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- Author: Lucy S. R. Austen
- Full Title: Elisabeth Elliot
- Category: #books
- For Betty, faith meant more than following a set of rules for behavior. The school motto was “Esse Quam Videri,” “to be, rather than to seem,” and she took it seriously. She wanted her actions to line up with God’s will, but she wanted to experience inner transformation as well—to have her visible self and her inner person be consistent. She worked to discipline her thoughts and feelings and change her attitude as well as her behavior,
- In a 1966 letter to her mother she would deliver a stinging assessment of the school: the DuBoses said that HDA epitomized Christian society, but their actions directly contradicted Christian teaching; they were manipulative and tyrannical; they used the school for their own gain. In 1967 she would name specific things that had happened while she was a high-schooler at HDA: Gwynn DuBose had spanked her and publicly called her a prostitute; Peyton had shouted repeatedly at another student that she was going to hell—for wearing the wrong set of gym clothes. As an adult, Betty believed that the administration at Hampden DuBose Academy had failed to live out their claims to represent Christ and had dangerously muddied the waters around the idea of what it meant to be Christian.
- She continued to struggle with the balance between grades and extracurriculars throughout her sophomore year, and she continued to rely on her own spiritual impressions rather than her mother’s counsel in the matter. __“Mother—you need not worry about my having too many irons in the fire. I have prayed very definitely about them.”__35 Betty lived in a culture where the individual’s obedience to God’s private leading was emphasized preeminently, and she wanted very much to hear God’s direction for herself and to be obedient.
- In Holiness terminology, “the cross” had become shorthand for taking up one’s own difficult “cross,” and—through personal experiences of “dying to sin and self”—sharing in Christ’s sufferings.
- I’ve been praying for you every time I think of you and I trust that the Lord is having His own way. I have been wondering if maybe He brought this illness on you to teach me some lessons.
- I have faced out several issues before the Lord, one of them being the possibility of staying home next semester. At first all I could see was how much I’d lose out and how hard it would make things, but as I prayed about it, the Lord revealed to me the joy that there would be in it… . If that’s His will, it’s all right with me. He has shown me Himself, and truly, “the things of earth grow strangely dim!”
- She wanted to be an influence for good with her roommates, but her methods—repeated invitations or exhortations to church, Sunday school, and daily devotions, and even setting a roommate’s alarm clock, without her knowledge or consent, to get her up in time for church—weren’t particularly popular.
- The public emotionalism of confessionals was always distasteful to Betty. She felt students were “always trying to work themselves up to some sort of crisis—as if every day were the turning point in a life supposedly long since given over to Him.”
- Because she wants to do God’s will in the abstract, but in the particular she also wants to be with Jim, she is afraid she might be deceived even about her desire to obey.
- For months, Betty had been consuming a literary diet composed exclusively of writers who passionately exhorted their readers to self-sacrifice, backing it up with the strongest claims to spiritual authority.
- Although Passion and Purity reaches toward a countercultural Christian perspective on romantic relationships, it repeatedly echoes general culture from Betty’s youth and young adulthood.
- Jim’s conduct was repeatedly at odds with aspects of Passion and Purity’s teaching. He didn’t have a job or a way to support a wife; he didn’t know what his next step would be; he believed he was called to stay single for an undefined period of time. Despite all this he deliberately pursued a relationship with a woman and declared his love to her without offering commitment. The book lets him off the hook, claiming that things were different for them: Can I recommend Jim’s plan of action to others? Never in a million years. I feel quite certain he would not have wanted anyone to build a doctrine on it. But the situation was unusual. Not that he was called to a lifetime of celibacy. He did not know whether it was for life. He did not need to know. He was called to stay single, unattached, uncommitted at least until he had missionary experience. He had reason to believe that he had awakened love in a dedicated woman and that he could trust her with the information he wanted to give her.147
- Olive would later write more frankly about her hurt and frustration and her sense (shared by both her parents and Pete’s) that Jim’s larger-than-life personality was responsible for Pete’s sudden change of course and poor treatment of Olive. Dave Howard confirms this: Their relationship was greatly affected by Pete going and being with Jim Elliot. And when I read Olive’s book, I thought, yeah, yeah. I know exactly what’s going on here, because I suffered through the same kind of thing with Jim, and he probably is making Pete feel like a second-class Christian because he’s got a girlfriend and he’s engaged and he’s talking about being married, and Jim still has this celibacy idea and he had not yet given in to the fact that he was in love with Elisabeth—he didn’t really want to admit that.149
- But Betty was becoming increasingly disenchanted with SIL. She was frustrated because Orr had only been able to obtain permission because there was “no established church” at Puyupungu.21 Although Betty continued to refer to the organization as “Wycliffe,” WBT was actually the US-based fundraising arm of Cam Townsend’s brainchild, and SIL the arm operating in the field. The SIL policy was to enter countries as a linguistic rather than a missionary organization, and to avoid activities that could lay it open to charges of proselytizing. Townsend felt that members were invited into host countries as guests, and he wanted them to be good guests.
- He was perfectly contented, I could see, to be the father of a daughter instead of a son. So I was content. It was God who had given you to us, God to whom our prayers for a son had been made, and God who knew reasons we did not then know that made His choice far better.”
- But although he had hardly had a chance to establish meaningful relationships in Shandia, he decided that the Shandian Kichwa had had their chance to hear the gospel. As Betty would write a few months later, he felt that “their blood was now upon their own hands.”95 Perhaps he would have seen things differently had he been another decade down the road of life and seen how slowly most good things grow, but he was just twenty-eight, vigorous and full of enthusiasm. He was going to the “auca.”
- And in my desperate attempts to tell him what Christianity was about, he would stop me, again and again, and say, ‘Wait a minute. What does that mean? What are you talking about?’”75 Elliot discovered that the vocabulary she had used all her life—growing up in a Christian home, going to church regularly, attending a Christian high school and a Christian college−couldn’t convey the things she believed to this talented, intelligent man. It must have been tempting, in communication breakdown between her and the Shandians, whose culture sometimes seemed to her uneducated and superstitious, to assume in the back of her mind that the blame lay more in their failure to understand than in her failure to explain. But with Capa—almost a decade older than she, cosmopolitan, sophisticated, multilingual, successful in a way she could recognize—it began to dawn on her that the root of the problem might lie at her doorstep. After Capa left, Elliot wrote to her family, “I am disturbed about the lack of impact which the Church makes on the world. It is no wonder we are incomprehensible to them. Granted, the preaching of the Cross is foolishness, but there is no need to create our own foolisheness [sic] by employing the goobledygook which most of us use so thoughtlessly.”
- Later in the year Elliot would write, “What can you say when a person assures you that this is the Will of God? If it really is, then all difficulties and objections fade. If it is not, it is not up to me to say that it is not.”83
- As for herself, she was already having misgivings about her choice to leave the Curaray, even questioning in her journal whether the apparent lack of guidance now was punishment for missing God’s direction.
- The three-part framework Elliot used to make decisions—“circumstances, the witness of the Word, and … peace of mind”
- She wrote to her family that she was greatly helped by MacDonald’s depiction of “simple men and women in whom the image of Christ is clear because it shines through simple deeds… . The life of Jesus, as we find it in the gospels, is the pattern given us to follow. We have swung too far on the matter of ‘reckoning ourselves dead,’ ‘taking it by faith,’ the victorious life, etc. ‘Faith without works is dead,’ and for me, in these days, I have found a need of simple doing.”117 She continued to puzzle over how to put this into practice, pondering what in her days was necessary and what was getting in the way of showing “the image of Christ.”
- She began to have niggling doubts about the fact that not one, but two missionaries were pouring all their time and energy into a language spoken only by a dwindling handful of people.
- Rather than trying to clear things up with the other missionaries through direct communication, she tried to follow the exhortation of Hudson Taylor to “move man, through God, by prayer alone.”123 She reminded herself that just as Mary and Martha had not needed to understand what Jesus was doing to obey, so she too could leave the reasons with God and simply follow orders.
- When Jim decided that the Shandians had gotten enough opportunities to learn about Jesus, that “their blood was now upon their own hands” and he was going to a new tribe, Elliot saw dedication to the Bible verses known as the Great Commission rather than the youthful immaturity suggested by his impatience for visible progress during the brief, interrupted two-and-a-half years he had worked in Shandia.
- But unlike the situation in November when Wilfred Tidmarsh had strongly opposed her plans, she did not appear to see these objections as “circumstances” that should cause her to pause or to question her understanding of her own heart or of scriptural guidance.
- She puzzled over why so many people were so focused on this tiny group in the jungles of Ecuador, when missionaries were working around the world, and in situations that seemed much more important or difficult than her own.
- Reading her Bible in the evenings by candlelight, she gradually came to the conclusion that the word missionary did not appear in the Bible, that instead, the Scriptures talked about witnesses.26 Now a passage from her special chapter in Isaiah came alive in a new way, and she wrote it in her journal. “‘You are my witnesses,’ declares the Lord, ‘and my servant whom I have chosen, that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he. Before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me’” (Isa. 43:10). Perhaps to be a missionary was ultimately to be a witness to the nature and character of God. A witness observes and reports. This she could try to do. The discovery of this verse in this context produced a lifelong paradigm shift for her.
- In her teens and twenties, Elliot had sincerely and enthusiastically embraced the Holiness teaching of both the Keswick Convention and Prairie Bible Institute’s L. E. Maxwell. Now she wrote, “Keswick teaching was always ‘too deep for me,’ and not very practical. Maxwell, too. I find the words of the Lord Jesus, and Paul’s lists of instructions much simpler to understand.”45
- Elliot began to ponder whether, since there was no work she could profitably do as a linguist, God wanted her to leave Tewæno. There was still Kichwa language work needed in Shandia and in the Sierra; perhaps she should take up one of those tasks. But it seemed that whatever she put her hand to turned to dust and ashes—her work on Tsafiki, her sacrifices for the Cathers family, her work on Wao tededo.
- She could not understand how two of the most prayed-for missionaries in history could be so utterly alienated.
- ‘dirty,’ and thereby miss an enlightening book.”148 On another pass through Genesis, she was struck by the way the Bible recorded the reality of the human condition, “all the sins—deceit, chicanery of all kinds, casual moral standards, etc., which are simply narrated, with no mention whatsoever of their being sin.”
- First, she realized, she would have to consider whether the push for everyone to have the Bible available in their mother tongue was as well-considered as she had once thought. Not only was the Ecuadorian government working to acculturate indigenous peoples and requiring government-run schools to be taught in Spanish, but it appeared to her that the Kichwa themselves preferred to learn Spanish. Just as Dayomæ had wanted to Kichwa-ize the Waorani to shed the “savage” stigma, so the Kichwa, aware of the socioeconomic stratification between themselves and native Spanish speakers, often seemed uninterested in becoming literate in their own language. Evangelical missionaries in some parts of the country had been “severely criticized for their attempt to ‘hold back’ the Indian—i.e. to teach him in his own language.”
- Like Elliot, Vandevort had seen little visible change from more than a decade of missionary work. But she fairly glowed with love for God. “It appears that the evangelization of the world (i.e. missionary work) really amounts to the sanctification of the Church (i.e. the missionary),” Elliot told her family. “Of results in the Nuer tribe, Van has seen almost nothing, but she has come to know God, and one cannot help knowing this in knowing her.”184
- Elliot increasingly doubted that she was doing any meaningful work in Shandia. She was troubled by the relationship with her neighbors brought about by their financial disparity. It seemed no one wanted Christian discipleship, and everyone wanted “my time, my medicine, my money, my tools, and my chonta fruit and bamboo.”
- “Van said she felt only a stumbling block to the Nuers, and I know what she means. We could give them the moon, and it would accomplish precisely nothing. We cannot be one of them—much less can they be one of us. Nor do they want either thing. What does God intend to do with them, anyway, and why does He want me here?”
- The church in Shandia seemed to be floundering. No one would serve as an elder, and when Venancio Tapui was out of town, no one spoke in church. In late May Elliot wrote, “Just what is the ‘missionary task’? When Jesus said to pray for laborers for the ‘harvest,’ does not the word imply that someone has planted something? And in order to plant, must not the ground have been prepared? How can we give people what they don’t want?”
- How different from the sense of increasing frustration over the past five years as her sense of unknowing increased. Her conversations with Vandevort over the past sixteen weeks had encouraged her to trust that God was not a hard taskmaster; that where her desires were not proscribed in Scripture she could do what she wanted and still be within his will; that God could be trusted to see that she did not stray from the narrow path. Her prayer that the decision to leave Shandia would be made easy for her had been answered, not by the arrival of someone to take over the station, but by the arrival of someone who could speak truth in such a way that her heart could receive it.
- Although she rarely goes into detail, Elliot’s family letters during this time make clear that though she was still “inside” Christian faith, she was disturbed by the way many Christians spoke about who God is, how God acts, and how the life of faith works. It did not match her experience, nor that of many other people she had talked with. Life was not straightforward. Tragedy was not explainable. Missionary work was not “inspirational.” And yet many of those “inside” the church continued to speak and act as though they were.
- It seemed to Elliot that in many ways, those on the “outside” had a better grasp on “Christian values” than those on the “inside.” Spending time with the Capas and their friends, she was impressed by how they embodied virtues like long-suffering and loving-kindness. But they, too, seemed to be missing important pieces of the puzzle.
- He had tried desperately to make Victorious Life teaching work for him and failed and had left America, as he would later write, “prepared to set God aside … if to pursue Him meant to miss the cakes and ale” experiences of life. He had come back feeling unable to try any longer to reconcile “the data of human experience” and the Christian claim of a loving God.
- Now, in the summer of 1964, she continued to develop her understanding of the primary place of love in Christian theology. The beliefs she had developed and expressed in letters over the course of 1960 and 1961 were foundational: that the attitude of a person’s heart determines whether an action is “worldliness,” that each sheep has to hear the Shepherd’s voice for him- or herself. Foundational, too, was her frustration with what she saw as American evangelicalism’s myopic focus on avoiding things (such as alcohol and movies) while letting pass unchallenged actions (such as lying and idolatry).
- At the conference she spoke on “Writing as Personal Discovery,” arguing that we can only write with integrity about what we have learned through experience. The writer’s task is to faithfully portray the things she has seen. This requires a posture of uncertainty and active searching in order to be able to see. It requires openness to change—it will mean that “we don’t think the same way that we thought last year”—and to messiness. The psalmist, she pointed out, says in Psalm 37 not to fret, and then writes other psalms that are “just one long fret.” And it requires a commitment to excellence in the craft of writing: good writing can be trusted “to give form to … truth,” but “bad writing is a lie.”
- In contrast to this vision, Elliot said, much of what is called Christian writing begins from the assumption that the writer’s job is to expound the right doctrine, win adherents to the cause, create certainty, prevent change, preserve tidiness. The result, she suggested, is not art but propaganda: “It is the search for truth which gives rise to creativity.” “I believe one of the reasons for the lack of really true Christian art is first of all that we start with the answers. We begin with the cheerful assurance that we know the truth and so the search that is the basis of art is thwarted.”41
- Behind all this lay the pointed implication that the missionary stories she had been reared on in places like Wheaton’s chapel were not looking honestly at the facts of life. “My experience certainly was poles apart from missionary experiences of which I had read and heard, and I simply had to bow in the knowledge that God is His own interpreter.” The insistence of Christians on interpreting God’s plan in human suffering and loss she called “arrogant,” “childish,” “fatuous.” In fact, the speech suggests that in their own partiality to God, the evangelical church in America had created an idol and were worshiping it in God’s place.
- The more she read, the more she felt that her Christian-school and Sunday-school background had left her with gaping holes in her understanding of the world and a picture of reality that was a fantasy, populated by two-dimensional figures who were either sinners or saved, who either had nothing to offer or had everything figured out. She chided herself for having been so slow to seriously examine her worldview and prayed for God’s mercy toward her foolishness.
- Life goes on. The community does not exclude her. People visit her or welcome her into their homes or ignore her, just as they did before. She has not been the benefactor she had thought she would be; neither has she been struck with fire from heaven or run out of town on a rail. “What would happen to your idea of God … if you found that your work was useless?” Anderson had asked her.
- Even Harper’s informed her that although No Graven Image was their best-selling novel of the year, they were hesitant to advertise it more heavily because they did not want to alienate religious readers.
- And despite Elliot’s annoyance with the assumption that she had suddenly moved from one category to another, her thinking was changing rapidly. Leitch was an institutionalist to the core and devoted a tremendous amount of time to various Christian organizations. Elliot, who had been disgusted by many of these institutions, suddenly became much less vocally critical—so suddenly and so much so that Vandevort was horrified.18 Leitch disliked the current cultural emphasis on speaking one’s mind and argued vociferously against it, believing it to be an excuse for sloppy thinking and irresponsibility. Elliot, who had been emphatic about telling the truth and letting the chips fall where they might, now began to echo his perspective, referring repeatedly to “the youth cult of ‘honesty,’ which is really so phoney and dishonest and selfish.”19 Leitch wrote in opposition to the idea that behavior could be judged on “the one general Absolute of Love.”20 Elliot, who had told her brothers that love might be the only absolute in human existence, began to argue for many absolutes.
- Perhaps, as with Jim’s decision to contact the Waorani, Elliot had to believe that her husband was in the right in order to live with the consequences of his decisions.
- but to engage in what she was coming to see as the primary task of God’s people: worship.
- During her time in Ecuador she had begun to believe that the Christian life was not intended to help the Christian get results for God, but to help the Christian get to know God.
- As Catherine Peeke, who had worked with Saint and Dayomæ off and on since Hacienda Ila in 1955, had written the summer before, the situation in Tewæno was a “tragedy.” Not only were the Waorani in the process of losing their land and many traditional aspects of their culture, but translation “is not going forward and … the Wao church is stagnant.”31 Over a period of almost twenty years, Saint and Dayomæ had made drafts of the Gospel of Mark, the book of Acts, and a few small excerpts of other books. Because Saint refused to have them edited, even these were not really complete. Once again, Elliot chose to trust, to see the visible reality—the destruction of so much she had prayed for, so much she loved—in the light of the invisible reality of God’s character and God’s promises.