(From Elisabeth Elliot’s These Strage Ashes: Is God Still in Charge? , p.124-7)
The events of the preceding day stayed vividly in my mind for a long time. It had been, I wrote to my parents, “the most nightmarish day of my life.” As we walked home in the rain from the graveyard, it seemed to me that everything was over. Although I could, by no stretch of the imagination, hold myself responsible for Macario’s murder, the enormity of it weighed me down almost as heavily as if I were guilty. It was another failure, somehow, a judgment on us and our work.
I went over and over in my mind how it had come to be that I was here at all, that Macario had been my colleague. The work we did together was the work to which each had been clearly called, had we not? I went back to the night in New Jersey when I had knelt in my room, asking for assurance that the call was God’s voice and not a figment of my own mind. It had seemed that He answered me through a Bible verse, “I the Lord have called thee and will hold thine hand.” I thought of those who had prayed for me and encouraged me in so many ways, I thought of all the sermons I had cringed under about the coldness of the churches and their disobedience to Christ’s commission, “Go ye.” I thought of all the times I had sung “Where He Leads Me, I Will Follow,” earnestly examining my soul for signs of insincerity or impurity of motive. I could not deny the reality of that call or the faithfulness of those who had supported me.
What of the work of the Colorado translation? Could I possibly doubt that this was God’s work? Was He, in fact, interested in the salvation of this jungle tribe, or was it only we three foreign women who were interested? Had I come here, leaving so much behind, on a fool’s errand? If this was how the Lord of Hosts looked after His servants and His glory, if this was a sample of how He answered prayers for His work and His workers, it certainly fit none of my categories. How was I to reconcile His permitting such a thing with my own understanding of the missionary task?
… As I look back on that time, I think it was Lesson One for me in the school of faith. That is, it was my first experience of having to bow down before that which I could not possibly explain. Usually we need not bow. We can simply ignore the unexplainable because we have other things to occupy our minds. We sweep it under the rug. We evade the questions.
Faith’s most severe tests come not when we see nothing, but when we see a stunning array of evidence that seems to prove our faith vain. If God were God, if He were omnipotent, if He had cared, would this have happened? Is this that I face now the ratification of my calling, the reward of obedience? One turns into the abyss. But in the abyss there is only blackness, no glimmer of light, no answering echo.
When I was sixteen years old, I copied in the back of my Bible a prayer of Betty Scott Stam’s, whose visit to our home when I was very small had made such a deep impression on me. Her prayer: ”Lord, I give up all my own plans and purposes, all my own desires and hopes, and accept thy will for my life. I give myself, my life, my all, utterly to thee to be thine forever. Fill me and seal me with thy Holy Spirit, use me as thou wilt, send me where thou wilt, work out thy whole will in my life at any cost, now and forever.”
The cost, for her, was quite literally her life only a few years after she had prayed that prayer. I had never forgotten the picture on the font page of our newspaper of the Stams’ baby daughter being carried in a rice basket by a Chinese woman who had found her after her parents’ execution.
I went back to things like that prayer as I searched for meaning to Marcario’s death. Only God knew Marcario’s heart, and whether he was a martyr. For me there were other implications. I had promised to obey God, and I had known that that promise might lead to “tribulation.” I had prayed also for holiness, but this – this kind of “answer” – was startling and repugnant to me. I had desired God Himself and He had not only not given me what I asked for, He had snatched away what I had. I came to nothing, to emptiness.
… I felt like a son who had asked for a fish and been given a scorpion I had honestly (surely it was honestly?) desired God. I wanted to do His will.
… It was a long time before I came to the realization that it is in our acceptance of what is given that God gives Himself. Even the Son of God had to learn obedience by the things that He suffered. He had come for only one purpose: “Lo, I come, in the volume of this book it is written of me, to do thy will, O God.”
Amy Carmichael wrote: “But these strange ashes, Lord, this nothingness / This baffling sense of loss / Son, was the anguish of my stripping less / Upon the torturing cross?”
Each separate experience of individual stripping we may learn to accept as a fragment of the suffering Christ bore when He took it all. “Surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.” This grief, this sorrow, this total loss that empties my hands and breaks my heart, I may, if I will, accept, and by accepting it, I find in my hands something to offer. And so I give it back to Him, who in mysterious exchange gives Himself to me.