The Uncategorizable Suffering: A Reflection on Becoming Elisabeth Elliot
I used to think of my suffering in categories, like little sticky notes stuck to my wall in columns with arrows connecting one thing to another, leading to a final glorious result. Everything happens for a reason, and I could deduce or interpret that reason if I examined it thoroughly or studied Scripture. All suffering fell neatly into a handful of categories: discipline, correction, personal growth, or lives changed. And that would be visible to my discerning eye.
Over the past three years, suffering has come upon my family blow after blow. Don’t waste this suffering, I constantly reminded myself. Let God grow you, let him discipline you, let him change you, let him change others through you. Don’t let this suffering go to waste.
And yet, as each flaming arrow struck our home and lives, it became a little more difficult to stand up, to shake the soot from the curtains, to expel the smell of smoke. Until finally, I felt like I was sitting in only rubble and charred remains. There was no phoenix to burst up from these ashes. I could see no purpose, no possible fruit to grow from it all. It felt like a “baffling sense of loss,” as Amy Carmichael put it in her poem These Strange Ashes.
Elizabeth Elliot named one of her books These Strange Ashes after this poem. As Ellen Vaughn explained in her biography Becoming Elisabeth Elliot, Elisabeth saw most of her ministry in Ecuador to be a mass of strange ashes—useless suffering. Her years of tiresome translation work being stolen, her husband’s death at the hands of Waodani people because of a lie, her struggles to translate their language as Rachel Saint worked against and resisted her—what good did any of it accomplish, Lord? she often wondered. It all simply felt like a waste.¹
As I poured over the journal entries in her biography, I found myself. An often depressed, questioning, aching woman begging God for help while wondering what her relentless and seemingly purposeless suffering could achieve.
As I grieved our losses and trials, I, like Elisabeth Elliot, realized not all suffering falls into neat and tidy boxes. We can’t simply assess our pain and drop it into the right category and then deduce the results that should follow. As Ellen Vaughn observed, “God began to teach [Elisabeth] truths she would probe deeper and deeper over the ensuing decades, multi-faceted aspects of His will that could not be charted, categorized, or listed on an index. God’s sovereign will was a mystery that could not be mastered, an experience that could not be classified, a wonder that had no end. It wove together strands of life, death, grace, pain, joy, humility, awe.”² Some, if not most, suffering is beyond our understanding. And our task isn’t to solve it or categorize it. Rather, as Elisabeth Elliot said,
There is always the urge to oversimplify, to weigh in at once with interpretations that cannot possibly cover all the data or stand up to close inspection. We know, for example, that time and time again in the history of the Christian church, the blood of martyrs has been its seed. So we are tempted to assume a simple equation here. Five men died. This will x-number of Waodani Christians….
Perhaps so. Perhaps not. Cause and effect are in God’s hands. Is it not the part of faith simply to let them rest there? God is God. I dethrone Him in my heart if I demand that He act in ways that satisfy my idea of justice….
A healthier faith seeks a reference point outside all human experience, the Polestar which marks the course of all human events, not forgetting that impenetrable mystery of the interplay of God’s will and man’s….
It is not the level of our spirituality that we can depend on. It is God and nothing less than God, for the work is God’s and the call is God’s and everything is summoned by Him and to His purposes, our bravery and our cowardice, our love and our selfishness, our strengths and our weaknesses.³
So when we can’t categorize our suffering, when no fruit seems to come from it, when our suffering seems to be simply a pile of useless, strange ashes, what do we do? Do we become cynical? Bitter? Resentful? Do we resign the truths we’ve held so dear about God’s goodness, love, and sovereignty? Or do we dig and sift through the ashes frantically trying to find some kind of good and beauty underneath?
Neither, according to Elisabeth. Instead we stand among our ashes, hold up our weary and empty hands, and lift our drooping eyelids to behold Christ, who in every trial, offers himself. The man of sorrows, our compassionate High Priest, the one who has sustained us from the beginning, who calls us his own, the one who knew true darkness and loneliness so we never would, the one whose hands are pierced and side is slashed—he is the beauty that rises from the ashes. Not new strength. Not a new and improved self. Not a fruitful ministry. Not hundreds of transformed lives from our story. He is what—or rather, who—we are to look for. In our suffering, in our pile of strange ashes, we always find Christ.
It can be tempting to sift through our ashes for something salvageable, or some kind of phoenix waiting to rise up from the soot. We may try to put our faith in ourselves and how much good we can cultivate from our suffering. But this isn’t what we are called to. The majority of our suffering will be uncategorizable and undefinable. There are some things that are “hidden” and “belong to the LORD our God,” and aren’t for our minds to comprehend. Like Job, who was answered from the whirlwind by God himself, we will still never know the reason for our suffering.
But, “the revealed things belong to us and our children forever, so that we may follow all the words of this law,” (Deuteronomy 29:29 CSB). We have the comfort and promises of God’s Word—that he will be near, that he will love us without wavering, that he will carry us through, and that we will one day find ourselves in eternal life where all tears will be dried and all suffering will come to an end. And all the while we have Christ himself.
As Elisabeth Elliot observed of her many years of ministry, “I suppose the general opinion of missionary work says that it is intended to bring [people] to Christ. 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.”⁴ Let that be how we each reflect upon our lives—not in what measurable good we could forage from it, but that Christ has brought us to himself.
-
Ellen Vaughn, Becoming Elisabeth Elliot (Nashville, Tennessee: B&H Publishing Group, 2020), 265.
-
Ibid, 111.
-
Ibid, 260-61.
-
Ibid, 275.
