Finding Your Way through Loneliness by Elisabeth Elliot

Author:Elisabeth Elliot [Elliot, Elisabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Christian Living, REL012000
ISBN: 9781493434572
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2021-03-15T15:00:00+00:00

15

A Field with a Treasure in It

When Jim Elliot was preparing for missionary work, he saw parallels between the demands of the life to which he believed God was calling him and life in the Yukon a century ago. For both, the prize was gold, although of greatly differing durability. He copied into his journal a part of Robert Service’s poem, “The Law of the Yukon”:

Send not your foolish and feeble; send me your strong and your sane,

Strong for the red-rage of battle, sane for I harry them sore.

Send me men girt for the combat, men who are grit to the core . . .

And I wait for the men who will win me—and I will not be won in a day,

And I will not be won by weaklings, subtle and suave and mild,

But by men with the hearts of Vikings and the simple faith of a child,

Desperate, strong, and resistless, unthrottled by fear or defeat,

Them will I gild with my treasure, them will I glut with my meat.1

The old prospectors had to believe that the gold was there. The journey to get it would be torture, but they chose the torture because of the hope. Jim believed there was treasure better than the Yukon’s gold, worth any risk, any sacrifice. I think I can picture him now, looking back from the Celestial City to the journey he had made, thinking the price, after all, didn’t amount to much.

You and I are not rushing off to the Yukon to dig for gold, any more than Jim was. We are not gluttons for punishment. We are not legendary heroes and heroines. We are only ordinary folks who get out of very comfortable beds in the morning, brush our teeth with running water, put on whatever we like to wear, and eat whatever we want for breakfast. Our lives generally don’t seem to call for much courage. We are so accustomed to luxury we think of traffic jams as hardship. It ruins our day if the air conditioner quits or the waiter says they’re fresh out of cherry cheesecake. Of course it is only a matter of time before the traffic jam is unsnarled; time and money can fix the air conditioner; we can order a different dessert. We expect to get things fixed—fast. When we can’t, we are at a loss.

Loneliness is much worse than being stuck in a traffic jam or having to do without cheesecake. Perhaps we hardly think of its calling for courage, because we hardly think of it as real suffering, yet it fits the simplest definition I know: having what you don’t want, or wanting what you don’t have. Loneliness we don’t want. It comes from wanting what we don’t have.

Who can compare sufferings? They are unique as each sufferer is unique. “The heart knows its own bitterness” (Prov. 14:10 NEB). We respond according to our temperaments. Some cast about for solutions, stew, fret, rage, deny the facts. Some sink into an oblivion of self-recrimination or pity.

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