Love That Doesn't Always Protect

Our vision is so limited we can hardly imagine a love that does not show itself in protection from suffering. The love of God did not protect His own Son... He will not necessarily protect us - not from anything it takes to make us like His Son. A lot of hammering and chiseling and purifying by fire will have to go into the process. ~ Elisabeth Elliot

The Hardest Things

"The greatest things are always hedged about by the hardest things, and we, too, shall find mountains and forests and chariots of iron. Hardship is the price of coronation. Triumphal arches are not woven out of rose blossoms and silken cords, but of hard blows and bloody scars. The very hardships that you are enduring in your life today are given by the Master for the explicit purpose of enabling you to win your crown. Do not wait for some ideal situation, some romantic difficulty, some far-away emergency; but rise to meet the actual conditions which the Providence of God has placed around you today. Your crown of glory lies embedded in the very heart of these things--those hardships and trials that are pressing you this very hour, week and month of your life. The hardest things are not those that the world knows of. Down in your secret soul unseen and unknown by any but Jesus, there is a little trial that you would not dare to mention that is harder for you to bear than martyrdom. There, beloved, lies your crown. God help you to overcome, and sometime wear it."

Knowing Him Through Suffering

Eternal life means knowing God. All our life on earth is designed to facilitate that. But knowing Him must include sharing His sufferings by reproducing the pattern of His death. (Phil. 3:10)
Instead of seeking first for escape from suffering, the soul hungry to know Christ will seek IN IT the means to know Him better.
Our human nature would look first for someone to blame, and focus our responses on that person. The spiritual mind looks first to God, "Teach me Thy way." The rest can wait.

Elisabeth Elliot,
A Path Through Suffering

No Scar?

Hast thou no scar?
No hidden scar on foot, or side, or hand?
I hear thee sung as mighty in the land,
I hear them hail thy bright, ascendant star.
Hast thou no scar?

Hast thou no wound?
Yet I was wounded by the archers; spent,
Leaned Me against a tree to die; and rent
By ravening beast that compassed Me, I swooned.
Hast thou no wound?

No wound? No scar?
Yet, as the Master shall the servant be,
And pierced are the feet that follow Me.
But thine are whole - Can he have followed far
Who has no wound nor scar?

Amy Carmichael