Stability or Am I Nuts?

When I get discouraged by the unending task of kitchen duty I am cheered by thoughts like these:

"Dishes, dishes, dirty dishes, I do dishes all day long.
Seems I'm always washing dishes, so I sing this little song.
Thank You, God, for dirty dishes, for our food and family.
Help me see each dirty dish as one more blessing given me." Janet Jansen

One of my favorite people is Elisabeth Elliot, the widow of Jim Elliot who was speared to death as a missionary to the Auca Indians in Ecuador in the early 1950’s. Elisabeth wrote about the experience:

The Aucas were a fierce group whom no one had succeeded in meeting without being killed. After the discovery of their whereabouts, Jim and four other missionaries entered Auca territory. After a friendly contact with three of the tribe, they were speared to death.

Our daughter Valerie was 10 months old when Jim was killed. I continued working with the Quichua Indians when, through a remarkable providence, I met two Auca women who lived with me for one year. They were the key to my going in to live with the tribe that had killed the five missionaries. I remained there for two years.

I’ve enjoyed reading Elisabeth’s books about what it means to be a woman and the value of creating a home for oneself and other people.  I admire her life as the kind I wished I could have lived- filled with discipline, orderliness, stability.  Her childhood and ways were so different than mine.  I envied her family of origin structure and certainty and the way she lived out a classically virtuous love affair with Jim Elliott. (See her book Passion and Purity).  I've struggled not to envy other families I met where there had been no divorce and where a mother and father were reliably present to care about, have meals with and listen to the children- to simply be there. I loved Elisabeth’s voice of stability and rationality when for years she aired a daily radio program. Sometimes I wonder why I am making any effort to write especially when I read this sort of musing by Elisabeth:

Writing was never easy work for Elisabeth. She always said writing was the most difficult of her tasks and in a letter of hints to perspective writers, she ends her advice with this:

One final word: don't be a writer if you can get out of it! It's a solitary job, sometimes a rather lonely one (who's listening? you say), and it requires relentless self-discipline. The world is _not_ waiting with bated breath for what you turn out. A writer has to be some kind of nut to stick with it. But if, like the psalmist, you say, "My heart was hot within me, while I was musing the fire burned," then perhaps you will have to write. http://www.elisabethelliot.org/index.html

Elisabeth Elliot