Friday, Jan. 28, 2005 - 12:41 p.m.

More Changes-EE on sacrifice

I have cut my credit load to 14-maybe 12 if necessary by March. 1d has been told she needs to have a growth in her neck connected with the damage from the seizures to her chemical receptors removed right away. The doctor removed her driving privileges for a time also, so I am the designated chauffeur, errand runner, and overseer.

The classes I dropped were not crucial to my major. In fact, since I was given permission to add the Education Generalist courses, I didn't even need to take them as I now have enough to stay full time. PC Prep would have been interesting, the first class showed it to be about adding memory and other such technology at a very low level and I would finally have known what SDRAM, Intel Celeron,DDR, and other terms meant. Many of the assignments and powerpoint presentations were online, and perhaps, as time allows, I can still access them, just not be cornered by classes and assignments. The Intermediate Windows proved to be a repeat of much of what I already know, altho I am sure I would have learned more, and would have finally known the correct labels and quickest way to do some things. Finally, the US History 2, independent study, had much reading with major papers every four weeks. While I like history and paper-writing, I am glad to have dropped it in view of everything else that is on my plate, academically and personally, right now.

I now have 2 days in the week that I can stay home and even most Saturdays. Big sigh of relief. Remember to examine time between semesters with large amount of salt, when considering lack of stuff to do. And I can always clean the garage.

By the time I sat down here this morning at 9:30, I was on my second can of diet cola and shaking like a leaf. That's not like me, I usually don't have a nerve in my body. I had a good phone conversation with 1d for half an hour, lined up my new plan, and feel much calmer. Have tons of stuff to do connected with taxes, school, home, etc, but one thing at a time.

Elisabeth Elliott has had such good devotions online lately, I just have to copy them here for re-reading. They are not being stored on her website as in the old days, and while I am sure I have the originals in the books of hers I have collected, they are more readily available in this journal.

Title: Provision For Sacrifice

Author: Elisabeth Elliot

It took me quite a long time to unwrap my breakfast one day last week. I was flying somewhere I can't remember where because the past two months are a jumble in my memory--checking into TWA, American, Eastern, Delta; plunking my purse and attach� case down on the carpeted counter to be sent through the security scanner; reading the New Yorker in boarding lounges--Atlanta, Cincinnati, San Francisco, Florence, Grand Rapids; buckling seatbelts; drinking tea and ice water and (on Allegheny Airlines) apple juice.

Which brings me back to that breakfast flight, wherever it went. I had to unwrap my breakfast. The cutlery and napkin were sealed in an impregnable plastic bag. The omelet was encased in gold foil, the muffin in a paper cup which clung stubbornly. The butter was protected by a square mold of something nearly as tough as Plexiglass, the orange juice was sealed with a convex foil lid which when pierced squirted a jet of juice in a wholly unpredictable direction, and the fruit cup was fastbound in Saranwrap, the edges, corners and ends of which had been concealed with a cleverness that bordered on the diabolical.

At length, however, the food lay open and exposed to my hunger, and I ate it thankfully. I was thankful, for one thing, to have conquered the wrappings, but genuinely thankful, too, for the luxuries of modern American life the speed of travel, the comfort of the seat (an economy-class airplane seat is infinitely more comfortable than the two boards at right angles which make up a "first-class" seat on an Ecuadorian banana truck, and I've done my stint on those), the temperature of the cabin when outside it is perhaps seventy degrees below zero, the cleanliness, the quiet, the safety.

All these things, some cynic might point out, are relative. The Concorde travels much faster than a DC-10, a seat in first class is a lot roomier than one in economy class, it is sometimes frigid or stifling on planes, occasionally you find crumbs on your tray table and there is the chance of being seated next to some executive who has just had one of those three-martini lunches or some garrulous grandmother who wants to show you the latest Polaroids of the small person she has just visited. And planes crash, don't forget. So says the cynic.

But it is always possible to be thankful for what is given rather than to complain about what is not given. One or the other becomes a habit of life. There are, of course, complaints which are legitimate--as, for example, when services have been paid for which have not been rendered--but the gifts of God are in an altogether different category. Ingratitude to him amounts (let us resort to no euphemisms) to rebellion.

Many women have told me that my husband's advice, which I once quoted in a book, has been an eye-opener to them. He said that a wife, if she is very generous, may allow that her husband lives up to perhaps eighty percent of her expectations. There is always the other twenty percent that she would like to change, and she may chip away at it for the whole of their married life without reducing it by very much. She may, on the other hand, simply decide to enjoy the eighty percent, and both of them will be happy. It's a down-to-earth illustration of a principle: Accept, positively and actively, what is given. Let thanksgiving be the habit of your life.

Such acceptance is not possible without a deep and abiding belief in the sovereign love of God. Either he is in charge, or he is not. Either he loves us, or he does not. If he is in charge and loves us, then whatever is given is subject to his control and is meant ultimately for our joy.

I rode horseback this morning through the sweet fragrance of late autumn woods and meadows, fresh with dew. The New England countryside was a softly muted tapestry of fading color. A few apples still clung to the boughs of gnarled trees. The oak leaves, not yet fallen, were golden banners, and the leaves on the blueberry bushes were still blood red. The horses walked, the saddles creaked, a couple of joyful dogs joined us out of nowhere and capered around the horses as we moved through the meadow. Thank you, thank you, thank you was the rhythm of all the world. It was all loveliness, all subject to the will of God, all made for joy.

But I had to come back to my typewriter and remember that there are those for whom today is a burden and a horror. I had intended to write about suffering because on Sunday I was talking to a group of graduate students as we sat in my living room after dinner. "How can we prepare ourselves to suffer?" they had asked, and as I talked one of them said, "Will you write this down for us? Will you do an article on it?" And I thought, yes, perhaps I will do an article. I had been thinking very much about suffering in the past two weeks because it seemed I had encountered more of it in more of its varied forms, in the lives of people I had met, than in any other short period of my life. A couple whose only son had died of bone cancer. A woman who said to me with tears on her cheeks, "I am losing my husband--but in another way from the way you lost yours. But it's all right." A woman with a grotesquely disfiguring disease which had plagued her for more than twenty years. A couple whose two-year-old son choked to death on an almond. A woman whose oldest son died in a motorcycle accident six weeks ago--"and am I angry at God? Oh God, am I angry!" she said. A widow left with millions of dollars in debts. And tonight, only a few hours after that beautiful ride through the woods, I listened to a father tell of appalling things his children have done and are doing which break his heart. His voice broke, his hands tried to find something to do to hide their trembling as he talked.

In the days of Cyrus, when the temple was restored in Jerusalem, he decreed that all that was needed for sacrifice, the young bulls, rams or sheep for burnt offerings to the God of heaven, wheat, salt, wine or oil, should be given "day by day without fail." Is it not reasonable to believe that that same God, the God of heaven to whom all thanks is due, will provide for us today the materials for sacrifice? "All things come of thee, O Lord," we sing, "and of thine own have we given thee."

Sometimes the materials he provides are things of beauty, things for which we give thanks at once with all our being. The glory of the oak trees today was one of these. And sometimes they are things which break our hearts--not gifts in the sense that Almighty God decrees the evil and suffering of the world (we only know that he allowed it, we do not know why), but gifts in that he gives to us himself--his presence, his never-failing love in the midst of our pain. We may offer up those very pains, those inexplicable catastrophes that baffle us to silence. We may even give him our broken hearts, for the sacrifices of God, we are told, are "a broken spirit, a broken and a contrite heart." All of it--the gladness and the sorrow--material for sacrifice, given "day by day without fail." For one who has made thanksgiving the habit of his life, the morning prayer will be, "Lord, what will you give me today to offer back to you?"

EE's devotional

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