The Uncategorizable Suffering

A Reflection on "Becoming Elisabeth Elliot" by Ellen Vaughn

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 long enough. All suffering fell neatly into a handful of categories: discipline, correction, personal growth, or lives changed.

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.

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. As I survey my surroundings, I feel like I’m sitting in rubble and charred remains. I have yet to see a phoenix burst up from these ashes. This suffering is only 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. 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 heard myself in her writing: An often depressed, questioning, aching woman begging God for help while wondering what her relentless and seemingly purposeless suffering could achieve.

Joseph Wright of Derby, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons