Can God really be trusted?
Many of us have asked this question, in one form or another. We wonder what God is doing and why, especially when his will involves suffering and hardship. We want to understand his plans and make sense of our circumstances.
Elisabeth Elliot—a faithful wife and widow, missionary, and writer—spent decades wrestling with this question too. Lucy S. R. Austen, author and former editor of the Spring Hill Review, offers insight into Elliot’s heart and mind through this extensive biography, Elisabeth Elliot: A Life.
Across 624 pages, readers are introduced to a woman of faith with many strengths and weaknesses, giftings and flaws. Through her raw and detailed account, Austen shows us how Elliot asked the same hard questions we do. The answers are often less tidy than we’d like.
Austen is realistic in her portrayal of Elliot and those around her. She explores the excruciating roller coaster of Jim Elliot’s courtship of Elisabeth in great detail. Elisabeth’s challenges in expressing healthy emotions and connecting to others is increasingly evident as the story marches on. The interpersonal conflicts between missionaries are portrayed in ways that reveal the struggle for saintliness all servants of Christ must endure.
Despite the flaws of all the people in the story—many of whom we have been taught to revere as saints––readers are likely to walk away from this biography with a deeper appreciation for God’s work through Elisabeth Elliot. The overarching theme of her life is this: God can be trusted, not because of what he is doing or our ability to understand it all, but because of who he is.
Elliot grappled with trusting God in at least three important areas: suffering, ministry, and writing.
Suffering
“What sort of view of God do you . . . have [after death]?” Elliot asked this question to a couple who had lost their son (387). No stranger to the great suffering of death, Elliot was the widow of missionary Jim Elliot, who was murdered by the Waorani people in South America. He and four other men had sought to bring the gospel to a remote jungle tribe, and their heroic yet tragic story quickly spread throughout the world.
Austen provides us with many of Elliot’s diary entries and family letters: windows into the mind of a vulnerable young widow and new mother wrestling with loss and yet fully assured of God’s goodness. We watch Elliot move from an uncritical acceptance of her evangelical upbringing (a “victorious” understanding of the Christian life with its many platitudes) to a genuine grappling with darkness, death, and defeat. Austen paints a multilayered picture with the brushstrokes of Elliot’s confidence in God and her struggles with loneliness, confusion, and depression. Elisabeth Elliot was a real person with real feelings—and deep faith in a real God.
Ministry
Elliot was a real person with real feelings—and a deep faith in a real God.
“What would happen to your idea of God . . . if you found that your work was useless?” Elliot posed this tough question to her audience in one of her later speeches (398). To all appearances, the Elliots’ missionary work in Ecuador did seem useless. Her husband died without reaching the Waorani for Jesus, and then Elliot would spend about 10 years interpreting various languages, translating the Bible, and living among her husband’s killers, trying to communicate God’s love to them, with little visible fruit. Instead, Elliot encountered constant trials: vocational roadblocks, relational difficulty, and frustration.
Many in ministry will relate. We work tirelessly for the Lord, according to where we believe he’s leading us, but our efforts seem futile. People are difficult, the work is toilsome, and the fruit seems little. What does God actually promise us in ministry?
Elliot’s diary and her controversial novel, No Graven Image, pose the same question. Austen shows how Elliot was willing to wrestle with uncomfortable, confusing realities as her ministry years unfolded. Because of her experience, she encouraged others by shifting their perspective: ministry is less about what we’re accomplishing and more about who we’re becoming.
Writing
“God help us all. I don’t know why people ever try to write books.” I laughed out loud when I read this confession from one of Elliot’s diaries (395). This is a seemingly universal lament from all who write books. Elliot’s writing mission was to “to write—without fear—what [she saw],” to attempt to put into words all the complexities of her previous experiences and her wrestling with God’s will and character throughout the years (382). Writing was the outpouring of what she was seeing, learning, and becoming.
Ministry is less about what we’re accomplishing and more about who we’re becoming.
“She was disturbed,” Austen writes, “by the way many Christians spoke about who God is, how God acts, and how the life of faith works” (383). So Elliot used her writing and speaking to respond to this, encouraging her audience to pursue knowing God rather than merely getting results for him.
For writers, it’s important to ask why we’re doing what we’re doing, if we’re pursuing intellectual honesty rather than serving popular opinion, and if our words are full of trite Christian platitudes instead of carefully “[giving] form to . . . truth” (393). Elliot was a proponent of excellence, faithfulness, and courage in the craft of writing.
Ripples and Reality
Like a stone that travels through the air and then slips beneath the surface of water, a life sends out its ripples in time. Austen’s extensive biography uses this metaphor to close Elliot’s story. She poignantly notes, “The ripples of our lives matter deeply, but they are not everything. The core of reality lies in the character of God” (525).
The overarching theme of Elliot’s life is well communicated in this biography: God can be trusted, not because of what he’s doing or our ability to understand it all, but because of who he is. Can we say the same?
The Gospel Coalition