I don’t know why I never read Elisabeth Elliott’s books until a few months ago. Among Christian women of the late twentieth century she deserves special honour for the witness of her life. And her writings have quietened, encouraged and instructed many fellow believers weathering the storms of life for over forty years. Yes, I had a treat in store for me when someone urged me to read Through Gates of Splendour, Elisabeth’s first book. Being the type of reader who tends to ‘binge” on finding a good author, I quickly read most of the rest of Elisabeth’s books. Soon I discovered that I was being shown the story of her whole life, glimpse by glimpse, as she revealed, through her words of wisdom to others, what God had taught her in the crucible of her own sufferings. And it is a wonderful story.

Her Background⤒🔗

Elisabeth was born in Brussels to American missionaries serving on a short-term assignment in Europe in the 1920s. Her parents had a deep passion for missionary work; and in her home in New Jersey (just over the river from the city of Philadelphia) the children grew up on news of overseas missionaries, prayer for missionaries, and interest in the cause of the gospel all over the world. As a little girl, she thought the calling of overseas missions work to be the highest possible.

When she went to Wheaton College (a Christian undergraduate college in Chicago) in the 1940s, Elisabeth intended to prepare for service overseas as a “pioneer” missionary. That meant taking the gospel to previously unreached people, and often, living in primitive conditions. She was already deeply and steadfastly committed to Christ, and was prepared for sacrifice. So she took courses in the Bible, including Greek and Hebrew, as preparation for translation work. In her senior (final) year, a classmate attracted her attention. This young Brethren man, Jim Elliott, was also preparing for pioneer missionary work, and was in many ways as steely in his commitment to Christ as was Elisabeth. As she wrote much later, many girls found Jim Elliott – a handsome and athletic man – intensely attractive, but seemingly unattainable. Some even wondered if he disliked girls. In actual fact, he thought girls delightful – but expensive and distracting! On coming to college, having made it his priority to serve God, he decided to “delete them from his life.” When Elisabeth once asked him to sign her college yearbook, he added “2 Timothy 2:4” with his signature. “How long do you think it took”, she later asked, “for me to get to my room and open my Bible and find that verse?”!! It was not the cryptic message she had been hoping for.

In Love←⤒🔗

However, Jim was also falling in love with Elisabeth and one day at the end of her final year he confessed it to her – not knowing what they should do about it. Both of them, serious about the calling to pioneer missionary work, had grave doubts about the possibility of marriage. Faithful to the call to purity, they decided – with struggling hearts – to “lay on the altar” their love for each other. What followed was five and a half years of waiting on God while they continued their preparations for missionary life, and worked out where they should serve – singly. Elisabeth records these years of waiting in her book Passion and Purity. It was a remarkable story of painful, but trusting, putting of God first in two young people’s lives. How many of us today would sacrifice self in such a way? How many would defer, or even deny themselves marriage to one we loved with all the intensity that Jim and Elisabeth loved each other? And their self-denial was no asceticism – it was real flesh-­and-blood living for the only thing worth dying for.

Called to Service←⤒🔗

As it turned out, both were called to missionary service in Ecuador, to work with Indian tribes which had recently been reached by Protestant missionaries. After studying Spanish in Quito, Jim and Elisabeth went their separate ways to their different tribes in the jungle hinterland of the country, and remained in intermittent contact. For Jim, the final test of whether they ought to marry or not was whether his work in such primitive conditions could be done by a married man who would need to care for his wife. Months went by. Finally, one day in January 1953, Elisabeth, at work in the western jungle, received a message that Jim was waiting for her in Quito. The next day, after she arrived, Jim asked her to marry him and gave her the engagement ring he had bought for her. In October that year, they were married. One can only imagine the joy of finally belonging to each other, of their delight in each other. The text on their hearts that day? Isaiah 25:9, “Lo, this is our God; we have waited for Him.”

Jim’s New and Dangerous Work←⤒🔗

Jim built them a house to live in the jungle, and at first they continued Jim’s work with the Quichua. However, within months he and friends from Wheaton College who were also serving in Ecuador developed a deepening interest in the Auca Indians, a fierce, stone-age tribe who resisted all attempts to reach them, killing all who entered their territory, including Jesuit priests who had tried to bring them Catholicism. Patiently, through a series of gifts dropped into one of their villages from a plane, these five men managed to generate interest and build some sort of rapport with the Aucas. Finally, in January 1956, they decided to go in themselves, and stay inside Auca territory to see if they could share some parts of the gospel with their few words of the Auca language. On their last night together before they left their families these five men sang the hymn, “We trust in Thee our shield and our defender”. Jim kissed Elisabeth and their baby daughter, Valerie, goodbye as he ran to the waiting plane that was to land them in Auca territory. One week later, all five men were dead, killed by Auca spears.

The Love of the Lord←⤒🔗

Can you imagine what these young wives felt on hearing this news? Especially Elisabeth, who had waited all those painful years for Jim, only to lose him after 27 months of married life! How did she manage? Did her faith falter? Of course, as she wrote later, there were dreadful, stabbing moments of pain as yearning for Jim swept over her. But she found, as her loving mother wrote to her shortly afterwards, that the years of longing for Jim before their marriage had actually prepared her for this calamity. She had learned to rest in her Saviour, and found him, in this desperate time, just as true to her as before.

During the next two years she carried on their work with the Quichua, and courageously wrote the story of the five missionaries’ attempt to reach the Aucas and of their death. It was entitled, when published, Through Gates of Splendour, after the hymn they had sung together on the night they had set off. Elisabeth also wrote a life of Jim, which included many extracts from his journals, revealing him to be a strong, manly Christian, passionate about his Saviour, who loved the great hymns of the faith and would often express his thoughts in lines of hymns or in verses from the poets of past ages.

Going to the Same People←⤒🔗

Then came an opportunity to live in an Auca village with Jim’s sister in order to learn their language. A huge step of faith! She took it, and went to live with the Aucas, taking little Valerie. For this she received strong criticism as well as encouragement, but the two years’ listening to the Aucas resulted in the commitment of their language to writing for the first time. She recorded this work in her book The Savage, My Kinsman.

Some years later – perhaps due to disillusionment with missionary organizations (hinted at in her novel, No Graven Image)­ Elisabeth returned to the United States with Valerie, living until the late 1960s in New Hampshire. She continued writing, her first two books having been read all over the world. More than ten years after Jim’s death she remarried, to Addison Leitch, a theology professor at Gordon Seminary near Boston. Addison was 60; Elisabeth then 42, and when he proposed he wrote her what he called his “geriatric letter”, lest she entered into marriage to an old man with her eyes closed. He predicted that the day would come when she would need to clean his glasses, and take over the driving and even more onerous duties. His closing line, she wrote, was unforgettable. “Yet here I am, all of me, for you, forever. But what kind of an offer is that?” His predictions came true sooner than they thought. Within three years Addison was diagnosed with cancer, and in those days treatment was radical, painful, and often grotesque. Mutilating surgery was suggested, and Addison made many uncomfortable visits to hospital. Elisabeth’s faith was tested in new ways. She woke in the small hours, imagining things worse than death itself. An Episcopalian (American Anglican), familiar with the language of the Book of Common Prayer, Addison talked in his final days of his “vile body”, longing to be with Christ in heaven. When he died (in 1973), Elisabeth was relieved for his sake.

A Ministry of Suffering←⤒🔗

But what could she make of this suffering? Someone wrote to her soon after Addison’s death that he thought God must have given her a “ministry of suffering.” But as Elisabeth pondered this, she concluded that she had not suffered much – not compared with many others. I’ve thought about this, and wondered at her seemingly extraordinary understatement. Why would she say this? I think she said it because she understands suffering. Certainly, Elisabeth has experienced suffering, and from a young age. But it’s more than merely experience of suffering – she knows what suffering means, so much so that she is clear and straightforward about its logic in life to the point of humility, of matter-of-factness concerning it. When it comes, you simply trust, and obey; knowing that God will work out His purposes in it. She knows that sometimes God puts us in difficult situations, when He calls us to deny self and follow Him. Of the choice Eric Liddell, the Scottish athlete, had to make on finding his race in the 1924 Paris Olympics had been scheduled for a Sunday, she said: “the decision had already been made ... It may have been hard, but it was perfectly clear what he had to do.”

I’ve met several people who have heard Elisabeth speak (she has spoken frequently, about her life and her experiences, for many years), and they have called her “straightforward”, even perhaps a little harsh. Another has called her “not at all relational.” Elisabeth herself has said that people must have thought her a woman of steel – she shed no tears at the memorial service for the five slain missionaries in 1956. I’ve only heard her on tape, and certainly she is calm, straightforward and clear in her challenge to young people to make up their minds to live for God and “stay out of bed” – as she and Jim did. But does her directness, her expectation of high spiritual standards, make her actually unfeeling, or cold? Having immersed myself in her writings for a while, I would say, definitely, NO.

Sincerely Honest←⤒🔗

The books she has written in the last 30 years show her to be a woman of empathy and compassion as well as one of wisdom and challenging directness. Since her return to the United States Elisabeth has obviously been moved by the erosion of manhood, womanhood and marriage. In many of her books she has written outspokenly about what it means to be feminine as a Christian and as a wife; and in encouragement of manliness and gentlemanliness in Christian men. During the 1970s and 1980s she was vigorous in her witness against the distortions of the feminist movement. However, her writings on the subject avoided all of the harsh, sneering stridency sometimes found in anti-feminist writings today. Elisabeth wrote with warmth, gentleness and humour. She wrote about things she knew first­hand; and with the common sense of a Christian who knows the realities imposed by the struggle against personal sin. Perhaps some of you who are older enjoyed Let Me Be a Woman, addressed to Valerie when she was about to be married – or The Mark of a Man, written for her nephew, Pete, as he reached young manhood. But if you are just reaching that stage of life now, and have not read them, let me assure you these books are treasures that haven’t dated, because their subject has never bored any generation!

A Particular Book←⤒🔗

One of Elisabeth’s most sensitive books is The Path of Loneliness. It comes from the depths of the sufferings of her heart in the times when she was twice widowed. She knows what it means to be “out of place” among married couples. She knows what lonely hours in the middle of the night are like; and when, to a widow, the memory of the sound of snoring is the “sweetest sound there is.” It is this insight that has prompted Susan Hunt to suggest that young wives need the company of older widows, to share with them the dear memories of their husbands, and thus encourage these younger women to treasure what God has given them. But as Elisabeth has known all her life, the path of loneliness is for the Christian the path toward finding our sufficiency in God: “...the answer to our loneliness is love – not our finding someone to love us, but our surrender to the God who has always loved us with an everlasting love. Loving Him is then expressed in a happy and full-hearted pouring out of ourselves in love to others.”

And the ending to Elisabeth’s story has indeed been happy and full-hearted. Soon after Addison’s death a man named Lars Gren, widely loved as a delightful Christian, made Elisabeth’s acquaintance; and over five years or so they became good friends. She greatly appreciated his gentlemanly respect of her past sufferings, and the fact that he didn’t try to “rush” her into romance. By the end of the 1970s, however, they were married; and the wonderful conclusion to her story is that they are still enjoying each other’s company!

As many people say, and as is so obvious from her books, everything Elisabeth says and writes is validated by the clear credibility of her testimony. She has been a steadfast, courageous follower of her Saviour through thick and thin. I would love to meet her: while unlikely in this life, it will be a joy in heaven!