[bksvol-discuss] Just Submitted

  • From: Mike Pietruk <pietruk@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2005 11:45:15 -0400 (EDT)

Loneliness: it can be a wilderness, it can be a pathway to God /
by Elisabeth Elliot


As a missionary in the bush country of
western Canada and as a stranger and foreigner
with several different Indian tribes in the
Amazon rain forest of eastern Ecuador, Elisabeth
Elliot found that those wildernesses can be
lonely places. She knows that the most civilized
and populated place may also be a wilderness
of loneliness. In fact, loneliness is a component
of the universal human "predicament! There
is nothing unique about it.
This is a book for the married, for the not-yet-married,
and for the used-to-be-married.
Twice widowed and thrice married, the author
has learned that each stage of life may bring
loneliness of one kind or another. Single people
sometimes imagine that the solution to their
loneliness is marriage. Married people often
find themselves alone in ways they did not
expect. It seems that a deep gulf separates them
from the one who was supposed to understand
them best.
While we may find answers in one area,
those very answers may lead to another experience
of loneliness-the "empty nest" rejection,
bereavement. Analogies are drawn from the
human life cycle of birth, puberty, adolescence,
marriage, and death to show that each crisis
is death to the old life and the gateway to a
new one.

Elliot draws distinctions between the two
kinds of aloneness: solitude, which does not
connote suffering, and loneliness, which does.
The view presented here sees loneliness not
primarily as a problem to be solved or even a
pain to be assuaged, but, paradoxically, as a
gift, for it is precisely here, in the wilderness
of loneliness, that God wants to give us Himself.
When the gift is willingly received by faith in
God's eternal and loving purpose, it becomes
the very pathway to holiness and-beyond our
wildest imaginings to joy.
The message of this book is the glorious
message of the Cross. Through an offering
of sacrificial Love, all suffering has been transformed.
We are not therefore exempt, but our
sufferings are transformable. Elliot shows how
this happens through a variety of illustrations
from nature and from the lives of Christians
past and present who made of their loneliness
material for sacrifice. We learn from them that
as we accept the gift and offer it back to God,
our wilderness can be turned into a watered
garden, our deserts into springs, our little deaths
into life for others.

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