Elisabeth Elliot Biography

There are missionary stories the church tells because they end well, and there are a few it tells because it cannot quite believe them. Elisabeth Elliot’s belongs to the second kind. Her husband was killed by a people he had gone to reach — speared to death on a river sandbar with four other young men — and two years later she carried her toddler daughter into the forest to live among the very men who had done it. She was not naïve about what they were. She had read the accounts. She went anyway, and she stayed, and she watched a good number of them come to Christ. Then she spent the rest of a long life writing and teaching about the one thing that return had taught her: that obedience is possible in the dark, and that God is to be trusted precisely where He is not to be understood.

A missionary’s daughter, and a hard school

She was born Elisabeth Howard on 21 December 1926 in Brussels, where her parents were serving as missionaries. The family moved to Philadelphia the following year, and she grew up in a home ordered around Scripture and prayer. She went to Wheaton College and studied Classical Greek — not for its own sake, but because she meant to translate the Bible for people who did not yet have it. Afterward she trained further at Prairie Bible Institute. The plan was set early: language, a hard place, a Book put into unwritten speech.

At Wheaton she met Jim Elliot. He was ardent, uncompromising, already given over to the idea of the mission field, and their courtship was famously slow and deliberate — a long discipline of restraint that she would write about decades later, when a younger generation needed someone to tell them that waiting was not a wasted thing. They did not marry until both were in Ecuador. The wedding was on 8 October 1953, in Quito, on Jim’s birthday. Their daughter Valerie was born in February 1955. They settled at Shandia, among the Quichua, and the translation work she had aimed at all her life began in earnest.

The sandbar on the Curaray

Jim and four other missionaries — Nate Saint, Pete Fleming, Ed McCully and Roger Youderian — had set their hearts on reaching the Waorani, a people then known by the insulting name “Auca,” feared across the region for killing outsiders. The men made contact from the air, dropped gifts, and at last landed on a strip of sand along the Curaray River. For a few days it seemed to be working. On 8 January 1956 all five were speared to death.

Elisabeth was twenty-nine, with a ten-month-old daughter, in a foreign forest, suddenly a widow. What she did with the fact — not at once, but soon — became the pattern of everything she taught afterward. She did not treat the killing as the end of the mission. She treated it as, somehow, part of it.

You are loved with an everlasting love — that’s what the Bible says — and underneath are the everlasting arms.

— Elisabeth Elliot, her sign-on for the radio program Gateway to Joy

That sentence, which she would later use to open every one of her broadcasts, was not a slogan she reached for in comfort. It is the thing she had to believe with a spear-widow’s knowledge of what it costs to say it. The everlasting arms are only underneath you when you have fallen far enough to need them.

The return

Here the story turns from grief, which many can imagine, to a decision almost no one can. Rather than go home, Elisabeth stayed in Ecuador and worked toward the one thing the five men had died attempting. In October 1958 she went to live among the Waorani themselves, taking Valerie — by then about three years old — into the group that had made her a widow. She was joined by Rachel Saint, sister of Nate Saint, the pilot killed on the sandbar. The people gave Elisabeth a name in their own tongue: Gikari, the woodpecker. She lived among them until 1963, and in that time — around 1960 — many of the Waorani came to faith in Christ.

It would flatten the story to make the two women into a seamless team of saints. They were not. Elisabeth and Rachel Saint differed — in temperament, in theology, in method — and the friction between them was real and is honestly recorded by those who knew them. It is worth saying plainly, because the truth of the return does not depend on the two of them getting along. Two strong, grieving women, each certain of her calling, living in a forest among former killers, did not always agree on how the work should be done. That they persevered anyway, and that the Waorani heard the gospel through them regardless, is more credible for the strain, not less.

Do the next thing.

— the counsel Elisabeth Elliot loved and made famous, from an older poem of uncertain authorship, which she was always careful to credit

A lifetime of telling the truth about suffering

Elisabeth Elliot became, in the decades that followed, one of the most trusted Christian writers of her century — trusted precisely because she never lied about pain. She wrote Through Gates of Splendor (1957), the account of the five men, and Shadow of the Almighty (1958), drawn from Jim’s own journals. She wrote The Savage My Kinsman (1961) about the Waorani. Later came Passion and Purity (1984), which handed her long courtship’s lessons to the young; A Chance to Die (1987), her portrait of Amy Carmichael; The Path of Loneliness in the late 1990s; and Keep a Quiet Heart (1996). From 1988 to 2001 her voice reached households daily through the radio program Gateway to Joy.

Her marriages after Jim were not spared sorrow either. She married the theologian Addison Leitch in 1969 and was widowed again in 1973. In 1977 she married Lars Gren, who cared for her to the end of her life. She knew grief as a repeated visitor, not a single event, and it did not soften her message. It hardened it into something usable.

The center of what she taught was surrender — what she called relinquishment, the handing over of one’s own will to God’s. Her counsel on suffering was direct and unsentimental: accept it, thank God for it, and then offer it back up to Him. Not explain it. Not escape it. Not necessarily even understand it. Accept, thank, offer. She had done exactly that on a riverbank in 1956, and she was not going to prescribe to others a medicine she had refused to swallow.

She is also remembered for three plain words she gave to countless people paralyzed by grief or dread or the sheer size of a hard day: do the next thing. She loved that counsel and made it famous, quoting it constantly — but she was always careful to say she had not coined it. It came from an old poem of uncertain authorship, which she credited rather than claimed. The honesty is characteristic. She popularized it; she did not pretend to have written it. And its wisdom is exactly the wisdom of the return: when the whole road is too dark to see, you are not asked to see the whole road. You are asked to do the next thing.

The last years, and what she leaves

Elisabeth Elliot stopped public speaking in 2004 as dementia advanced, and she spent roughly her last decade in its long silence. She died at home in Magnolia, Massachusetts, on 15 June 2015, aged eighty-eight, cared for by Lars.

What she leaves is not a system and not a single miracle. It is a demonstration — carried out with her own body, in a real forest, in front of real killers — that the gospel means what it says. She leaves the sentence she began every broadcast with, which is simply true whether or not the day is going well: that you are loved with an everlasting love, and that underneath are the everlasting arms. And she leaves the three words for anyone who cannot see how to go on: not a theory of suffering, but an instruction. Do the next thing. She did, all the way into the forest, and out the other side.

You are loved with an everlasting love — that’s what the Bible says — and underneath are the everlasting arms.

— the words she gave away, day after day, for thirteen years