by kristin vanderlip

I stumbled across Elisabeth Elliot’s book, A Path Through Suffering, some time around 2011, a year into my experience with suffering.

I never expected to suffer. Not many of us do. But a quarter of a century into my life, suffering came and pounded multiple sorrows into my heart.

A new bride ready for her happily ever after, I found myself entering into a nightmare instead. I buried my infant daughter while I watched my father wither away to an unrecognizable skeleton. I grieved their deaths back to back during a time of isolation and loneliness that resulted from a move that had taken me far, far from home.

As a self-proclaimed good girl and faithful follower of Christ, I couldn’t make sense of the pain. There was a spiritual crisis happening beneath the surface of my grief tearing me apart at the seams.

At the time, I didn’t need help moving through the layers of grief clouding my soul and seeping out my eyes. I needed someone to help me find God in my suffering.

Elisabeth Elliot was the person who did this for me through the words she offered on the page.

A Path Through Suffering was the first work of hers I’d ever read, and inside its pages I found words of truth and love written bluntly yet tenderly. Words I had yet to encounter anywhere else. They were a welcomed and beautiful refreshment.

Toward the beginning of the book she writes, “Jesus lets missionaries be killed. Jesus lets babies lose their parents…[and] children lose their best friends.”

She goes on to ask the question burning in my soul: What do we do with this?

She didn’t offer a single platitude of plastic comfort. She didn’t tell me how to “get over it” or “find joy” or “flourish again.” She made space.

Elliot was the first person I found who spoke honestly about the ugliness of pain, normalized suffering, revealed God in suffering, and showed me how to walk the path through suffering.

Our culture continues to be one that wants to offer us a way around suffering. We want to do all we can to avoid and escape it, but Elliot offers this conviction:

“Instead of seeking first for escape from suffering, the soul hungry to know Christ will seek in it the means to know Him better.”

I wanted to escape but she helped me lean in.

A good author acts as a guide for the reader, and Elliot was this for me.

By leaning in and finding a path through suffering with the help of Elliot’s book, healing and hope emerged and the darkness flooding me relented.

This book changed my life by offering me a way through my pain, leading me to deeper intimacy with God and a greater understanding of His mercy, and ultimately guiding me toward hope.