“‘You are loved with an everlasting love,’ that’s what the Bible says, ‘and underneath are the everlasting arms.’ This is your friend Elisabeth Elliot…”
I grew up hearing those words regularly on the radio as they opened Elisabeth Elliot’s “Gateway to Joy” broadcast, a daily program wherein Elliot discussed how to live as a Christian in the contemporary world. Her radio show, like the 21 books she wrote over her career as a writer and speaker, focused on many of the same overlapping topics: marriage, childrearing, obedience, joy, suffering, discipline, and missions. Initially propelled into the public consciousness by the martyrdom of her husband and four other missionaries in South America, Elliot’s first book about her husband’s final days established her as one of the most prominent voices of her generation trying to negotiate an unchanging Gospel in a rapidly changing world. From the deaths in an Ecuadorian jungle to the mundane give-and-take of marriage, Elliot was animated by the idea that we are indeed loved with an everlasting love — and that such love requires nothing less than a total surrender of our desires to God’s will.
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Matthew Loftus
Matthew grew up in a family of 15 children and completed his medical training in Baltimore, Maryland. Since 2015, he and his family have lived in East Africa, where he currently teaches and practices Family Medicine at a mission hospital. His work has appeared in outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Atlantis, and Mere Orthodoxy and his first book is forthcoming from InterVarsity Press. You can learn more about his work and writing at www.matthewandmaggie.org and preorder his forthcoming book here: https://www.ivpress.com/resisting-therapy-culture
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