Being Elisabeth Elliot

Metadata

Author: Ellen Vaughn and Joni Eareckson Tada
Full Title: Being Elisabeth Elliot
Category: #books

Highlights

“The attitude of students and faculty alike was one of earnest seeking for truth, an openness and willingness to listen to something new which I simply have not found in churches—there seems to be such intellectual sterility, such insufferable bigotry in the churches.”
Elisabeth spoke about “the dishonesty in mission representation, our false sense of what it means to believe God, our mistaken idea of what it means to serve God.”
I am astounded at my present ability to understand and appreciate things (e.g., Chekhov) which were meaningless to me in 1957. This is in one way gratifying—I have a new vision, a far broader horizon—and then again it is lamentable. Why is it that for so long I lived, as it were, in prison? My whole perspective was bound by the four walls of Christian dogma—I do not say Christian truth. God save us all—dogma imprisons. It is truth alone which liberates.”
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Curious, Elisabeth asked the actress how emotionally involved she becomes in a part like the role of Job’s wife. Did it reflect her own attitude toward God? “No,” Elisabeth recorded later in her journal. “Essentially she doesn’t react to God at all. A writer who was there concurred; she doesn’t consider questions of the origin of man’s mind, or of the existence of God as issues at all. They simply do not occur. “I am baffled anew—these serious people, who can portray so convincingly the basic problems of life, seem unwilling to come to personal terms with them.”
“And now, my writing. I am finding it difficult in the extreme to pull myself out, after twenty years, more or less, of denying life, and now trying to learn to affirm
She was hungry to consume all that she had missed. She wrote of her missionary years, “Eleven of the best years of my life were spent denying myself, negating existence, shunning opportunities to learn, earnestly seeking to limit myself to the one thing (never adequately defined) God required of me. I came and went, without seeking out Quito’s cafes and museums, never reading what my contemporaries wrote, listening to no music, seeing no painting, never heeding the voices that cried within me, not daring to live to the hilt. “And now—I am hungry. I want to learn all of these things, to do everything, to listen to the voices, to see life clearly and whole, and to write about it. I am trying to make up for it all, I am trying to write, in spite of this great zero factor in my development. It is a constant handicap. “And what does my faith say in response to this? “I believe. Still I believe God has made with me an everlasting covenant, ordered in all things and sure. But I feel like a bird released after a long imprisonment, confused and unable at once to fly. “This, too, must be a part of the covenant. As though He had held me quiet in His hand, pinned my beating wings until I subsided then, in the fullness of time, said, ‘Now.’ And let me go.”
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She saw herself—a young, earnest, single missionary in a dusty shack, her little medical bag beside her in the dirt, unable to staunch the flow of blood when a young woman named Maruja died in terror. “If God had spared Maruja’s life,” Elisabeth wrote later, “the whole … tribe might have been delivered from spiritual death. In my heart I could not escape the thought that it was God who had failed.”
Around this same time, Elisabeth was reading the Old Testament prophets. She noted in her journal their oddities, their conviction, and their courage. She was concerned that she learn to see clearly in order to write truly. “The actual process of writing is a continuous unfolding of truth which I have to deal with somehow. It is so difficult to strip or be stripped of the layers of prejudice and preconception which have inhibited me, and the expose of what one is can’t help being painful …”
Her study of Ken Strachan and his work had thus far, “only served to baffle me more—which may be another way of saying strengthen my faith, for it is the God of such anomaly and contradiction who promises us perfection and fulfillment in the End, it is He with whom we have to do. Lord—make me true to the Truth. This is my charge.”
In Shell, Elisabeth was devastated by the situation in Marge Saint’s once-impeccably hospitable home. Elisabeth reported that the missionary couple now in residence “both have the Bible school look … Children (2) bedraggled, crooked teeth, wide stare, stained clothes. Rubber pants, potty chair, waste basket containing used Kotex in bathroom. No maids, so Mary is washing dishes. Breakfast: cool scrambled eggs, baking powder biscuits which were not properly browned, served without butter. Coffee was a cup of yellowish hot water with which we were offered a can of powdered coffee. I can’t think what possessed me to subject myself to this again—worse, indeed, than ever before.
The couple told Elisabeth that Rachel Saint was currently in Quito, away from the Waodani settlement, and Elisabeth decided it would be a good time to go back and visit her old friends there. “How very thankful I am to have been delivered from this ‘death’” Elisabeth wrote in her journal. “It seems abhorrent and debasing to me now, although when I lived here I accepted it as the others do. Life—so unreal in a place like this, so ignored, so discounted, somehow. Have they the capacity to be grateful to the God who made them, for the beauty of the earth, for the greatness of the gift of life? I wonder. They are like ants, each rushing with his tiny burden.”
“The Waodani are sweet people,” Elisabeth wrote in her journal, her tone fond but distant. “They talked at once of themselves, their children and illnesses and animals and hunting, who had died, who is pregnant, who is married to whom. Once more I was glad to be among them, and I was glad to see the Quichua in Shandia, but glad, too, that I have other work to do. And so I remember all the way, and give thanks. It is interesting to note how one can see that doors are closed behind one, and the only way is forward.”
After World War II, a distinguished gentleman named Colonel Lawrence Van der Post, a novelist and soldier, was asked why Indonesia had asked the Dutch to get out of their country. His questioner was a Dutch man, who sputtered, “We built up their country, brought in industry, lifted the people to a higher level of … living standards, and increased their span of living.” Why in the world had the Indonesians wanted the Dutch to get out? “Ah,” said the Colonel. “It was because of the look in your eye. You did not look at the Indonesians with compassion, but condescension, not with sympathy but superiority, not admiration but arrogance, not pity but pride, not graciousness but greed, not to give but to get, and your true inner attitude came out through the look in your eye.”
Privately, Elisabeth wrote in her journal, “The RKS first draft is nearly finished. I have looked in vain for the ‘secret of power’ or whatever it is that is supposed to inspire biography-readers. It simply isn’t there. A weak, vacillating, ambitious, secularly minded man who earnestly wanted to ‘serve the Lord,’ who had the intelligence to see ‘the tyranny of pseudo-absolutes in the lives of others and completely missed his own bondage to a program. ‘What doth the Lord require of thee?’ Somehow, Ken did not see that it was to do justice, to love mercy, and walk humbly with God. Does any of us see it? Does any of us do it?”
Not to be daunted, Elisabeth met next with Bonnie, trying to work with her on the lack of clarity in her piece about her emotional problems in her marriage. She noted that in group discussion Bonnie was one of the most vocal and dogmatic, but perhaps, Elisabeth thought, this was simply because of “her own psychosis.” Bonnie shared what Elisabeth called “an imprecatory prayer”—as in a curse or plea for God’s judgment—she had written against her husband for his failure to assume spiritual leadership. Bonnie was funneling her boiling anger, feelings of futility, and sadness about her husband into her writing. This did not help her prose. Elisabeth reported, “She seems paranoiac, nearly in tears (of rage, perhaps) when I criticize her piece.”
“I could marry him, I think, if he should ask me. He would be a great father to Val—a real man who could dominate our home. He has three daughters of his own. “He would take care of us—and how I long for that! Someone who makes the decisions and the plane reservations and, as K. Mansfield said, ‘who goes to bed where you do.’
She had read the Bible all her life; she knew that Israel was chosen by God to be a people for Himself … “there was no surprise for me in Israel’s victories. It was all in the cards, that is, in the Book. Everything I knew about what had happened in June fitted nicely my belief in miracles.”
“These men are conscious of power. They move men in order to move nations in order to move God—to DO SOMETHING. Each has his road company, his show, his production.”
Add’s greatest misery was his own inability to live well while he was dying.
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“I am witnessing the total emotional and physical collapse and dissolution of the man I love,” Elisabeth wrote in her journal. “I still have no doubt at all that God could heal him—indeed might heal him, but I pray that it be soon, or that God take him quickly.”
Addison was calmer, had less pain, more strength to stand and walk. Two friends both felt he was going to be healed. At college, Valerie was fasting from lunch each day until Add was healed. “Something surely remains to happen before healing comes,” thought Elisabeth, “but I believe it will come.”
“September 4. Dave Howard [Elisabeth’s brother] and his son came. Stephen had been given the gift of healing while in Colombia, and has just now spent three days fasting and praying in the woods of New York, preparing to visit his Uncle Add. He laid hands on Add, prayed, and told him he believes he’ll be healed.”
“September 8. The doctor visited. A horror of great darkness looms in front of me. I try to prepare myself for Add’s death, try to accept it, while at the same time praying earnestly … for a miracle.” Elisabeth thought again of C. S. Lewis’s wife, who had a few weeks to live, then recovered and lived another two years in remission. She pled with God for the same for Add.
“The whole sequence of the last 11 months looks to me now utterly unendurable and nightmarish. Oh, the suffering that dear man underwent. What an exquisite torture of mind, soul, and body. I do not know how we got through any of it. How ironic that Add was able to live through one phase in order to experience another and worse one, and another… . Hideous. Entirely hideous. Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy.”