Ellen Vaughn > Quotes

“Sometimes we look at outcomes in this life, seeking the reassurance of a happy ending, and it's just not there. What then? As Betty put it, His ways are "inscrutable." So we have to rest, not in the peace of a pretty story, but in the reality of faith in a Person we cannot see.”
― Ellen Vaughn, Becoming Elisabeth Elliot

“Whatever befalls us . . . however it befalls us, we must receive as the Will of God. If it befalls us through man’s negligence, or ill will, or anger, still it is, in even the least circumstance, to us the will of God for if the least thing could happen to us without God’s permission, it would be something out of His control. His providence or His love would not be what they are. Almighty God Himself would not be the same God; not the God whom we believe, adore, and love.” —E. B. Pusey, noted in Elisabeth’s leather notebook of favorite quotes”
― Ellen Vaughn, Being Elisabeth Elliot: The Authorized Biography: Elisabeth’s Later Years

“Few loved the Bible more than Elisabeth Elliot. But she was appalled when Christians used it as a weapon to clobber or distance themselves from people who were different from them. Or to distance themselves from suffering, mysteries, and difficult questions. “Immaturity cannot tolerate ambiguity,” Elisabeth thought later. “It’s either black or white. And if you make your system your god, you’ll soon be telling lies in order to remain consistent.”⁠8 Such people were stuck. Static.”
― Ellen Vaughn, Being Elisabeth Elliot: The Authorized Biography: Elisabeth’s Later Years

“Oh, how I pray for conforming to the acceptable will of God. I do not want to miss one lesson. Yet I find that events do not change souls. It is our response to them which finally affects us. - Elisabeth Elliot”
― Ellen Vaughn, Becoming Elisabeth Elliot

“I knew, standing in Elisabeth Elliot’s home, with her favorite books, her piano, her teacups, and the wild ocean she loved just beyond the picture window, that those long-ago deaths in the jungle were just part of her story. For Elisabeth, as for all of us, the most dramatic chapters may well be less significant than the daily faithfulness that traces the brave trajectory of a human life radically submitted to Christ.”
― Ellen Vaughn, Becoming Elisabeth Elliot

“For Elisabeth, the central question was not, “How does this make me feel?” but simply, “Is this true?” If so, then the next question was, “What do I need to do about it to obey God?” Boom.”
― Ellen Vaughn, Becoming Elisabeth Elliot

“The cruel chisel destroys a stone with each cut. But what the stone suffers by repeated blows is no less than the shape the mason is making of it. And should a poor stone be asked, ‘What is happening to you?’ it might reply, ‘Don’t ask me. All I know is that for my part there is nothing for me to know or do, only to remain steady under the hand of my master and to love him and suffer him to work out my destiny. It is for him to know how to achieve this. I know neither what he is doing nor why. I only know that he is doing what is best and most perfect, and I suffer each cut of the chisel as though it were the best thing for me, even though, to tell the truth, each one is my idea of ruin, destruction and defacement. But, ignoring all this, I rest contented with the present moment. Thinking only of my duty to it, I submit to the work of this skillful master without caring to know what it is.”
― Ellen Vaughn, Being Elisabeth Elliot: The Authorized Biography: Elisabeth’s Later Years

“When He doesn’t fix broken situations in our lives, it’s usually because He is fixing us through them.”
― Ellen Vaughn, Becoming Elisabeth Elliot

“How can I write? (Shut up—God has given a gift.) How shall I pay the bills? (They’re paid, aren’t they, for a year or so?) Yes—but what then? (Don’t fret about the future. Be thankful for the present.) But I’m not producing anything. (But gestation is prerequisite.)”
― Ellen Vaughn, Being Elisabeth Elliot: The Authorized Biography: Elisabeth’s Later Years

“All the dancing and feasting and processing and singing and building and sculpting and baking and merrymaking that belong to us, and that were stolen away into the service of false gods, are returned to us in the gospel.” —Thomas Howard”
― Ellen Vaughn, Being Elisabeth Elliot: The Authorized Biography: Elisabeth’s Later Years

“Forcible shakings. Elisabeth had experienced many. She viewed them as earthquakes designed to topple the idols we so habitually construct, whether they are false gods of stone, substances, self, bogus beliefs about God, or whitewashed religion itself.”
― Ellen Vaughn, Being Elisabeth Elliot: The Authorized Biography: Elisabeth’s Later Years

“We presume to speak for God, the god we assume shares not only our political and social views, but our taste. The god of the bumper sticker, the hashtag, the slogan.”
― Ellen Vaughn, Being Elisabeth Elliot: The Authorized Biography: Elisabeth’s Later Years

“He told her he had never understood prevenient grace until the Philippines trip—at each point God met us in some way.”
― Ellen Vaughn, Being Elisabeth Elliot: The Authorized Biography: Elisabeth’s Later Years

“I find that faith is more vigorously exercised when I can find no satisfying explanation for the way God does things. I have to hope, without any evidence seen, that things will come right in the end—not merely that we shall receive compensation, but that we and all creation will be redeemed. This means infinitely more than the good will eventually outweigh the evil.”15”
― Ellen Vaughn, Becoming Elisabeth Elliot

“As Tim Keller has said, “Love without truth is sentimentality; it supports and affirms us but keeps us in denial about our flaws. Truth without love is harshness; it gives us information but in such a way that we cannot really hear it.”
― Ellen Vaughn, Being Elisabeth Elliot: The Authorized Biography: Elisabeth’s Later Years

“To Elisabeth’s delight, Corrie invited Elisabeth and Val to tea. They talked about suffering. Elisabeth had been intrigued by Corrie’s book and the movie, The Hiding Place. Corrie told her that the film showed .01 percent of the cruelties and hardships of the concentration camp.”
― Ellen Vaughn, Being Elisabeth Elliot: The Authorized Biography: Elisabeth’s Later Years

“How grateful I am to the Lord for giving me such a dear husband and baby. How much life means now—living for them, giving of myself to them, feeling myself needed by them. Of all hopelessly selfish people I should have been the worst had I remained single.”
― Ellen Vaughn, Becoming Elisabeth Elliot

“On the most basic question of all, “who is a Jew?” Elisabeth could find no solid answers. Many of her interviewees simply shrugged: “Ask three Jews, get five opinions.” In a later Christianity Today article, Elisabeth summarized her search for answers. “It is not, Israel officially proclaims, a racial question. There are Jews in every anthropologically-defined “race”—from the black Ethiopian to the Chinese orthodox Jew. “It is not a religious question. Probably fewer than ten percent of Israelis are orthodox Jews, and many are not only not religious, but are militantly anti-God. “To be Jewish is not a linguistic question. Over seventy languages are spoken in Israel, even though Hebrew is the official language and strong efforts are made to encourage everybody to learn it. “It is not a cultural question. Some Jews, desperately casting about for a definition that would satisfy me, said that Jewishness is a “cultural consciousness.” But what culture? Elisabeth had seen keening eastern Jewish women in Arab dress, Jews from New York’s East Side, Russian Jews, and Israeli natives born on kibbitzes. There were clearly no common denominators in terms of rituals, speech, dress, or outlook. “Is Jewishness then a political category?” Elisabeth continued. “Israel is a political state, but there are millions of Jews who are not Israelis. There are thousands of “Israelis” who are not Jews—every Arab now “assimilated” into the nation of Israel by conquest is officially an Israeli . . .” At the time the Israeli government defined Jews genetically, which to Elisabeth seemed a strange contradiction when they so vehemently deny that Jewishness has anything to do with race. But the determining question is, “‘Who is your mother?’ Anyone born of a Jewish mother is Jewish. The question as to what makes her Jewish has no answer. If your father is Jewish, if he is even a rabbi, it will not help you at all.”⁠3 “I have come to the conclusion that it remains for Israel; alone to execute justice for those who are its responsibility. If its highways must cut through the Arabs’ desert, if it claims ‘eminent domain,’ it must justly compensate those who have been displaced, those whose empty houses and lands Israel is now determined to fill with its own immigrants.”
― Ellen Vaughn, Being Elisabeth Elliot: The Authorized Biography: Elisabeth’s Later Years

“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 . . . And His reward was desolation, crucifixion.”
― Ellen Vaughn, Becoming Elisabeth Elliot

“Only God knows if anything in my ‘missionary career’ has ever contributed anything at all to this end. But much in that ‘career’ has brought me to Christ.”
― Ellen Vaughn, Becoming Elisabeth Elliot

“Always nice to have something immediate that one simply has to do. Anything rather than think!”
― Ellen Vaughn, Being Elisabeth Elliot: The Authorized Biography: Elisabeth’s Later Years

“Martha had started with the right goal. She wanted to serve Jesus. But she lost sight of how to do that. She turned the objective into making the meal rather than pleasing the Master. Barreling toward her own outcome, she got frustrated by how much there was to be done in so little time. In the process, she forgot who Jesus was, yelling at Him and treating Him like a means to her end. It’s so easy to be like Martha, particularly in today’s high-achieving culture. Even when we want to serve Jesus, we can end up blown off track, distracted by the means rather than keeping the end goal before us.”
― Ellen Vaughn, Time Peace: Living Here and Now with a Timeless God

“Edwards wrote in his Religious Affections that most thoughtful human beings feel a sense of gratitude for God’s gifts: life, health, a crisp, sky-blue day. He called it natural gratitude. That, while a common good, is not enough to stir us to true, deep love for the Giver. If people love God only because of what He gives, Edwards points out that “even a dog will love his master that is kind to him.”1 As Betty Howard wrote, there is a deeper, more mysterious, more sustaining sense of thankfulness: gratitude to God not for what He gives, but who He is. Edwards denoted this as supernatural gratitude, and said that it is the mark of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer. This radical, gracious gratitude can thrive even in the midst of times of pain, trouble, and distress. It is relational, rather than conditional, drawing the human being who knows God into closer intimacy with Him.”
― Ellen Vaughn, Becoming Elisabeth Elliot

“Gratitude unleashes the freedom to live content in the moment, rather than being anxious about the future or regretting the past.”
― Ellen Vaughn

“Being a good steward of time doesn’t start with managing it better. It doesn’t begin with being more organized, efficient, and disciplined. These are great virtues. But one can be the most organized person on the planet and still have a heart as cold as steel, locked tight as a heavy file cabinet, a heart that does not really acknowledge the master’s rights to all those files.”
― Ellen Vaughn, Time Peace: Living Here and Now with a Timeless God

“God does work through hurt. God works in the midst of all things.”
― Ellen Vaughn, Becoming Elisabeth Elliot

“President Dwight Eisenhower once said, “If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking . . . is freedom.”
― Ellen Vaughn, Being Elisabeth Elliot: The Authorized Biography: Elisabeth’s Later Years

“How could God let this happen to her? How could he allow the death of this Indian to whom she had come to minister? And the answer emerges: Men cannot tell God how to act; he works sovereignly. We are to worship and serve. Results belong to him, not to us.”
― Ellen Vaughn, Being Elisabeth Elliot: The Authorized Biography: Elisabeth’s Later Years

“Betty made sure to write her parents about all the dramatic events of the spring of 1945. Four-term president Franklin Delano Roosevelt passed away in April: “Wasn’t the president’s death a shock? I heard it 15 minutes after he died and just couldn’t believe it. I was thrilled that Truman declared yesterday a day of prayer and asked the newspaper men who knew how, to pray for him. A good start—maybe he won’t be so bad after all. [A professor] had just said last Monday that he could think of nothing worse that could possibly happen to the U.S. than if Truman were to have been elected. And now this! We never know how God will use it.”4”
― Ellen Vaughn, Becoming Elisabeth Elliot

“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?”
― Ellen Vaughn, Becoming Elisabeth Elliot