Moonless Trust

Moonless Trust
by Elisabeth Elliot


Some of you are perhaps feeling that you are voyaging just now on a moonless sea. Uncertainty surrounds you. There seem to be no signs to follow. Perhaps you feel about to be engulfed by loneliness. There is no one to whom you can speak of your need.

Amy Carmichael wrote of such a feeling when, as a missionary of twenty-six, she had to leave Japan because of poor health, then travel to China for recuperation, but then realized God was telling her to go to Ceylon. (All this preceded her going to India, where she stayed for fifty-three years.) I have on my desk her original handwritten letter of August 25, 1894, as she was en route to Colombo.

"All along, let us remember, we are not asked to understand, but simply to obey.... On July 28, Saturday, I sailed. We had to come on board on Friday night, and just as the tender (a small boat) where were the dear friends who had come to say goodbye was moving off, and the chill of loneliness shivered through me, like a warm love-clasp came the long-loved lines--'And only Heaven is better than to walk with Christ at midnight, over moonless seas.' I couldn't feel frightened then. Praise Him for the moonless seas--all the better the opportunity for proving Him to be indeed the El Shaddai, 'the God who is Enough.'"

Let me add my own word of witness to hers and to that of the tens of thousands who have learned that He is indeed Enough.

He is not all we would ask for (if we were honest), but it is precisely when we do not have what we would ask for, and only then, that we can clearly perceive His all-sufficiency.

It is when the sea is moonless that the Lord has become my Light.

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Amen. Let it be so.

The Beauty of the Wind

True Confession: I love the wind.

I love walking in the wind. I love feeling it mess up my hair. I love to lean into it and feel it tickle my skin as it passes through my clothes. From the top of my head to the bottom of my feet, I am wrapped in an invisible presence. And this presence is undeniable. I can hear the trees moaning. I can see the leaves wildly waving. I can feel my hair blowing around in a brown cloud about my head. My clothes are plastered to my body. My skin tingles and stings. My eyes water. I breathe deeply of the sharp air, and the wind takes my breath away from my lungs

To me, the wind has come to represent God.

It is a constant reminder of His presence. The wind is something that I can't see but that I can feel very strongly. My eyes can perceive the effect of the wind, though I can't capture evidence of it with sight.

Wind is a signal of change. It is a sign of changing seasons, of changing weather, of changing landscape.



Right now, my life is very windy.



I went for a walk this morning in the wind. It bit into my ears and my hands with its icy nature, but somehow I found myself invigorated, as if the pain of the wind was reminding me that I'm alive. Without pain, I wonder if we ever really live.


And at this time, my life is filled with pain. The winds of change are blowing with great might, and I know that anything not securely fastened is going to be gone in the morning. Hebrews 12:27-28 talks about a removal of all those things which "can be shaken" so that what remains is only those things which "cannot be shaken."

Much is being shaken in my life.

After this wind dies down, many things will no longer remain, but what what does remain in the morning will be the immovable pieces of my life.


As I was leaning into the wind on my walk this morning, I had a picture in my mind of myself on a beach.

At sunset, I stood on the beach and drank in the beauty of the shore, the shadows, the light. I watched the dimming light play with the grasses and the ripples in the sand.
But as I drank in the beauty, I felt the winds beginning to pick up. I watched as the water was being stirred into a frothy mess. I observed the sea gulls taking off in flight, pushing the wind with their wings.
I left the beach, my clothes flapping agains my legs and arms, knowing that the beauty I had seen that evening would not be there in the morning.

At sunrise, I went to the beach again. The landscape of the beach was completely changed. The sand was still there, the water still there, but nothing else seemed the same. The shoreline, the flotsam, the debris, the tidal pools, the sandbars all made it feel like a completely different place.

But it was still breathtaking in its beauty. The sun glinting on the water and fracturing into diamonds, the waves making music, the shadows, the light . . . they reminded me of what I had once known.

No, it didn't look like what I had seen the night before, but this new landscape wakened my hear to sing in a new way, in a way the scene the previous evening had not done.


But change is hard, and it is important to mourn what was.

And so I mourn.

I mourn the beauty of what has been. I ache with what I leave behind. I choke out sobs, and I wrestle with the many "why?"s that are surfacing in my heart.

And then I walk into the wind -- I lean into it.

I can do this because the wind is my God. The wind is the Lover of my heart.

Yes, right now walking is much harder than it was when the wind was not present and the air was still. But when I lean into it -- when I lean into Him -- I find the bracing reality of His presence.

It is going to be a hard walk. It is going to be painful. And when the wind ceases, the landscape of my life will look very different, but it will still be beautiful.

So right now, all there is for me to do is to mourn what was, to trust the One who promises good for those who love Him, and to lean into the wind . . .