Apprenticeship

Elisabeth Elliot:

The Lord of Heaven desires and seeks our companionship (remember His words to the disciples, “Will you also go away?”), but we can never go far along the road if we refuse things that are hard for us. Our spiritual apprenticeship is served only as we earnestly observe what the Master does and do it after Him, not asking for shelter from winds that beat on Him, but turning our faces to that wind, taking up and embracing His cross. A glad acceptance of hard things opens the way for glory.

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We are “God’s heirs and Christ’s fellow-heirs, if we share his sufferings now in order to share his splendour hereafter” (Rom 8:17). The message is clear if we evade suffering, we shall miss out on the splendor. Jeremiah wrote, “If you have raced with men on foot and they have wearied you, how will you compete with horses? And if in a safe land you fall down, how will you do in the jungle of the Jordan?” (Jer 12:5, RSV]. 
If we are ever called to great suffering, how shall we bear it if we have not learned to share willingly with Christ our small ones? How shall we manage to save others if in little common ways we are bent on saving ourselves? Jesus could not do it (“He saved others, … he cannot save himself”—Mk 15:31). Neither can we.

The chance for each one of us to “die” is always given. The day’s happenings are presented to us by the God who conceived the intricate shape of the cranesbill’s seed. With exquisite delicacy He prepares us in mysterious ways and teaches us how to receive our daily deaths, whether they be small ones such as the cutting remark, the social slight, the unwelcome task, or the coming to pass of our worst fear.