Pour Out Your Heart

“Trust in him at all times; ye people, pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us.” — Psalm 62:8 (KJV)

Back in America, Elisabeth and Valerie settled in Franconia, New Hampshire, where her family had spent its summers. She was famous. Churches, colleges and conferences wanted Jim Elliot's widow to come and tell the story, and since she now earned her living by writing and speaking, she accepted many invitations. But the woman who stood up to speak wasn't quite the woman audiences expected.

The story of 1956 had been told everywhere with a neat shape: five men died, and God used their deaths to open a closed people to the gospel. Elisabeth never denied that God had worked. She'd seen it. But she had also seen how much didn't fit the shape: a murdered helper, a stolen suitcase, a station washed away, rivalry among missionaries. She had hard questions about whether missionaries, herself included, understood what they were doing to a people's whole way of life, and how much of what they called the Lord's work was really their own plans in religious language. She decided the honest thing was to say so.

In 1966 she published a novel, No Graven Image. Its heroine is a young single missionary trying to put an unwritten language into writing in Ecuador, longing for a faithful helper and the success she's been taught to expect. Near the end, trying to help, she gives an injection to the very man her work depends on, and he dies. The novel doesn't turn it into a lesson. It ends with the missionary stripped of her assumptions about what God must do. Many readers who had loved her first book were dismayed. Some decided she had lost her faith. Others see it as the most searching thing she ever wrote. The title comes from the second commandment. A God who always has to produce the results we planned for him, she was saying, isn't the God of the Bible. He's an idol with a Christian name.

The biography is clear that this wasn't a woman abandoning Christ. Her letters and journals from those years show someone lonely and often unsure, but not walking away. What she abandoned was the habit of tidying things up. She came to believe a Christian's job is to trust God, not to explain him, and that the faithful thing to do with an unanswered question is to bring it to God rather than hide it.

Then her life changed again. In the later 1960s she met Addison Leitch, a Presbyterian theologian and teacher: big personality, funny, well read, and not at all overawed by her. His wife Margaret died in 1968 after a serious illness. Elisabeth and Addison were married on 1 January 1969. She was forty-two; he was sixty. They moved to Hamilton, Massachusetts, where he taught theology at a new seminary, Gordon-Conwell. Valerie gained a stepfather and four older stepsisters. By the accounts of those who knew them, the years with Addison were happy ones.

They didn't last. Addison was found to have cancer. Elisabeth nursed him at home and watched a large, vigorous man grow weak. He died on 17 September 1973 (a few accounts say the 18th). She was forty-six and a widow for the second time. This time there was no magazine spread and no book. She grieved without an audience. When she later wrote that suffering is never wasted, she wasn't writing from a desk. She had sat at a dying husband's bedside.

Psalm 62 doesn't tell you to tidy yourself up before you come to God. It says “pour out your heart before him,” because God is a refuge, and a refuge is for people in trouble. Honest questions aren't the opposite of faith. Hiding them is often more dangerous than asking them.

One thing to do this week: write God an honest prayer about a question you have been hiding, about him, about suffering, about something that happened to you. Don't clean it up. Then end it with one sentence of trust, even a small one.