Chapter Three: Acceptance
Chapter 3
Acceptance
I want to tell you a little story that may offend some of you. I hope it will not be too offensive, but I have actually been accused, at times, of being frivolous about the fact that I’ve had two husbands who have died. So, I don’t want to seem frivolous, but I’m sure you all realize that the subject of these talks is a very heavy one. And here’s a story that does fit in very nicely under this particular heading.
An incident happened a couple of years ago. Lars and I were in Birmingham, Alabama. And it was a breakfast and Lars was setting up his book table. And there was a little lady there setting place cards out at the various tables. And he and she were chatting back and forth. There was no one else around at the time. And suddenly she turned to him and she said, “By the way,” she said, “What’s your name?” And he said, “Well,” he said, “I’m an Elliott, too.” And she looked at him and she said, “Are you the speaker’s husband?” And he said, “Yes.” And she said “Well, that’s funny. They, I thought they told me you had a different name.” And he said, “Well, I have actually. My name’s Gren.” But he said, “You know, I’m the third husband.” And her face fell, and she said, “Oh my goodness, but we only have one place card.” She was completely serious. And Lars said, “I don’t think you need to worry. The other two are dead. I don’t think they’re going to show up.”
Well now, how does that fit in with the subject of acceptance? Quite simply, I could not possibly talk this way about Jim and Ad if it hadn’t been for the fact that by the grace of God I was enabled to accept their death. And people have come to me more than once in my life and said how can you possibly talk about your late husbands in that frivolous and flippant way? And I’ve even had some widows say to me, how do you keep from comparing your husbands? And I say I don’t.
I’ve made all kinds of comparisons between my husbands. And you can be sure that I would never have accepted Lars’s proposal if he didn’t compare very favorably with the first two. Although they are very different men, at least they had one thing in common, and that was that they liked me. But the fact is that they’re men with very different gifts. And one of the things which God brought to my mind when I was considering Lars’s proposal before I’d given him an answer was a verse in 1 Corinthians 12. Men have different gifts but it’s the same Lord who accomplishes His purposes through them all.
Acceptance, I believe, is the key to peace in this business of suffering. As I’ve said, the crux of the whole matter is the cross of Jesus Christ. And that word crux means cross. It is the best thing that ever happened in human history as well as the worst thing. Here in His love, the Scripture tells us. Not that we loved God here in His love, not that we loved God but that He loved us and gave Himself, no, here in His love that Christ laid down His life for us.
Not that we loved God here in His love, not that we loved God but that He loved us and gave Himself, no, here in His love that Christ laid down His life for us.
When we speak of love as the Bible speaks of love, we’re not talking about a silly sentiment. We’re not talking about a mood or a feeling or warm fuzzies. The love of God is not a sentiment. It is a willed and inexorable love that will command nothing less than the very best for us. The love of God wills our joy. I think of the love of God as being synonymous with the will of God.
Young people sometimes say to me this whole business of the will of God is just so scary. I don’t see how you can ever just turn over your whole life to God without knowing what He’s going to do. Well, that’s what faith is about, isn’t it? If you really believe that somebody loves you then you trust them. The will of God is love. And love suffers. That’s how we know what the love of God for us is, because He was willing to become a man and to take upon Himself our sins, our griefs, our sufferings.
Love is always inextricably bound with sacrifice. Any father knows this. Any mother knows this. You may have known it in theory but when that baby is born, if the mother has not suffered before that—during those nine months—certainly there comes the time when she has to suffer. And when that baby is born and the labor is over with, then we all, we mothers know that’s just the beginning, isn’t it? And no father or mother can possibly imagine what changes there will be in their lives, no matter how much they may have read and how much they may have observed. But the presence of that new little human being in their lives changes everything.
The will of God is love. And love suffers.
And it’s sacrifice, day in and day out, night in and night out. But it’s not something about which you sit down and feel sorry for yourself. It’s not something you moan and groan about, except perhaps once in a while. But it is very real, isn’t it? It is my life for yours. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the principle of the cross. That’s what Jesus was demonstrating. My life for yours.
Suffering is a mystery. It is not explained, but it is affirmed. And we must remember that all of Christianity rests on mysteries. Those of you who belong to churches that use creeds know that you are articulating a set of statements about the faith, every one of which deals with a mystery. Is there anyone who calls himself a Christian that can explain the Trinity? Is there anyone who can get at the gynecology, for example, of the virgin birth? Is there any specialist in aerodynamics that could tell us anything about the Ascension? These are mysteries. Creation, Redemption, Incarnation, Crucifixion, Resurrection—these great key words of the Christian faith are mysteries.
Suffering is a mystery. It is not explained, but it is affirmed. And we must remember that all of Christianity rests on mysteries.
We stand up as a body in church—the church that I go to, for example—and we say a creed out loud together. We are not explaining anything. We are simply affirming. And that’s what Christianity is about. God is God. God is a three-personed God. He loves us. We are not adrift in chaos. To me that is the most fortifying, the most stabilizing, the most peace-giving thing that I know anything about in the universe. Every time things have seemingly fallen apart in my life, I have gone back to those things that do not change. Nothing in the universe can ever change those facts. He loves me. I am not at the mercy of chance.
Lars and I got to the airport once for a flight to some place or other, and I think our flight was supposed be at 11:30 in the morning. We got there about 10:30 and, lo and behold, the airport was closed. There were lines all the way from the ticket counters out to the sidewalk. You couldn’t even get through the revolving doors into the airport in Boston. We were told that all flights had been cancelled, that the airlines were taking no responsibility for rebooking for anything. You had to get in line and start over. To top it off, your tickets would mean nothing as far as bookings were concerned. It was a scene of real horror and chaos. People were crying, people were angry, people were despondent. It was a mess. I felt so sorry for those families that had little children and they were headed for Orlando to go to Disney World for their winter break, and college students with skis.
But there were fist-fights. There were people so angry with the poor ticket agents that they were actually coming to blows. And we heard that there was one planeload of people on the runway when they were told that the airport was closed. They refused to get off the plane. Now, you know, you just wonder what kind of a view of things people have who make choices like that. But it was such a peaceful thing to me to realize, in spite of the fact that I had people at the other end of the line waiting for me, that Lars and I were not at the mercy of the weather, let alone of the airport.
We’re not adrift in chaos. We’re held in the everlasting arms.
We’re not adrift in chaos. We’re held in the everlasting arms. And therefore, and this makes a difference, we can be at peace and we can accept. We can say yes, Lord, I’ll take it. The faculty by which I apprehend God is the faculty of faith. And my faith enables me to say, “Yes, Lord. I don’t like what You’re doing. I don’t understand it. You’re going to have to take care of those poor people at the other end that thought I was coming to speak on this particular day. But God, You’re in charge.” I know the One who is in charge of the universe. He’s got the whole world where? In His hands. And that’s where I am.
So that to me is the key to acceptance: the fact that it is never for nothing. Faith, we might say, is the fulcrum of our moral and spiritual balance. Think of a see-saw. The fulcrum is the point where the see-saw rests. And my moral and spiritual balance depends on that stability of faith. And my faith, of course, rests on the bedrock that is Jesus Christ.
Now faith, like love, is not a feeling. We need to get that absolutely clear. Faith is not a feeling. Faith is a willed obedience action. Jesus said again and again, “Don’t be afraid.” “Fear not.” “Let not your heart be troubled.” “Believe in God. Believe also in Me.” “Accept, take up the cross and follow.”
Do the next thing. That has gotten me through more agonies than anything else I could recommend.
He said if you want to be My disciples, there are three conditions. First, you must give up your right to yourself. Second, you must take up your cross. Third, you must follow. My understanding of giving up your right to yourself is saying no to yourself. And taking up the cross is saying yes to God. Lord, whatever it is You want to give me, I’ll take it. Yes. Yes. Yes.
There’s an old legend, I’m told, inscribed in a parsonage in England somewhere on the sea coast, a Saxon legend that said, “Do the next thing.” I don’t know any simpler formula for peace, for relief from stress and anxiety than that very practical, very down-to-earth word of wisdom. Do the next thing. That has gotten me through more agonies than anything else I could recommend.
And when I found out that my husband was dead, I had gone out to the missionary aviation base in a place called Shell Mera, the edge of the jungle, to be with the other four wives as we waited for word about our husbands. And when the word finally came that all five of the men had been speared to death then, of course, we had decisions to make. Were we going to go back to our jungle stations or what were we going to do.
And I went back to my jungle station. I had never considered any other alternative because for one thing, I had been a missionary before I ever married Jim Elliot, before I was even engaged to Jim Elliot. So, nothing had changed as far as my missionary call was concerned. But I had to go back to a station where there was no other missionary and try to do the work that two of us had been doing between us. So it wasn’t as though I was without things to keep me occupied.
I had a school of about forty boys to sort of oversee. I wasn’t the teacher but I was in charge of things in a sense. I had a brand new church of about fifty baptized believers with no Scriptures in their hands and I was supposed to be the one doing the translating. I had a literacy class of about twelve girls that I was teaching to read in their own language so that eventually they could learn to read the Bible translation that I was working on at the same time. I had a ten-month-old baby for whom to care. I had a thousand details of running things on a jungle station like learning how to run a diesel generator, giving out medicines right and left, and delivering babies in between times.
I really didn’t have time to sit down and have a pity party and sink into a puddle of self-pity. I did the next thing. And there was always a next thing after that. And I have found many times in my life, such as again after the death of my second husband, just the very fact that although I was living in a very civilized house, I had dishes to wash. I had floors to clean. I had laundry to do. It was my salvation.
A couple of years ago, I had the privilege and fun of taking care of four of my grandchildren while their parents were away for a trip and had taken the newborn fifth child with them. That was the only time when I’ve ever had the chance to do that. My grandchildren live in Southern California and I live in the Northeast. So I’m one of the lonely grandmothers as opposed to the exhausted ones. After the first day my daughter had the thoughtfulness to call that evening. And she said, “Well momma, how are you doing?” And I said, “Well they’re wonderful children and they’re very obedient and everything. But I don’t know whether I’m going to make it through the next four days.” I was tired, to say the least. I had to ask the question that my daughter really doesn’t like me to ask, “How do you do it?” Because every minute of the day I’m thinking, I’m going all day long with things that need to be done every second, but my daughter has a nursing baby which takes about six more hours in the day. I kept thinking, how does she do it? How does she do it?
So, I had to ask the question. I knew she didn’t want me to. But I said, “Val, how do you do it?” She laughed on the phone and she said, “Momma, I do just what you taught me years ago. I do the next thing.” She told me not to think about all the things you have to do. Just do the next thing. So I took her advice and we got through the next four days triumphantly, not just somehow. But it is acceptance that enabled me to do that because I really believed that this was not an accident.
About six weeks after Jim died, I received a letter from my mother-in-law. I had been writing letters home and trying to reassure my parents and my in-laws that God was there. Everything was fine. They were not to worry about me. They were both, my in-laws and my own parents, were just dying a thousand deaths as you can imagine. And we parents, I’m sure, suffer sometimes a hundred times more than our children suffer. Although we think that the situation is worse than it is, what we can never visualize is the way the grace of God goes to work in the person who needs it.
So my mother-in-law wrote me this letter saying she was very much afraid that I was repressing my feelings, that it wasn’t normal the way I was reacting and just carrying on. I was just trying to be busy and maybe I was burying myself in my work. And she told me that eventually I was going to crack. Well then, all of a sudden my peace disappeared. And I began to wonder if she was right. Is there really no such thing as the peace that passes understanding? Can God really fulfill His Word?
I kept going back again and again to the promises that God had given me. I had them right there in my journal. Day after day God was giving me promises that just enabled me to get through. Jesus Christ, the same yesterday and today and forever. Jim died yesterday. But the same Lord was with me today. And I didn’t need to worry about the next fifty years, which is a temptation for anyone who’s lost someone they love. You think, “Well, I guess I could make it through supper tonight but not real sure about tomorrow or next week, let alone the next fifty years.”
And in the very same mail with my mother-in-law’s unsettling letter, I received a poem by Amy Carmichael which came in a form letter from her mission. The poem read, “When stormy winds against us break stablish and reinforce our will; O hear us for Thine own Name’s sake, hold us in strength, and hold us still. Still as the faithful mountains stand, through the long, silent years of stress; so would we wait at Thy right hand in quietness and steadfastness.”15 Well that sounds pretty brave and strong, doesn’t it? But listen to the last stanza, “But not of us this strength, O Lord, and not of us this constancy. Our trust is Thine eternal Word, Thy presence our security.”
This vital truth was laying hold of my mind and my heart, that God really did mean what He was saying that He was right there. And one of the verses that God had given me before I went to Ecuador was in Isaiah 50, verse 7, “The Lord God will help me; therefore shall I not be confounded: therefore have I set my face like a flint, and I know that I shall not be ashamed” (kjv).
I was tempted, as all of us are, to say, “Well Lord, You promised to help me, but You do have a kind of a funny way of going about it. This is not my idea of the way God is supposed to help one of His servants who is trying to be obedient and trying to be faithful.” And what does God say to an argument like that? Same thing He’s always saying. “Trust Me.” “Trust Me.” Some day, even you will see that there’s sense in this. Your suffering is never for nothing.
Now my husband Jim was a fairly good carpenter. And he built a very nice house in the jungle, a very civilized house with a cement floor and wooden walls and an aluminum roof. He even built a wonderful water system by collecting the water from the aluminum roof and then piping it into the house so that we actually had a flush toilet and a shower and a sink. And he set about filling the house with very serviceable and not terribly beautiful furniture.
But while Jim was building a piece of furniture, if there was one thing he could not stand, it was for me to hang over his shoulder. And I would say well what’s this thing, you know? And what are you doing with that tool? And why do you do it this way? And how in the world are you gonna fit that thing into this? And he would tell me to get lost, when it’s finished, I’d see. This brings about a very simple analogy: God is saying, ”Trust Me.” Accept it now. See later.
How many choices have you got to go back to those alternatives? You either believe God knows what He’s doing or you believe He doesn’t. You either believe He’s worth trusting or you say He’s not. And then, where are you? You’re at the mercy of chaos not cosmos. Chaos is the Greek word for disorder. Cosmos is the word for order. We either live in an ordered universe or we are trying to create our own reality.
Acceptance is a voluntary and willed act. God was giving me something to do. The next thing was, “Yes, Lord.” Accept it. And that is the key to peace. Now does it make sense to an ordinary human being to say, “Accept this suffering?” Isn’t it contrary to human nature? And I want to make something very clear here because I realize every word I say can be distorted and twisted and misunderstood. I want to try my best to make very plain what I mean here when I say “accept.” I’m not talking about things which can be changed and/or ought to be changed.
There are some things which can be changed that ought not to be changed. For example, a dear young man that I know decided to unload his wife and two children when the second child was one week old. And he went ahead and did that against all advice to the contrary. And a couple of years later I said to him, why? And he said it wasn’t working.
Now I hear this on all sides. We all hear it, don’t we? We know that this is happening on all sides. There was a situation which he thought ought to be changed, and that’s the thing to do. You just have to get rid of her because this is a case of incompatibility. So when I say that there are things which can be changed but ought not to be, that might be one example. There are many things which cannot be changed. And there are things which must be changed, such as abuse of persons. So I’m not, I want us to be clear that I’m not saying accept everything, just resign yourself and the worst things that happen, you don’t think a thing about it. That is not my purpose in this talk.
The Apostle Paul, remember, prayed for the removal of that thorn in his flesh. And what was the answer? He prayed three times that God would remove that thorn. And the answer was, “My grace is all you need. My grace is sufficient for you” (2 Cor. 12:9 rsv). And it’s very interesting, it’s very significant I think, that Paul says I was given a thorn in the flesh to keep me from becoming absurdly conceited. And then he says it was a messenger of Satan.
Now that seems like a contradiction because obviously it had to be God who cares whether he becomes absurdly conceited. Satan would be delighted if we become absurdly conceited. But he said, in order to keep me from becoming absurdly conceited over a particular spiritual experience—which he has just described in that chapter, 2 Corinthians 12—he said in order to keep me from that, I was given a thorn in the flesh. So it was a messenger of Satan, he says.
So if you get all hung up, thinking now is this thing from God or is it from Satan? Is this the voice of God or the voice of Satan? Stop worrying about it. You don’t really need to sort that out because here’s a case where the thorn was in a sense given by God as a messenger of Satan. And there’s another, at least one other, example in Scripture that I can think of the same apparent contradiction where Joseph says to his brothers that it was they who sent him into Egypt. But he says God sent me to Egypt. We know that Joseph’s brothers were sinning against him and yet it was God who sent him there.
So, when the answer was no about the thorn in the flesh, and was the answer of Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane, we know that there’s nothing wrong with praying that God will solve our problems and heal our diseases and pay our debts and sort out our marital difficulties. It’s right and proper that we should bring such requests to God. We’re not praying against His will. But when the answer is no, then we know that God has something better at stake. Far greater things are at stake. There is another level, another kingdom, an invisible kingdom which you and I cannot see now but toward which we move and to which we belong.
When the answer is no, then we know that God has something better at stake. Far greater things are at stake. There is another level, another kingdom, an invisible kingdom which you and I cannot see now but toward which we move and to which we belong.
And a verse which, to me, sums up just the things that I’ve been trying to say under this heading of acceptance is another seeming contradiction which I found in the 116th Psalm. The psalmist says, “What shall I render unto the Lord, for all his benefits toward me?” (v. 12 kjv). And I was reading this one day when I was so overwhelmed with gratitude for all the blessings of my life. That I was just sitting in a chair looking out over the ocean and I was looking at this magnificent view in a very comfortable room and just saying, “Lord, I don’t know how to thank You. How can I say thanks?” And I opened my Bible to this verse where the psalmist says, “What shall I render?” And then I saw that the next verse is, “I will take the cup of salvation” (v. 13 kjv). What shall I give You Lord? And the answer is, I will take the cup of salvation.
Now what is in God’s cup of salvation? Obviously, the psalmist in the Old Testament times was not thinking of salvation in the somewhat narrow terms that we sometimes do. Whatever is in the cup that God is offering to me, whether it be pain and sorrow and suffering and grief along with the many more joys, I’m willing to take it because I trust Him. Because I know that what God wants for me is the very best. I will receive this thing in His name.
I need pain sometimes because God has something bigger in mind. It is never for nothing. And so I say Lord, in Jesus’ name, by Your grace I accept it.
Whatever is in the cup that God is offering to me, whether it be pain and sorrow and suffering and grief along with the many more joys, I’m willing to take it because I trust Him.