By trying to grab fulfillment everywhere, we find it nowhere.” There is dullness, monotony, sheer boredom in all of life when virginity and purity are no longer protected and prized. In forfeiting the sanctity of sex by casual, nondiscriminatory ‘making out’ and ‘sleeping around,’ we forfeit something we cannot well do without. I am convinced that the human heart hungers for constancy. What do they really want? If ‘times’ have changed, have human longings changed, too? How about principles? Have Christian principles changed? I say no to the last three questions, an emphatic no. “What do women want today? What do men want? I mean, deep down. “But the question to precede all others, which finally determines the course of our lives is What do I really want? Was it to love what God commands, in the words of the collect, and to desire what He promises? Did I want what I wanted, or did I want what He wanted, no matter what it might cost?” Many deaths must go into reaching our maturity in Christ, many letting goes.” What God gives us is not necessarily ‘ours’ but only ours to offer back to him, ours to relinquish, ours to lose, ours to let go of, if we want to be our true selves. “If we hold tightly to anything given to us unwilling to allow it to be used as the Giver means it to be used we stunt the growth of the soul. “I realized that the deepest spiritual lessons are not learned by His letting us have our way in the end, but by His making us wait, bearing with us in love and patience until we are able to honestly to pray what He taught His disciples to pray: Thy will be done.”

In remembrance of her great life and legacy, here are some of my favorite quotes from her work, Passion and Purity. While some people remember Elisabeth as a fearless and faithful missionary to the savage Auca Indians, I remember her as the woman who played a role in shaping my views about love and healthy relationships. She taught me to pray over my love-life, long before it existed, and to work to align my will and my desires with the heart of Jesus above all else. If you don’t know much about her story and her life, I suggest you take the time to read up!

Not only that, but I had the privilege of hearing her share her heart and thanking her face-to-face when she visited my university as the guest speaker one year. In fact, my friend Jessie and I used to say that she basically “mentored” us through high school and college because we talked about her so much.

I had the opportunity to read many of her books growing up. Elisabeth Elliot was a woman whose heart and affection for Jesus trumped her ministry, her personality, and even her love-life. This week marks the passing of a great woman - a passing from this life, and into the next.

Elisabeth elliot quest for love