Hannah Sorenson’s Reviews > Being Elisabeth Elliot: The Authorized Biography: Elisabeth’s Later Years > Status Update

^The truth, in love. Ah. So often we hear that phrase as a dialectic. 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."^

^wanting most of all that “consciousness of another consciousness that is conscious of me! Wanting to matter to someone.^

🥲

^After the honeymoon, Walt and Val set up house in Walt’s small apartment in Centerville, Louisiana. There were no curtains. “What’s with this?” asked Val, concerned about privacy. “We just duck and run,” said former bachelor Walt.^

Oh my 😂😂

^”But I am absolutely sure that in His will is my peace—and ultimate joy, and I’ve given it all over, once again.”^

^”Measure thy life by loss and not by gain,
not by the wine drunk but by the wine poured forth;
for love’s strength standeth in love’s sacrifice,
and whoso suffereth most hath most to give.”
—Ugo Bassi^

cont’d

This, she said, was the destruction of her "spiritual self-hood."

And now. God had surprisingly gifted her with her spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and physical soulmate. Then He had ripped Add away. Slowly. Cruelly. How much more might the Almighty rip from
her hands?

It wasn't just the loss of her beloved, but "another death to who I am.”^

cont’d

Then, much later, she'd poured herself into writing No Graven Image. Though her fiction was set in a different location, it was the best rendition she could do of the real story she'd lived in the jungle, and the absolute mystery of God's sovereign, sometimes agonizing ways. And Christian people had hated it. Bookstores had refused to carry it.

cont’d

This, she said, made the meaning of the Cross actual, rather than theoretical.

Then, improbably, Elisabeth's dream to reach the Waodani came true. She lived among them ... and had to leave because of an elemental inability to get along, not with the tribal people, but her fellow American missionary, Rachel Saint.

In this, she surrendered her goals and reputation.

^The waters churned, rose, surged, and the entire mission station was washed away into the raging river. All their earnest, painstaking work for God, lost. Why?

This, she wrote now, was a demand from God for unconditional trust.

Then Jim, passionately committed to bringing the great news of the gospel to the Waodani, was brutally speared and hacked to death. Slaughtered at age twenty-eight. Why?

^For Elisabeth, mundane routine was the best support for her soul, the unlikely mechanism by which she could “sing” of God’s grace.^