When God Works In Mysterious Ways

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Do you ever wonder why God allowed something to happen?

I recently read about a bunch of times like these in a missionary’s first year working in the jungles of Ecuador, South America. The missionary was Elisabeth Elliot and she had taken a summer course in how to get a language written down so that it could be made into a Bible for those who don’t have the Bible in their own language.

She went out to live near the tribe of the Colorado Indians to set to work at their language. However in just that one year many things happened which challenged her views of God.

She had a lot of trouble finding any Colorado Indians to sit down and answer questions so that she could write down their language, as they didn’t like interacting with the white people. She finally found a man that lived nearby who was a Christian and spoke both Spanish and the Colorado language fluently so she could set to work. But not that long afterwards he was killed.

This is what she says:

“Each time I saw it (the blood from his death), I thought of the sight of those spilled brains, the only brains in the world that contained the languages I needed. I felt like a son who had asked for a fish and been given a scorpion.”

By the end of her year there, she had compiled a whole host of paperwork with all the words and translations and phonetics written down. She later heard that the suitcase which contained all of that was stolen from the top of a wagon – her whole year’s work was gone. It was never found.

She was also engaged to be married to Jim Elliot, a missionary who had been working with another Indian tribe in Ecuador during the year she had been working with Colorados. She started working in a place where they transmitted all the radio messages and one day she got a message through from her agitated fiancée who said that most of their mission station had been destroyed in a flood. He had spent over 500 hours of that last year on building some of those buildings, and all that he had worked on was destroyed!

Most of us read things like that and are very perplexed. Surely translating the Bible and building a mission station would be God’s will, so why would He let those things happen?

Elisabeth Elliot came to the conclusion that God was using that year to teach her lessons – here are some of the things she says as she reflects:

• To be a follower of the Crucified means, sooner or later, a personal encounter with the Cross. And the Cross always entails loss.
• It was only gradually during the months that followed that I saw that to God nothing is finally lost… loss and death are only the preludes to gain and life. 
• He was quietly and steadily teaching me what I now, somewhat ruefully, call the ‘kindergarten lessons’… they were to prepare me for yet more formidable courses.
• As we learn to know God, we learn that His ways are past finding out.
• God makes no mistakes. He does not fall asleep. He does not forget His loved children. He asks us, every day, no matter what circumstances or adversities we find ourselves in, to trust and obey.

And that last point is, I think, the most important – He asks us to trust and obey. I was talking to my kids today about how God works everything for good for those who love Him (Romans 8:28) even in times where it might seem hard to understand.

My son asked how could God possibly be working for good in the death of a father we know, who left behind a wife and four children and medical bills. I told him that I don’t know – but that is where we have to trust God. We don’t always understand why, but we need to trust that God does love us and will fulfill His promises.

I can see how God was probably using that year to prepare Elisabeth Elliot for what was to come even though she had no idea at the time. Later on she lost her husband, who was martyred along with four others. You can read the story in the book, ‘Through Gates of Splendour’.

If she hadn’t gone through those ‘kindergarten lessons’ as she calls them, she might never have come through the other side of that as well as she did, and gone on to reach the very tribe that killed her husband, then write many amazing and challenging books afterwards. If you want to read more about what I have been writing, the quotes have been taken from her book, ‘These Strange Ashes’.

There is a great song by Chris Tomlin called ‘Sovereign’ which talks about trusting God whatever comes our way. Here is a link to it on You Tube:

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