Sunday, February 14, 2021

Through Gates of Splendour

by Elizabeth Elliot
274 pages / 1981

This is the original true account of a missionary endeavour that went terribly wrong, and yet was used by God for great good. The story is continued in such books as The End of the Spear, by Steve Saint - one of the sons of the missionaries who risked their lives to bring the gospel to the hostile Auca tribe of Ecuador.

What makes this biography so striking is that the author, Elizabeth Elliot, one of the missionaries' wives, does not know at the time of writing how the story will "end." Indeed, we still do not know, and that is one of the insights shared by Elliot, and relied upon by the mssionaries themselves - that we are neither the authors, nor the final readers, of our own lives' stories.

Elizabeth Elliot's later writing also makes clear how we must trust that the Lord's purposes in both our successes and our failures are greater than we can imagine. 

If you would like to read Elliot's account of the beginning of a God-guided advanture, you can get it here and here in Canada.

No comments:

Post a Comment