On Asking God Why

And Other Reflections on Trusting God in a Twisted World

Elisabeth Elliot

• Publisher: Revell
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780800731243
• eBook ISBN: 9781493434497
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

God does many things we do not understand. When faced with suffering, sickness, death, and confusion, most people can ask only one question: why? Elisabeth Elliot, one of the outstanding women of present-day Christianity, knows too well this feeling of uncertainty. But she also knows that God will answer.

Now releasing with a fresh cover, On Asking God Why is a perceptive collection of Elisabeth Elliot's own meditations that confront the many issues we must deal with in our daily lives, from the ordinary occurrence of another birthday to serious topics like funerals, abortion, and divorce. With great insight and candor, Elliot reminds readers that we can overcome our fears when we decide to question God, because in Him we can find every answer we need.

On Asking God Why

One of the things I am no longer as good at as I used to be is sleeping through the night. I’m rather glad about that, for there is something pleasant about waking in the small hours and realizing that one is, in fact, in bed and need not get up. One can luxuriate.

Between two and three o’clock yesterday morning I luxuriated. I lay listening to the night sounds in a small house on the “stern and rockbound” coast of Massachusetts. The wind whistled and roared, wrapping itself around the house and shaking it. On the quarter hour the clock in the living room softly gave out Whittington’s chime. I could hear the tiny click as the electric blanket cut off and on, the cracking of the cold in the walls, the expensive rumble of the oil burner beneath me, and the reassuring rumble of a snoring husband beside me. Underneath it all was the deep, drumming rhythm of the surf, synchronized with the distant bellow of “Mother Ann’s Cow,” the name given the sounding buoy that guards the entrance to Gloucester Harbor.

I was thinking, as I suppose I am always thinking, in one way or another, about mystery. An English magazine which contained an interview with me had just come in the mail, and of course I read it, not to find out what I’d said to the man last spring in Swanwick, but to find out what he said I’d said. He had asked me about some of the events in my life, and I had told him that because of them I had had to “come to terms with mystery.” That was an accurate quotation, I’m sure, but as I lay in bed I knew that one never comes to any final terms with mystery—not in this life, anyway. We keep asking the same unanswerable questions and wondering why the explanations are not forthcoming. We doubt God. We are anxious about everything when we have been told quite clearly to be anxious about nothing. Instead of stewing we are supposed to pray and give thanks.

Well, I thought, I’ll have a go at it. I prayed about several things for which I could not give thanks. But I gave thanks in the middle of each of those prayers because I was still sure (the noise of the wind and ocean were reminding me) that underneath are the everlasting arms.

My prayers embraced four things:

1. Somebody I love is gravely ill.
2. Something I wanted has been denied.
3. Something I worked very hard for failed.
4. Something I prized is lost.

I can be specific about three of the things. A letter from a friend of many years describes her cancer surgery and its aftermath—an incision that had to be scraped and cleaned daily for weeks.

It was so painful that Diana, Jim, Monica, and I prayed while she cleaned it, three times and some days four times. Monica would wipe my tears. Yes, Jesus stands right there as the pain takes my breath away and my toes curl to keep from crying out loud. But I haven’t asked, Why me, Lord? It is only now that I can pray for cancer patients and know how the flesh hurts and how relief, even for a moment, is blessed.

The second thing is a manuscript on which I have spent years. It is not, I believe, publishable now, and I can see no way to redeem it. It feels as though those years of work have gone down the drain. Have they? What ought I to do about this failure?

The other thing is my J. B. Phillips translation of the New Testament, given to me when I lived in the jungle in 1960 and containing nineteen years’ worth of notes. I left this book on an airplane between Dallas and Atlanta several weeks ago. The stewardess brought my breakfast as I was reading it, so I laid it in my lap and spread my napkin on top of it. I suppose it slipped down beside the seat. (Stupid of me, of course, but on the same trip my husband did just as stupid a thing. He left his briefcase on the sidewalk outside the terminal. We prayed, and the prayers were almost instantly answered. Someone had picked up the briefcase and turned it in to the airline, and we had it back in a couple of hours.) I am lost without my Phillips. I feel crippled. It is as though a large segment of the history of my spiritual pilgrimage has been obliterated. It was the one New Testament in which I knew my way around. I knew where things were on the page and used it constantly in public speaking because I could refer quickly to passages I needed. What shall I do?

I have done the obvious things. Prayer is the first thing—asking God to do what I can’t do. The second thing is to get busy and do what I can do. I prayed for my friend, of course, and then I sat down and wrote her a letter. I don’t know what else to do for her now. My husband and I prayed together about the lost New Testament (and many of my friends prayed too). We went to the proper authorities at the airline and have been assured that everything will be done to recover it, but it has not turned up. We prayed about the bad manuscript and asked for editorial advice. It looks quite irremedial. I continue to pray repeatedly, extensively, and earnestly about all of the above. And one more thing: I seek the lessons God wants to teach me, and that means that I ask why.

There are those who insist that it is a very bad thing to question God. To them, “Why?” is a rude question. That depends, I believe, on whether it is an honest search, in faith, for his meaning, or whether it is a challenge of unbelief and rebellion. The psalmist often questioned God, and so did Job. God did not answer the questions, but he answered the man—with the mystery of himself.

He has not left us entirely in the dark. We know a great deal more about his purposes than poor old Job did, yet Job trusted him. He is not only the Almighty—Job’s favorite name for him. He is also our Father, and what a father does is not by any means always understood by the child. If he loves the child, however, the child trusts him. It is the child’s ultimate good that the father has in mind. Terribly elementary. Yet I have to be reminded of this when, for example, my friend suffers, when a book I think I can’t possibly do without is lost, when a manuscript is worthless.

The three things are not all in the same category. The second and third things have to do with my own carelessness and failure. Yet in all three I am reminded that God is my Father still, and he does have a purpose for me, and that nothing, absolutely nothing, is useless in the fulfillment of that purpose if I’ll trust him for it and submit to the lessons.

“God disciplines us for our good that we may share his holiness.” That is a strong clue to the explanation we are always seeking. God’s purpose for us is holiness—his own holiness which we are to share—and the sole route to that end is discipline.

Discipline very often involves loss, diminishment, “fallings from us, vanishings.” Why? Because God wills our perfection in holiness, that is, our joy. But, we argue, why should diminishments be the prerequisite for joy? The answer to that lies within the great mystery that underlies creation: the principle of life out of death, exemplified for all time in the incarnation (“that a vile Manger his low Bed should prove, who in a Throne of stars Thunders above,” as Crashaw expressed it) and in the cross and resurrection (“who, for the joy that was set before him, endured a cross”). Christ’s radical diminishments—his birth as a helpless baby and his death as a common criminal—accomplished our salvation.

It follows that if we are to share in his destiny, we must share in his death, which means, for us sinners, the willingness to offer up to him not only ourselves but all that goes with that gift, including the simplest, down-to-earth things. These things may be aggravating and irritating and humiliating as well as mysterious. But it is the very aggravation and irritation and humiliation that we can offer—every diminishment of every kind—so that by the grace of God we may be taught his loving lessons and be brought a little nearer to his loving purpose for us and thus be enlarged.

Somehow it’s easy to understand the principle of control and denial and loss in the matter of self-discipline. It is perfectly plain to anyone who wants to do a difficult and worthwhile thing that he has to deny himself a thousand unimportant and probably a few hundred important things in order to do the one thing that matters most. Bishop Stephen Neill said that writing is almost entirely a matter of self-discipline. “You must make yourself write.” I know. Alas. Sit yourself down, shut yourself up, restrict your enthusiasms, control your maunderings. Think. (Sir Joshua Reynolds wrote, “There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.”) Diminishments. Then put things on paper—carefully. Then (and this is the part I resist more strenuously) rewrite. Cut things. Drop things you’ve spent hours on into the wastebasket.

I lay in bed, luxuriating in the physical bliss, cogitating on the spiritual perplexities. I could not explain why God would restore Lars’ lost briefcase and not my New Testament. I could not fathom my friend’s suffering or the “waste” of time. But God could. It’s got something to do with that great principle of loss being the route to gain, or diminishments being the only way we can finally be enlarged, that is, conformed to the image of Christ.

“Who watched over the birth of the sea?”

The words from God’s dialogue with Job came to mind as I listened to the throbbing of the ocean from my bed.

“Have you descended to the springs of the sea, or walked in the unfathomable deep?”

No, Lord, but you have. Nothing in those dark caverns is mysterious to you. Nor is anything in my life or my friend’s life. I trust you with the unfathomables.

But you know I’ll be back—with the usual question.

On Brazen Heavens

Thomas Howard

For about a year now I have been witness to a drama that is all too familiar to us mortal men. Someone finds he has cancer; the medical treadmill begins, with its implacable log of defeat; hope is marshaled, begins the march, is rebuffed at every juncture, flags, rouses, flags again, and is finally quietly mustered out.

And meanwhile, because the people in the drama are Christian believers, everyone is dragged into the maelstrom that marks the place where our experience eddies into the sea of the divine will. The whole question of prayer gapes open.

The promises are raked over. And over and over. “Is the primary condition enough faith on our part?” “We must scour our own hearts to see that there is no stoppage there—of sin or of unbelief.” “We must stand on the promise.” “We must claim thus and such.” “We must resist the devil and his weapons of doubt.”

And we leap at and pursue any and all reports and records of healings. “Look at what happened to so-and-so!” “Listen to this!” “I’ve just read this wonderful pamphlet.” We know the Gospel accounts by heart. We agree that this work of healing did not cease with the apostolic age. We greet gladly the tales of healing that pour in from all quarters in the church—no longer only from those groups that have traditionally “specialized” in healing, but from the big, old, classic bodies in Christendom—Rome, Anglicanism, Lutheranism, Presbyterianism, and so forth. “God is doing something in our day,” we hear, and we grasp at it eagerly.

And meanwhile the surgery goes on its horrific way, and the radiation burns on, week after grim week; and suffering sets in, and the doctors hedge and dodge into the labyrinthine linoleum and stainless-steel bureaucracy of the hospital world, and our hearts sicken, and we try to avert our eyes from the black flag that is fluttering wildly on the horizon, mocking us.

And the questions come stealing over us: “Where is now their God?” “Where is the promise of his coming?” “He trusted in God that he would deliver him . . .” and so on. And we know that we are not the first human beings into whose teeth the tempter and his ilk have flung those taunts.

We look for some light. We look for some help. Our prayers seem to be vanishing, like so many wisps, into the serene ether of the cosmos (or worse, into the plaster of the ceiling). We strain our ears for some word from the mount of God. A whisper will do, we tell ourselves, since clearly no bolts or thunderings have been activated by our importunity (yes, we have tried that tactic too: the “nonfaith” approach).

But only dead silence. Blank. Nothing. “But, Lord, how are we supposed to know if we’re on the right track at all if we don’t get some confirmation from you—some corroboration—in any form, Lord—inner peace maybe, or some verse springing to life for us, or some token. Please let us have some recognizable attestation to what you have said in your Book.” Nothing. Silence. Blank.

Perhaps at this point we try to think back over the experience of the people of God through the millennia. There has been a whole spectrum of experience for them: glorious deliverances, great victories, kingdoms toppled, widows receiving their dead back, men wandering about in sheepskins and goatskins—

“Men wandering about in sheepskins and goatskins? What went wrong there?”

“That’s in the record of faith.”

“But then surely something went wrong.”

“No. It is part of the log of the faithful. That is a list of what happened to the people of faith. It is about how they proved God.”

The whole spectrum of experience is there. The widow of Nain got her son back and other mothers didn’t. Peter got out of prison and John the Baptist didn’t. Elijah whirled up to heaven with fiery horses and Joseph ended in a coffin in Egypt. Paul healed other people, but was turned down on his own request for healing for himself.

A couple of items in the Gospels seem to me to suggest something for the particular situation described in this article, where deliverance did not, in fact, come, and where apparently the juggernaut of sheer nature went on its grim way with no intervention from heaven.

One is the story of Lazarus and the other is the Emmaus account. You object immediately: “Ah, but in both those cases it turned out that the dead were raised.” Well, perhaps there is something there for us nonetheless.

For a start, the people involved in those incidents were followers of Jesus, and they had seen him, presumably, heal dozens of people. Then these followers experienced the utter dashing of all their expectations and hopes by death. God did not, it seemed, act. He who had been declared the Living One and the Giver of Life seemed to have turned his back in this case. What went wrong? What did the household at Bethany not do that the widow of Nain had done? How shall we align it all? Who rates and who doesn’t? Whatever it is that we might have chosen to say to them in the days following their experience of death, we would have had to come to terms somehow with the bleak fact that God had done something for others that he had not done for them.

From the vantage point of two thousand years, we later believers can, of course, see that there was something wonderful in prospect, and that it emerged within a very few days in both cases. The stories make sense. They are almost better than they would have been if the deaths had not occurred. But of course th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1. On Asking God Why
• 2. On Brazen Heavens
• 3. Singleness Is a Gift
• 4. A Look in the Mirror
• 5. Happy Birthday—You’re Heading Home!
• 6. I Won’t Bother with a Face-Lift
• 7. Why Funerals Matter
• 8. Hope for a Hopeless Failure
• 9. O Little Town of Nazareth
• 10. A No-Risk Life
• 11. Shortcut to Peace
• 12. To Judge or Not to Judge
• 13. Have It Your Way—or God’s
• 14. Person or Thing?
• 15. To a Man Who Chose Divorce
• 16. The “Innocent” Party
• 17. Is Divorce the Only Way?
• 18. Images of Hell
• 19. When I Was Being Made in Secret
• 20. London Diary
• 21. How to Sell Yourself
• 22. Meeting God Alone
• 23. The Song of the Animals
• 24. We’ve Come a Long Way—or Have We?
• 25. The Christian’s Safety 137
• 26. Tenderness
• 27. Parable in a Car Wash
• 28. Two Marriageable People
• 29. Pick Up the Broom!
• 30. A Jungle Grave
• About The Author
• Back Cover