A No-Risk Life

The risks people are prepared to take these days are certainly a different set from what they used to be... Dickens describes a journey into the Scottish Highlands:

When we got safely to the opposite bank, there came riding up a wild highlander, his great plaid streaming in the wind, screeching in Gaelic to the post-boy on the opposite bank, making the most frantic gestures....
The boy, horses and carriage were plunging in the water, which left only the horses' heads and boy's body visible.... The man was perfectly frantic with pantomime.... The carriage went round and round like a great stone, the boy was pale as death, the horses were struggling and plashing and snorting like sea animals, and we were all roaring to the driver to throw himself off and let them and the coach go to the devil, when suddenly it all came right (having got into shallow water) and, all tumbling and dripping and jogging from side to side, they climbed up to the dry land.
....
I'm for civilization. I'm all for certain kinds of progress and I accept quite gladly most of today's means of avoiding the risks that Dickens and Kipling and all of mankind before them had to run, but to imagine that we shall whip off the dishonesty that is characteristic of fallen human nature everywhere as painlessly as we whip off one garment and put on another, to imagine that by simply taking a different view we shall come up with a no-risk brand of honesty, is a piece of self-deception and fatuity to make the mind reel.

Plato, three hundred years before Christ, predicted that if ever the truly good man were to appear, the man who would tell the truth, he would have his eyes gouged out and in the end be crucified.

That risk was once taken, in its fullest measure. The man appeared. He told the world the truth about itself and even made the preposterous claim "I am the Truth." As Plato foresaw, that man was crucified.

He calls us still to follow him, and the conditions are the same: "Let a man deny himself and take up his cross."

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Elisabeth Elliot, "On Asking God Why"

Ritual

C. S. Lewis, that wise man who seems to have thought through almost everything, writes in his Preface to Paradise Lost:

"Those who dislike ritual in general--
ritual in any way and every department of life--
may be asked most earnestly to reconsider the question.
It is a pattern imposed on the mere flux of our feelings by reason and will,
which renders pleasures less fugitive and griefs more endurable,
which hands over to the power of wise custom the task
(to which the individual and his moods are so inadequate)
of being festive or sober, gay or reverent, when we choose to be,
and not at the bidding of chance" Oxford University Press, 1952, p. 21).

No Love Without Grief

Tell us, fool, who knows more of love--the one who has joys from it or the one who has trials and griefs? He answered: There cannot be any knowledge of love without both of them.

(Ramon Lull, The Book of the Lover and the Beloved)

When I imagine that I want to learn to love God--and to love my husband and others whom God has given me to love--let me test the desire of my willingness to accept trial and grief. If I can welcome them--Yes, Lord!--and believe God's purpose in them, I am learning the lesson of love. If I cannot, it's a fair indication that my desire to love is a delusion.


"A Lamp For My Feet", Elisabeth Elliot

The Habit of Your Life: Thanksgiving

...it is always possible to be thankful for what is given rather than to complain about what is not given. One or the other becomes a habit of life. There are, of course, complaints which are legitimate--as, for example, when services have been paid for which have not been rendered--but the gifts of God are in an altogether different category. Ingratitude to him amounts (let us resort to no euphemisms) to rebellion.

Many women have told me that my husband's advice, which I once quoted in a book, has been an eye-opener to them. He said that a wife, if she is very generous, may allow that her husband lives up to perhaps eighty percent of her expectations. There is always the other twenty percent that she would like to change, and she may chip away at it for the whole of their married life without reducing it by very much. She may, on the other hand, simply decide to enjoy the eighty percent, and both of them will be happy. It's a down-to-earth illustration of a principle: Accept, positively and actively, what is given. Let thanksgiving be the habit of your life.

Such acceptance is not possible without a deep and abiding belief in the sovereign love of God. Either he is in charge, or he is not. Either he loves us, or he does not. If he is in charge and loves us, then whatever is given is subject to his control and is meant ultimately for our joy.


Copyright© 1979, by Elisabeth Elliot
all rights reserved.