As a missionary in the bush country of western Canada and as a stranger and foreigner with several different Indian tribes in the Amazon rain forest of eastern Ecuador, Elisabeth Elliot found that those wildernesses can be lonely places. She knows that the most civilized and populated place may also be a wilderness of loneliness. In fact, loneliness is a component of the universal human "predicament." There is nothing unique about it. This is a book for the married, for the not-yet-married, and for the used-to-be-married. Twice widowed and thrice married, the author has learned that each stage of life may bring loneliness of one kind or another. Single people sometimes imagine that the solution to their loneliness is marriage. Married people often find themselves along in ways they did not expect. it seems that a deep gulf separates them from the one who was supposed to understand them best. While we may find answers in one area, those very answers may lead to another experience of loneliness--the "empty nest," rejection, bereavement. Analogies are drawn from the human life cycle of birth, puberty, adolescence, marriage, and death to show that each crisis is death to the old life and the gateway to a new one. Elliot draws distinctions between the two kinds of aloneness: solitude, which does not connote suffering, and loneliness, which does. The view presented here sees loneliness not primarily as a problem to be solved or even a pain to be assuaged, but, paradoxically, as a gift, for it is precisely here, in the wilderness of loneliness, that God wants to give us Himself. When the gift is willingly received by faith in God's eternal and loving purpose, it becomes the very pathway to holiness and beyond our wildest imaginings, to joy! The message of this book is the glorious message of the Cross. Through an offering of sacrificial Love, all suffering has been transformed.