The Path and It's "Problems"

From Elisabeth Elliot

The Road to Shandia

There is a road east of the Andes from the little tea-growing town of Puyo, to an unnamed point in the jungle just beyond the mostly Indian town of Pano. When I lived in Ecuador most of the road was not there at all, and it would have taken you three days to cover that distance. I covered it a few weeks ago in the space of a few hours in a jeep driven by a missionary named Ella Rae. We traveled along the south side of the Ansuc River and crossed, on a suspension bridge, the Atun Yacu, which we once crossed by dugout canoe. The road took us through the towns of Napo and Tena and then straight up the middle of what used to be a mission station airstrip in Pano. When the road ended at the Pano River, Ella Rae bade us good-bye and we set out on foot for Shandia, one of the places where I used to live. I had been over the trail from Tena to Shandia many times, but, although the government has laid logs crosswise to make walking easier, horses and cows have been making use of it and the trail was in the worst condition I'd ever seen.

We were two women and one man--he in shorts and rubber knee boots, we in standard jungle garb of blouses, skirts and tennis shoes. As we plowed our way through the mud some spiritual parallels came to mind.

Every step of faith is a step faith. In some places the logs were submerged in mud. Finding one to put your foot on did not make it easier to find the next one.

Each step was a decision, but to make it a problem would have halted progress altogether. Sometimes the choice was to balance on a three-inch-in-diameter log laid parallel to the path and take the chance of slipping off sideways and falling into the mud, or to step deliberately into mud (which was like peanut butter) up to one's knees, or to try to beat one's way through the tangle at the side of the trail (and of course that tangle could always hold snakes). You had to keep moving. Decisions, therefore, had to be snap decisions. If we had let each step be a problem, to be paused and pondered over, we'd still be there. If a decision turned out to be the wrong one, which it often seemed to be, you simply pulled yourself out and kept on.

The trail--always leading us to our goal--took on varied aspects. We were not always in mud up to our knees, or trying to find a footing on logs which were in some places floating and in some places submerged. For short spaces the trail was of gravel. Sometimes there were hills to climb and rivers to wade through where we got the chance to rinse off a few pounds of accumulated jungle soil. At times we were in sunshine where the forest had been cut back to make pasture, at other times in deep shade.

There was a tiny footprint in front of me. You learn when you travel jungle trails to recognize the differences in footprints. A party of Indians had evidently preceded us not long before. One of them was a child no more than three. As we came to what seemed to me impassable sections, I found myself spurred on by the knowledge that where the trail was firmer I would find the little footprint. Sure enough. That little person had made it through what was for him hip-high mud, across the precarious logs, into the streams, up the hills and down the slick ravines. There is something amazingly heartening in the knowledge that somebody else has been over the course before especially if it's somebody who has had manifestly greater difficulties than ours to overcome. Most of the time there was no evidence at all of his going, and I could lose heart. But here and there again the evidence lay, clear and unmistakable. If he had made it, so could I.

We made it. We reached the house my husband Jim Elliot had built twenty-three years ago. The only reason it still stands is that it was built on a cement slab with poured cement walls up to the level of the window sills, boards from there up to the aluminum roof. An ordinary jungle house would have vanished long since. Mary began sweeping out the bat droppings and the dead cockroaches and spiders, tidying up, lighting candles and cooking a simple supper while Frank and I went to visit the Indians in their houses nearby. Thirteen years lay lightly on most of them, but a generation of children had become unrecognizable.

We pulled out some bedding I had left stored in steel drums and stayed the night in the house. A mouse had to be evicted from one of the mattresses. The sound of the Atun Yacu at the foot of the cliff was the same as it had always been. The shadows cast by the candles seemed to take the shapes familiar to me from the nights when I had risen to feed my baby in this very bedroom. Her toy wicker furniture was still there, its upholstery mildewed and nearly colorless.

Not quite three weeks have passed, and I sit in my green-carpeted study in Massachusetts. The trail--always leading to the goal--does take on different aspects. Soon I will face my seminary students again to remind them that each footstep along the trail matters, not only the goal toward which they aspire. The clean, hard gravel matters, but so does the slough with the floating logs, the hill and the deep ravine. The traveler who makes each decision about where to put his foot is not different from the person who has reached the house and rests at last by the fireplace with a cup of tea and a candle. Are they prospective ministers? Then they must be now, while they are on the journey, true men and women, attending to today's task, living their lives today. They do not see into heaven. They have to live on earth. They must move steadily, putting one foot in front of the other, no matter whether it is the log, the rock or the mire that receives it. They must rightly discharge each small duty, whether it be to a professor, a landlady, a wife or an employer.

I will remind them, too, that the Bible does not speak of problems. As Corrie ten Boom says, "God has no problems, only plans." We ought to think not of problems but of purpose. We encounter the obstacle, we make a choice--always with the goal in mind.

We are conditioned nowadays, however, to define everything as a problem. A little girl on a TV commercial pipes, "I have this terrible problem with my hair! But my mommy bought No More Tangles, and now there's no more tangles!" A group of young wives asked me to speak to them on "The Problems of Widowhood." I declined, explaining in the first place that I did not regard widowhood as a problem, and in the second place that if I did I was not sure I had any warrant for unloading my own problems onto the shoulders of young women who had enough of their own, and in the third place a widow has only one "problem," when it comes right down to it--she has no husband. And that's something nobody can do anything about.

Life is full of things we can't do anything about, but which we are supposed to do something with. "He himself endured a cross and thought nothing of its shame because of the joy." A very different story from the one which would have been written if Jesus had been prompted by the spirit of our own age: "Don't just endure the cross--think about it, talk about it, share it, express your gut-level feelings, get in touch with yourself, find out who you are, define the problem, analyze it, get counseling, get the experts' opinions, discuss solutions, work through it." Jesus endured. He thought nothing of the shame. The freedom, the freshness of that valiant selflessness is like a strong wind. How badly such a wind is needed to sweep away the pollution of our self-preoccupation!

Analysis can make you feel guilty for being human. To be human, of course, means to be sinful, and for our sinfulness we must certainly "feel" the guilt which is rightly ours--but not everything human is sinful. There is a man on the radio every afternoon from California whose consummate arrogance in making an instant analysis of every caller's difficulties is simply breathtaking. A woman called in to talk about her problems with her husband who happens to be an actor. "Oh," said the counselor, "of course the only reason anybody goes into acting is because they need approval." Bang. Husband's problem identified. Next question. I turned off the radio and asked myself, with rising guilt feelings, "Do I need approval?" Answer: yes. Does anybody not need approval? Is there anybody who is content to live his life without so much as a nod from anybody else? Wouldn't he be, of all men, the most devilishly self-centered? Wouldn't his supreme solitude be the most hellish? It's human to want to know that you please somebody.

We visited another place where I lived--Tewaenon-- where the Aucas live. It had been sixteen years since I had seen them, but they remembered me, calling me by the name they had given me, "Gikari," and everybody beginning at once, as was their custom, to tell me what they had done since they saw me. Dabu, with two of his three wives, came walking up the airstrip and began immediately--there are no greetings in Auca--to tell me that when he had heard of the death of my second husband he had cried. This prompted Ipa to remark that she had sat down and written me a letter when she heard of his death, but on rereading the letter said to herself, "It's no good," and threw it away. Sometimes readers of things that I write tell me long afterward that they have thought of writing me a letter, or have written one and discarded it, thinking, "She doesn't need my approval." Well, they're mistaken--for wouldn't it be a lovely thing to know that a footprint you have left on the trail has, just by being there, heartened somebody else?