Elizabeth had seen God as a stern judge, waiting to penalize anyone who failed to understand his direction. Instead, A Slow and Certain Light describes him as a guide “who has been there before and knows the way,” who can be trusted not to let us wander off and get lost. It characterizes him as a good shepherd, “the God who carries lambs in his arms.”

Seeking God’s Will

Of the many books Elisabeth Elliot wrote, her best-known is surely her first, Through Gates of Splendor. The 1957 multibiography is first and foremost a narrative of how five families came together to plan a missionary approach to a little-known people group in rural Ecuador, and how the plan ended in the deaths of five of the missionaries, including Elliot’s husband Jim. But the book is also an exposition of the then-twenty-nine-year-old Elliot’s beliefs about the will of God.

The first mention of God’s guidance appears just a page into the book, and his clear leading is described again less than a page from the end. In between, God’s will is characterized as covering both the big picture (“Christ said, ‘Go ye’; their answer was ‘Lord, send me.’”¹) and the individual details (“He asked God specifically to show him his next move.”²) We see God’s will discovered through prayer, Bible reading, circumstances, and the impressions of the inner self.

Seeking and obeying the will of God had been a constant emphasis throughout Elliot’s life. She had grown up in a world saturated in the Keswick Holiness tradition, with its stress on giving the whole person, inside and out, to God. She took this teaching seriously, responding to an altar call for salvation at age ten and another at twelve to make clear her commitment to God’s will for her life. Her letters home from boarding school and college reflect this focus; they are liberally sprinkled with requests for prayer that God’s will for her time at school be fulfilled, that she can have the strength to attain all that God has for her, that she be preserved from mistaking God’s guidance and stepping out of his plan for her life.

The fear of missing God’s direction caused Elliot much grief. A letter to her mother written not long after her college graduation shows her understanding of God’s will in greater detail:

More than anything else in the world I fear myself. I can trust God to be unchangingly faithful—I could trust Him to keep me and guide me if I could honestly say I desire nothing save His own, complete will. But how do I know that that is all I desire? How can I know a heart that is deceitful above all things and DESPERATELY WICKED? God judges those who are disobedient. We must suffer. Oh, suppose I should, by allowing feeling to overcome faith, miss His direction? Why must I struggle thro’ a maze of thought and feeling which spring from myself and my own soul, in order to reach Him? These are the thoughts that continually recur.³