Becoming Elisabeth Elliot

Ellen Vaughn

• Publisher: B&H Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781535910941
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

Elisabeth Elliot was a young missionary in Ecuador when members of a violent Amazonian tribe savagely speared her husband Jim and his four colleagues. Incredibly, prayerfully, Elisabeth took her toddler daughter, snakebite kit, Bible, and journal... and lived in the jungle with the Stone-Age people who killed her husband. Compelled by her friendship and forgiveness, many came to faith in Jesus. This courageous, no-nonsense Christian went on to write dozens of books, host a long-running radio show, and speak at conferences all over the world. She was a pillar of coherent, committed faith; a beloved and sometimes controversial icon. In this authorized biography, Becoming Elisabeth Elliot, bestselling author Ellen Vaughn uses Elisabeth's private, unpublished journals, and candid interviews with her family and friends, to paint the adventures and misadventures God used to shape one of the most influential women in modern church history. It's the story of a hilarious, sensual, brilliant, witty, self-deprecating, sensitive, radical, and surprisingly relatable person utterly submitted to doing God's will, no matter how high the cost. For Elisabeth, the central question was not, "How does this make me feel?" but, simply, "is this true?" If so, then the next question was, "what do I need to do about it to obey God?" "My life is on Thy Altar, Lord—for Thee to consume. Set the fire, Father! Bind me with cords of love to the Altar. Hold me there. Let me remember the Cross." –Elisabeth Elliot, age 21

Part One

Beginning

Chapter 1

Death in the Afternoon

It was April 11, 1948, in Wheaton, Illinois, thirty miles west of Chicago. Jim Elliot was a junior at Wheaton College, a star wrestler, Greek major, poet, and jokester. He and three friends—another Jim, Walt, and Hobey—laughed and kidded one another as they piled into Hobey’s 1946 Nash, a classic mid-century American car with big rounded bumpers and a three-speed manual transmission. They were headed to a local hospital to visit patients and tell any who cared to hear about Christ.

The Nash arrived at the President Street train crossing near Wheaton’s campus. The Chicago and North Western Railway served area commuters, as well as hauling tons of produce from the west through Chicago, the gateway to the east.

The signal lights flashed; the boys could see that the heavy freight train was at least a block and a half away. Like twenty-year-olds everywhere, they went for it. The train watchman ran out of his shack at the crossing and down onto the tracks, yelling and waving them back. Hobey jolted to a stop in the middle of the tracks to avoid hitting him.

Trying to get off the tracks, Hobey panicked and stalled the Nash. He could not get the clutch to engage. Jim, Walt, and Jim threw open their doors, leapt out, and rolled to safety, yelling for their friend to follow. Hobey tried to start the car again.

As the watchman and the boys screamed, there was the added shriek of metal on metal as the freight train’s engineer tried desperately to brake. In the last second before impact, Hobey threw open his car door and jumped clear.

The enormous freight train hit the Nash on the right rear fender, spinning the sturdy car so fast that it hit again on the left front fender, crushing it like a soda can. Instead of sudden death on a Sunday afternoon, their blood blotting the railroad tracks, the boys were merely “spun and sobered,” as Jim Elliot wrote to his parents later.

It was a “narrow escape,” he said. “The details are fairly accurate in the papers, but newspapermen know nothing about the ministering spirits sent by the Maker of the universe” to protect His people.

“It sobered me considerably to think that the Lord kept me from harm in this,” Jim concluded. “Certainly He has a work that He wants me in somewhere.”1

January 5, 1956

Missionary Jim Elliot, now twenty-eight, stands ankle deep in the Curaray River, somewhere in the mysterious green rainforest of eastern Ecuador. He has found the work for which God saved his life on those Wheaton train tracks eight years earlier.

Clad only in his underwear because of the heat, phrasebook in one hand, he’s shouting out expressions of friendship and good cheer, the equivalent of “we come in peace.” The four missionaries with him—Nate, Ed, Pete, and Roger—laugh as Jim bellows his heart out to the unresponsive jungle, slapping at a million gnats as he does so.

Jim preaching to the jungle, January 1956

This extreme camping trip is the culmination of years of prayers, hopes, and planning. Each of these missionaries, already working with other indigenous tribes, has developed an unlikely attraction to an unreached people group known as the Aucas, or naked savages, who had lived in Stone Age isolation for generations, killing all outsiders who attempted to enter their territory.

The tribe would later be known by their actual name, the Waodani,2 or the People. “Auca,” used many years ago in Ecuador, is now understood as an offensive term.*

These five young missionaries believe that the violent Waodani story can change. For years, they’ve dreamed of introducing the love of Jesus to the tribe. They’ve made their benign intentions known for the past thirteen weeks, using an ingenious bucket-drop system to send gifts from pilot Nate Saint’s low-flying airplane down to a small Waodani settlement deep in the jungle. The Waodani soon responded enthusiastically, sending their own gifts—smoked monkey tail, pottery, a parrot—back up to the airplane, via the bucket.

Now, with their overtures of friendship established and reciprocated, the missionaries believe the time has come to meet in person.

They’ve established a campsite near the Waodani settlement, and christened it “Palm Beach.” They’ve built a tree house so they can sleep in safety. They communicate with their wives back at the mission stations by radio (using code since the channel is shared by other missionaries in the area). Due to the sensational reputation of the violent tribe, their mission to the Waodani is top secret. For now.

“Biti miti punimupa!” Jim shouts cheerfully, his broad shoulders and back to his friends, his face set toward the jungle. I like you; I want to be your friend. “Biti winki pungi amupa!” We want to see you!

What Jim does not know is that the Waodani are a kinship-based society that has no corresponding word in their unique language for “friend.” His phrases are corrupted, taught to him by a native Waodani speaker who’d fled the tribe years earlier. Living among the Quichua people, she’d forgotten much of her mother tongue, and had unintentionally mixed in phonetics that would not be intelligible to the Waodani.

So there is no response from the jungle. But Jim and the other guys have a sense that the Waodani—who are masters of concealment—are watching them.

About forty miles northwest of Jim Elliot’s heartfelt orations, his young wife sits at her wooden desk in Shandia, the missions station where she and Jim work with a community of Quichua Indians. Elisabeth Elliot is tall, slender, and blue-eyed, with light brown hair, dimples, and a distinctive gap between her front teeth. Her face is full of intelligence and curiosity. She is in the right place, as there are many curiosities in the jungle.

Elisabeth has taken advantage of her ten-month-old daughter’s naptime to write in her small black journal. She uses a fountain pen, her fluid prose flowing in bright teal ink on the smooth white pages.

“Jim is gone to the Waodani now,” she writes. “My heart longs and yearns for him. I sensed a great gulf between us in this last month, and longed to bridge it somehow . . . I can hardly restrain myself from pouring out my love for him, telling him how I love him and live for him.”3

But she’s excited about the Waodani project, sharing the same desire as her husband and fellow missionaries that this people group have the chance to hear the gospel. She had argued that she and baby Valerie should be the ones to go with Jim, reasoning that the tribe would be far less likely to attack a family unit than they would a group of five men.

Uncharacteristically, this was an argument that she lost.

So now she waits, a woman at home.

Friday, January 6, 1956

Back at Palm Beach, Jim and company were preparing for another long day of communing with insects and preaching to the trees when two women silently stepped out of the jungle on the opposite side of the river from the camp. They were naked, with the distinctive stretched earlobes and waist-strings of the Waodani.

Jim Elliot plunged into the river, took their hands, and ushered them across. Nate, Ed, Roger, and Pete welcomed them with much nodding, smiling, and vigorous cheerful pantomimes. Seeing that the reception was welcoming, a Waodani man emerged from the foliage as well.

The rest of the day passed in a friendly clash of cultures. The tribespeople had no idea what the North Americans were saying, and vice versa. But the visitors peered at the men’s cameras, magazines, airplane, and gear, tried some insect repellent, ate a hamburger, and drank some lemonade. The man even went for a spin with Nate in his plane; as they skimmed over the Waodani village, he leaned far out from the Piper, shouting and waving at his astonished tribesmen below.

Later in the afternoon, the young woman got up and abruptly headed into the jungle. The man followed her. The older woman stayed with the missionaries, chatting away. She slept by the campfire that night when the missionaries climbed up into their tree house, thirty-five feet off the ground.

Buzzing with excitement, the missionaries could hardly sleep. It was the first friendly contact with this untouched, violent tribe. They prayed it would be the beginning of a great new frontier for the gospel.

Sunday, January 8, 1956

At her home in Shandia, Elisabeth Elliot bathed little Valerie and tidied up. She prayed for Jim, Nate, Ed, Pete, and Roger.

Back at Palm Beach, the long, hot day before had passed without a follow-up visit from the Waodani. But on this Sunday morning, January 8, when Nate Saint flew out over the jungle canopy, he spotted a group of naked people fording the river, moving in the direction of Palm Beach.

He buzzed back to the camp. “This is it,” he shouted to Jim, Pete, Ed, and Roger when he landed. “They’re on their way!”

Nate radioed his wife with an update at 12:30 p.m. He told her of spotting the group of Waodani. “Pray for us,” he said. “This is the day! Will contact you next at 4:30.”

The event that some say galvanized the Christian mission movement for the second half of the twentieth century took less than fifteen minutes. Days later, the search and recovery party found the carnage. When they fished Nate’s bloody body out of the Curaray River, his watch had stopped at 3:12 p.m.

* I’ve chosen to call the tribe “Waodani” throughout this book, both in my own writing and in my quotes of others’ words from the time period when that slur was routinely—and innocently—used. If I were a historian, anthropologist, or linguist, I might not have come to this decision. Missionaries, journalists, laypeople, and everyone else used “Auca” routinely in the 1950s and ’60s. The 1956 outreach to the tribe, for example, was historically known as “Operation Auca.” Calling it “Operation Waodani” would be an anachronism. But it is hard, with a twenty-first-century mind-set, to read a racial, ethnic, disability-related, or any other slur and not recoil with negativity toward those who uttered it. If the missionaries or journalists I’ve quoted in this book who used “Auca” long ago had meant it as an insult, I would i...