Becoming Elisabeth Elliot

Metadata

Author: Ellen Vaughn and Joni Earekson Tada
Full Title: Becoming Elisabeth Elliot
Category: #books

Highlights

Back then missionaries weren’t just an anachronistic oddity tolerated on the fringes of culture. Life magazine, one of the premier mainstream media vehicles of the day, rushed its best photojournalist to Ecuador to cover the story. He joined the recovery party along with the U.S. and Ecuadorian army troops, missionaries, and Quichua Indians who trekked into the jungle, guns cocked, to search for the missing men.
role model—a term she despised, preferring “visible example”—than
Over the years, some have questioned Jim Elliot’s pursuit of the will of God, wondering if perhaps God’s will changed conveniently when the Rubber Man got to certain points in his own development. As one historian wrote, “… for Elliot the specifics of God’s will seemed to be a moving target, often coming down to his inner convictions at any given time.”
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But as Betty’s biographer, chafing at the tortured days and weeks and months of waiting for an outcome that seemed long-ripe for the plucking, fully within the smile of God, I’m reminded that it’s difficult to ascertain just how God leads any of us. Within the revealed wisdom of Scripture’s riverbanks, the Spirit’s particular leading can sometimes be difficult to explain to someone else. The key fact, and the great transferrable truth that comes from these sometimes maddening people, is this: Betty and Jim were determined to obey God’s leading as they discerned it, whatever the cost.
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So Betty prayed. “The work I hoped to do was God’s work … I was His worker. It was all clear and simple. My prayer was as free from selfish and impure motives as any I had ever prayed. I had God’s written promises of help, such as that in Isaiah 50:7, ‘The Lord God will help me, therefore shall I not be confounded.’”
Betty Howard wrote to her parents that it had been the most nightmarish day of her life. She could not quite grasp the sudden horror of her friend’s death, the rank injustice of it, and what his loss meant for the Colorado translation of the Bible. Macario had been God’s answer to prayer, the key to all of the language work, probably the only human on the whole planet who spoke both Colorado and Spanish with equal ease. Did God not care about the salvation and discipleship of this jungle tribe?
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The “tuberculosis” proved to be only a shadow which disappeared in the third X-ray. [The diagnosis had either been a mistake, or, as Jim believed, God had healed her of the shadow in her lung.]
Doreen reported that Barbara’s luggage had been stolen off the back of a truck. This included Betty’s suitcase full of her handwritten notebooks, file boxes, charts, and laborious linguistic notes on the Colorado language. All of them. There were no copies of anything. In one stroke, everything Betty had done in nine months in San Miguel was gone.
What was God doing? It made no sense. Didn’t He want the Colorados to have the Bible in their own language? Why would He so casually allow the loss of nine months of painstaking work for His kingdom?
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But this school year was not just about facts and skills. In it, God began to teach her truths she would probe deeper and deeper over the ensuing decades, multi-faceted aspects of His will that could not be charted, categorized, or listed in an index. God’s sovereign will was a mystery that could not be mastered, an experience that could not be classified, a wonder that had no end. It wove together strands of life, death, grace, pain, joy, humility, and awe.
Macario’s death, and the subsequent theft of the language notes, gouged a fatal hole in the usual smooth surface of her correct Christian answers and created a conundrum for the dutiful, devout, curious, and high-achieving new missionary. The question “why?” not only remained unanswered in practical terms, it also could not be neatly resolved by the skillful re-arrangement of facts to produce the proper “spiritual” answer. This death, this loss, defied the usual religious formula: Well, this bad thing happened so God could do x, y, and z, beyond what we could have asked or imagined.
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It was Betty’s “lesson one” in the graduate school of faith … “my first experience of having to bow down before that which I could not possibly explain. Usually we need not bow. We can simply ignore the unexplainable because we have other things to occupy our minds. We sweep it under the rug. We evade the questions. Faith’s most severe tests come not when we see nothing, but when we see a stunning array of evidence that seems to prove our faith vain.
In late July, Betty wrote in her journal, “I am quite certain I am pregnant. Jim and I are so happy about it … we’ve asked God for a son, and He has given me verses which assure me that He has given what we asked.”
- Note: They had a daughter, Valerie.
At one point Betty had counted thirty-four missionaries who’d had to leave the field. If she and Jim ever did so, she wrote, “I can’t imagine what we’d ever do in the States,” wrote Betty. “This is where God sent us, and this is where we belong.”
As he passed below it, the snake surged like lightning and struck his arm—right on the thick, rolled part of the sleeve. The fangs did not penetrate. The men moved on. “We thank the Lord for His promises that no evil thing can touch us without His permission,” Betty concluded.
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“I’m sure I have been making life difficult for dear Jim. I have not been the help to him in any way—spiritually, morally, or anything—that I should, and have complained too much of my personal condition. He is such a good husband to me, and very sympathetic and thoughtful. I am ashamed of myself… . [I] feel a real sense of unworthiness and responsibility. Marriage has cost him too much, I fear. I am to blame.”
A day or two later, Eugenia could still not walk, but she would live. A miracle. Betty thought about how she was no more than three paces in front of Eugenia on the leafy trail, with Jim in front of Betty. They must have walked right over the snake. “Jim feels that we are justified in taking very literally the Lord’s words that we shall tread on serpents and scorpions without harm. God has surely taken care of us, and there is nothing to do but trust Him to continue.”
Future decades would bring debates over whether aviation represented yet another means of the control missionaries exerted over tribal peoples, but in the 1950s the little planes represented the blessings of technology.”
What no one except Roger’s wife knew, however, was that he was struggling with depression. He felt he wasn’t seeing any results from his hard work among the tribal people. He felt like a failure. His faith was intact. He loved God. He loved his family. But there was something he could not identify, some failure for which he took responsibility, that made him believe it was time to hang up his missionary hat and return home to the States.
And now, as far as Roger could discern, God was directing him to join the mission to the Waodani. So he did.
She sighed, hating missing out on the action and being relegated to writing letters to supporters back home. “And here I am at the desk in the afternoon sun … the rude noise of a parrot in the trees, and time to write some letters to some ordinary car-driving, church-going, pizza-eating, elevator-riding, false-toothed and probably good hearted Christians in the USA.”
Regarding those policies, in early 1955 Betty had written to her parents, “… having observed Wycliffe methods here, I could very seriously question the wisdom of ever becoming connected with them. They go to extremes in trying to make the government think they are not ‘evangelicals’ but purely technicians. They fool no one, but do a lot to destroy fellowship among the missionaries. It is really sad. Nate Saint says he can’t see how Rachel can conscientiously continue with them.”4
The tribe’s worldwide notoriety had made the eastern jungle of Ecuador a destination for curious Christians who wanted to see where the missionary martyrs were buried, tourists who wanted to take pictures of naked tribal people, and unhelpful individuals who thought God had told them to come and help.
Like Betty Elliot and Rachel Saint, long-term missionary Wilfred Tidmarsh longed to connect with the tribe. He and his Quichua workers had built a bamboo hut at a river junction not far from a Waodani settlement. They cleared jungle for a nearby airstrip; Dr. Tidmarsh was anxious to cultivate contact with the Waodani, right at their own front door. Fortunately, Dr. Tidmarsh was away when the Waodani came knocking at his front door. They sacked his hut, scattered his clothes, medicines, and language files, tore up his paper money, and took his machetes and cooking pots. They pulled the door off its flimsy hinges and left two crossed spears blocking the opening.
Many of the missionaries in the area took the staged message as a sign from God to pull back, reassess, and wait. In her journal, Betty wondered just what the ransacking meant, but the tribal hostility didn’t change her intentions.
After the attack on Dr. Tidmarsh’s hut, SIL’s Cameron Townsend wrote the good doctor a cautionary letter. “The next move to the Waodani must be a fruitful move. The eyes of the world are upon that tribe. The stage has been set through the sacrifice of five missionaries, the extraordinary coverage given that heroic effort by the secular press and now Betty Elliot’s inspiring book [Through Gates of Splendor], for the greatest demonstration in history of the power of the Gospel in the savage heart.”
Townsend was a visionary who saw great things ahead—the Scriptures would “soon” be available in the Waodani language. He assumed that Rachel Saint was more successful in her translation work than she actually was. The Waodani New Testament would not actually be completed until 1992—35 years later. Translators Catherine Peeke, who worked full-time with the Waodani for many years, her coworker German linguist Rosi Jung, and about twelve Waodani helpers would accomplish the huge task of rendering the New Testament into this very difficult tongue.
She now had no doubt as to God’s leading. After all, she thought, God had led her to visit Arajuno when she did. He had seen to it that the good Dr. Tidmarsh was elsewhere. “When the word came, my unhesitating decision was to come at once. Gwen concurred; this fulfilled what I have been sure of all along: when the time came to do something, it would be incontestably evident to the one who was to do it.”
She felt she should press on in her work with M and M … although she couldn’t help wondering—why even learn the language of a disappearing people group?
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“I don’t remember ever feeling so useless in my life. I can do nothing it seems, which needs doing. Rachel teaches [Dayuma] faithfully—[Dayuma] in turn teaches the Waodani and possibly is the only one who will ever be needed to do so… . Were I running my own life, I’d quit now. Living conditions difficult. Val’s growth and enlarging capabilities cause me serious concern as to the wisdom of staying here. No other course is open to me, however. I am as confident as ever that God put me here.”
My mind keeps turning over ways to get us out of this situation (when it was the one I had prayed so long to be gotten into).”
It seemed to her that while Christians were quite comfortable talking about “missionary martyrs,” they were uncomfortable with the suffering in those who were left behind. So they compulsively explained it away. She had heard too much from Job’s chatty friends, so to speak. People weren’t at ease with mystery, nor with silence, so they filled the awkward spaces with talk.
“Again I find myself in the position I’ve been in twice before—an independent missionary who nevertheless has had Wycliffe training and I believe I have some gift in language work—but Wycliffe carries on their program without the consultation or sharing of data which I had been led to expect by their pose in the U.S. as a servant to missions. “I have repeatedly offered my materials to them—to Rachel many times … and they have not been needed. Quite apart from personal feelings of being ‘ignored’ or not appreciated—God save me from these—it appears unexplainable to me why they would not, as true scientists, seek all possible sources of data and consult with any who had had an interest in the language or work on it at all. But my position is a difficult one, for the very reason that other motives would unavoidably be attributed to any questioning I might do.”
SIL anthropologist Dr. Jim Yost, who later lived among the Waodani for more than a decade, doing analytical research, believes that it was “a huge human-based error to exclude [Betty.] Rachel’s linguistic skills paled in comparison with Betty’s. The translation was impeded greatly by using only Rachel and [Dayuma]. Rachel once told me that God had called only her and [Dayuma] to translate… . NOT anyone else, not even Catherine Peeke [a gifted SIL linguist] who had immense translation skills and deep understanding of the Wao language.”
“Got nowhere,” Betty wrote in her journal after the meeting. “Quite obviously the SIL crew had briefed one another quite thoroughly … before they came to talk with us. Their principal concern, it appeared, was how to defend SIL’s reputation. The Truth was not what mattered. The issue was, what shall we say? What defense shall we offer our public?”