Moonless Trust

Elizabeth Elliot Devotional

Title: Moonless Trust

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.