Missionary, author and speaker Elisabeth Elliot was born on December 27, 1926, in Brussels, Belgium, where her parents served as missionaries. Before she was a year old they moved to America. A true pioneer in the world of Christianity, Elisabeth went to Wheaton College and studied Greek, because she desired to translate the Bible for the remote regions in the world. While at the college, she met Jim Elliot. The first of her 3 husbands, Jim was martyred in Ecuador in 1956. Read more of her story here and here.
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The God who created, names, and numbers the stars in the heavens also numbers the hairs of my head…
He pays attention to very big things and to very small ones.
What matters to me matters to Him, and that changes my life.
If you believe in a God who controls the big things,
you have to believe in a God who controls the little things.
It is we, of course, to whom things look “little” or “big.”
God is God. Because he is God, He is worthy of my trust and obedience.
I will find rest nowhere but in His holy will that is unspeakably
beyond my largest notions of what he is up to.
He is always doing something–the very best thing,
the thing we ourselves would certainly choose if we knew
the end from the beginning. He is at work to bring us to our full glory.
If my life is surrendered to God, all is well. Let me not grab it back,
as though it were in peril in His hand but would be safer in mine!
Today is mine. Tomorrow is none of my business.
If I peer anxiously into the fog of the future
I will strain my spiritual eyes
so that I will not see clearly what is required of me now!
This hard place in which you perhaps find yourself is the
very place in which God is giving you opportunity to look only to Him, to spend time in prayer, and to learn long-suffering, gentleness, meekness – in short, to learn the depths of the love
that Christ Himself has poured out on all of us.
I will offer to Him both my tears and my exultation.
Nothing we offer to Him will be lost.
