Before we were married, Jim Elliot wrote exhorting me to lay aide all anxieties and to remember that I had “bargained with Him who bore a cross.” It was a word I needed then. It is a word I needed then. It is a word I need now- more than forty years later. Every day there are distractions which easily make me forget that “bargain:” If things upset, irritate, or even momentarily bother me, let me think of what Christ endured for me and the contrast will put my troubles in perspective. If I wonder why God deals with me as He does (repeating many times the lessons of love, self-abandonment, acceptance of loss or uncertainty, for example) the only answer I need is that I accepted His invitation to take up my cross and follow.
**Originally published in Guided by God’s Promises , pp. 46