in the house next door (our houses had no walls) would belt out the first announcement of the day: “Baru! Ñani omaemunamba!” which means, “She’s awake!”
I was a freak to these people. They were the Auca Indians of the Ecuadorian rain forest, a people so isolated that most of them had never laid eyes on anybody they didn’t know, so primitive they still made fire with two sticks. They wore no clothes at all, only a piece of cotton string around the hips. When I asked what the string was for they looked at me horrified. “Well, you certainly wouldn’t expect us to go around naked, would you?” They had a notion from way back—nobody could tell me where they got it—that everybody in the world who wasn’t an Auca was a cannibal, so when they met up with strangers they usually dispatched them as quickly as possible with eight-foot wooden spears to avoid ending up in the strangers’ cooking pot.
One day, two years before I lived there, the Aucas had found five white men on a little strip of sand on the Curaray River, men who had been dropping gifts to them from a yellow airplane. The Indians called the plane ibu, meaning bumblebee, because the sound it made was almost identical. They had argued among themselves for a long time about whether these men might be as friendly as they appeared to be, shouting and gesticulating from the plane, or whether they were just masters of treachery and deception. They couldn’t possibly know that they were missionaries, bent only on giving them some very good news. When they finally found themselves face to face on the sandstrip, the Indians hesitated, uncertain as to what to do. At last, the oldest of the six men, a man whom I later got to know as Gikita, said, “Well, I brought my spear—butu Wati! taenumu waeninani yaeae—I’m going to kill them,” and with that he lunged across the river that separated them and sank his weapon into the back of one of the missionaries. A long fight ensued, but ended with all five of the Americans dead.
That happened more than twenty-five years ago. Maybe it seems unusual in the twentieth century, maybe it seems strange that the God whom the five served should allow them to be defeated by a handful of utterly misled, totally ignorant Indians to whom spearing was all in a day’s work. But in Christian history the story is neither unusual nor strange. In fact, it seems legitimate to me to add the names of those men—Ed, Roj, Nate, Pete, and Jim—to a long list given to us in the Book of Hebrews. You remember many of those who qualified for the great gallery of chapter 11: Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Samuel, and the prophets—even a harlot named Rahab.
There were those not named who conquered kingdoms, shut the mouths of lions, quenched the furious blaze of fire, and escaped from death. They were the successful ones—the winners, you’d say. But do you remember the list at the end of the chapter? You never saw any pictures of them in your Sunday-school papers. They were the ones who were tortur