STRETCHED

“If it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you.”  I’m not sure what the author of that saying intended, but it takes me back to a book that profoundly impacted me as a young adult. It’s The Shadow of the Almighty, the biography of missionary martyr Jim Elliot, written by his widow Elisabeth Elliot. The book traced his passion for sharing about Jesus (including the remote Ecuadorean tribe that killed him and his colleagues in the 1950s) and shared his devotion to God in journal entries that included quotes like this: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”  About three years after reading his biography, I found myself on the campus of Wheaton College, where he graduated decades earlier and where he had first met “Bets” (Elisabeth) and knew she was the one—but not quite yet. (They would marry years later in a simple civil ceremony on the mission field.) I hoped to earn a master’s degree in communications at Wheaton as a door to work in Christian publishing. But often as I walked on campus and gazed at the same buildings where he studied, I wondered if I could ever have such audacious faith.

            I had no idea how God would stretch me—to give what I could not keep to gain what I could not lose. My neat-and-tidy plan to sprint through the program was interrupted by my parents’ deaths just six months apart. I found myself stretched in new areas through nearly unbearable grief and intimidating after-death tasks, including emptying the very full family home.

            A year later, I returned to graduate school. At times I wondered if I’d make it—physically, intellectually, and financially. Then, as graduation neared and I finished my thesis, I started job hunting. One by disappointing one, my inquiry letters trickled back with curt “not hiring” replies.

            That faith-stretching time of my life is one reason I resonated with “If it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you.”  Those bewildering, stretching, humbling years of higher education left me with this important lesson: When life belittles, God is bigger.  My job offer—a God-thing--came just days before I had to vacate college housing with no place to go.

            That job was a good experience, but marriage and motherhood changed my address and vocational direction. Four diplomas hang on the wall in my bedroom (high school, college, Bible school, graduate school). But I’m still “in school” for a degree that Jim Elliot described in his journals: the A.U.G.—“approved onto God.” He took this from 1 Timothy 2:15-16:

Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth.

            Or, said another way, don’t resist when God is taking the “raw you” and stretching you spiritually and vocationally to better serve Him. People who don’t change and grow, stagnate. Those who turn away from challenges backtrack…and lose, not gain.