A Lesson in Things Temporal

Elizabeth Elliot Devotional

Title: A Lesson in Things Temporal

I am upset when things are lost. Even small
things. I like to know that things have places
and are in them. It's much worse when something
like a manuscript is lost. I had worked for a
number of weeks on a certain piece, and when I
went to do the final rewriting it was gone. It
just wasn't anywhere. I looked, then Lars looked,
then we both looked. In all the likely and all
the unlikely places. We prayed about it, of
course, together and separately, but we could not
find it. At last I told the Lord that if I did
not find it today I would begin again from
scratch, as the deadline was closing in. That day
Uncle Tom, who was eighty-nine and was staying
with us, became very ill. There was no time to
think of manuscripts.

The next day we happened to move a piece of
furniture and discovered that moths were doing
their dastardly work underneath it. Lars went out
and bought a can of moth spray and proceeded to
fumigate every nook and cranny. The manuscript
was behind a desk. It had fallen down and lodged
standing up on the baseboard. If Uncle Tom had
not gotten sick I would have done a day's
unnecessary work on that piece that I was so
worried about. If the moths had not taken it into
their tiny heads to chew my carpet, we probably
would not have fumed up that sheaf of papers
until next spring. It was not for nothing that
the collect in my church that Sunday (the eighth
after Pentecost) was: "O God, the protector of
all who trust in you, without whom nothing is
strong, nothing is holy: Increase and multiply
upon us your mercy, that, with you as our ruler
and guide, we may so pass through things
temporal, that we lose not the things eternal;
through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and
reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for
ever and ever. Amen."