Better Than Life

A young man writing in his journal in 1949, six years before he was killed on a river beach by the people he had gone to reach. He wrote a sentence students still copy out: He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose. Jim Elliot was twenty-two. He was not being dramatic in hindsight. He was doing arithmetic in advance, and it is the psalm's arithmetic.

Because thy lovingkindness is better than life, my lips shall praise thee. Notice what is on the scale. Not God's love weighed against a comfortable existence, which anybody would trade. Against life itself. And the psalm tells you where the weighing happened: in the wilderness of Judah, a dry and thirsty land, where no water is. In a place where the terrain alone can take a man's life, he compares the two and says plainly which is heavier.

Look at the order of the sentence, because it is not decoration. Because the love outranks life, my lips shall praise thee. Praise here is not a mood he worked himself up into. It is the audible result of a calculation, which is why he can do it with a dry mouth and no prospects.

So back to the journal and the twenty-two-year-old. Reading that line as heroism lets you off, and it was not heroism when he wrote it. It was a valuation made on an ordinary afternoon, years before it cost him anything, and the same one is available at your kitchen table this morning at no cost except honesty about what you actually think is worth more.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 213 is Learned Obedience (Hebrews 5:8).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna