Talk about a woman with stories… Elisabeth Elliot’s life was one faithful adventure after another. Even to this final adventure.
She graduated this morning. As this world mourns, Heaven rejoices as a faithful servant is now home. She lived a very full and faithful 88 years on this earth, remembered as one of the most influential women of faith in the 20th century.
I don’t recall when I first heard of Elisabeth Elliot but I do know that it was regarding their mission service to unreached and less than welcoming tribal communities. I grew up in GA’s (Girls in Action) and Acteens which were programs in our church which taught us about being missionaries. That is likely where I heard of her first but it wasn’t until my adult years when I watched the movie, End of the Spear, that my heart was connected to hers. Her husband, Jim, would die at the end of the spear thrust into him by a villager in a community they were trying to share Christ with. She would later go back and serve these same people who killed her husband.
Elisabeth Elliot. What a woman. What a story. What a legacy.
Her passing makes me sit back and wonder about how I’m spending my life and what legacy I will leave. I can only hope that I will contribute a fraction of the good to my world that she did to hers. I know I’ve got some work to do.
“This job has been given to me to do. Therefore, it is a gift. Therefore, it is a privilege. Therefore, it is an offering I may make to God. Therefore, it is to be done gladly, if it is done for Him. Here, not somewhere else, I may learn God’s way. In this job, not in some other, God looks for faithfulness.” ― Elisabeth Elliot
“There is nothing worth living for, unless it is worth dying for.” ― Elisabeth Elliot
“I realized that the deepest spiritual lessons are not learned by His letting us have our way in the end, but by His making us wait, bearing with us in love and patience until we are able to honestly to pray what He taught His disciples to pray: Thy will be done.” ― Elisabeth Elliot
“This love of which I speak is slow to lose patience – it looks for a way of being constructive.
Love is not possessive.
Love is not anxious to impress nor does it cherish inflated ideas of its own ideas.
Love has good manners and does not pursue selfish advantage.
Love is not touchy.
Love does not keep account of evil or gloat over the wickedness of other people. On the contrary, it is glad with all good men when truth prevails.
Love knows no limits to its endurance, no end to its trust, no fading of its hope; it can outlast anything. It is, in fact, the one thing that stands when all else has fallen.” ― Elisabeth Elliot
“The fact that I am a woman does not make me a different kind of Christian, but the fact that I am a Christian makes me a different kind of woman.” ― Elisabeth Elliot
“Does it make sense to pray for guidance about the future if we are not obeying in the thing that lies before us today? How many momentous events in Scripture depended on one person’s seemingly small act of obedience! Rest assured: Do what God tells you to do now, and, depend upon it, you will be shown what to do next.” ― Elisabeth Elliot,
“God never withholds from His child that which His love and wisdom call good. God’s refusals are always merciful — “severe mercies” at times but mercies all the same. God never denies us our hearts desire except to give us something better.” ― Elisabeth Elliot
To be a woman of faith, could there be a higher calling?
If you’d like to know more about Elisabeth Elliot’s story you can read her book, Through Gates of Splendor or watch the movie, End of the Spear. She also has written a number of books and has several videos out on youtube.
Inspired,
~Andrea
For if He causes grief, Then He will have compassion according to His abundant lovingkindness. Lamentations 3:32
Empty Plate . Full Heart 