Jim Elliot Biography

Jim Elliot was twenty-eight years old when he was killed, on a river sandbar in the Ecuadorian rainforest, by the very people he had crossed the world to reach. He had published nothing. He had pastored no church. He had spent barely four years on the mission field and had not yet learned to speak fluently with the people he died among. By almost every measure the church uses to reckon a life, his was unfinished — and it became one of the most widely told missionary stories of the twentieth century, not for what he built, but for what he was willing to lose, and for a sentence he had written in a private journal seven years before, when he was twenty-two and no one was watching.

A Wheaton devotion

He was born on 8 October 1927 in Portland, Oregon, into a Plymouth Brethren home where the Bible was read plainly and taken seriously. Faith was not, for the Elliots, a Sunday matter; it was the frame of the house. He carried that seriousness into Wheaton College, where he studied from 1945 to 1949, took Greek, and wrestled — he chose the sport, he said, for the discipline it would give a body he meant to spend.

What set the young Elliot apart was less his talent than the ferocity of his devotion. He kept intense journals, and he fed himself on the lives of men and women who had given everything: David Brainerd, worn out among the American tribes before he was thirty; William Carey, the cobbler who would not let the church rest easy about the nations; Amy Carmichael in India. He was not looking for a comfortable Christianity. He was looking for a costly one, and he wrote and prayed his way toward it while still a student.

It was in that spirit, at Wheaton, that he made the entry his name is now bound to. On 28 October 1949 he wrote in his journal a line that echoes an older Puritan sentiment but is his own in its phrasing:

He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.

— Jim Elliot, journal, 28 October 1949

It is worth reading slowly, because it is the whole man in one sentence. He was twenty-two. He had lost nothing yet, faced nothing yet, proved nothing yet. He was simply doing the arithmetic of the gospel out loud — that a life, a comfort, a safety, are things a person cannot finally keep anyway, and that to spend them for Christ is not sacrifice but sense. Seven years later the sentence would be quoted over his grave, but he did not write it for a grave. He wrote it for himself, as a young man settling in advance what he would do when the bill came due.

The call to the Waorani

Around 1950 that settled conviction found its object. Elliot was drawn toward the Waorani people of the Ecuadorian rainforest — an isolated group with a long and well-earned reputation for killing outsiders. In that era they were known by a name others had given them, "Auca," a Quichua word meaning "savage." It was a slur, and the people it was aimed at never used it of themselves; they were, and are, the Waorani. That a group was feared and dismissed as beyond reach was, for Elliot, less a warning than an argument. These were exactly the people no one else was going to.

He arrived in Ecuador on 21 February 1952 with his friend Pete Fleming, and began by working among the Quichua at Shandia, learning the country, the language, the patience the work demanded. On 8 October 1953 — his twenty-sixth birthday — he married Elisabeth Howard, herself a missionary and, in time, the chronicler without whom his story would have been lost. Their daughter Valerie was born in February 1955. He was, by then, a husband and a father, with everything a young man might wish to keep.

Operation Auca

The plan to make contact took shape among five young men: Elliot himself; Nate Saint, a pilot with Missionary Aviation Fellowship; Ed McCully; Pete Fleming; and Roger Youderian. Beginning in September and October of 1955, Saint flew over Waorani clearings and lowered gifts on a line from the plane — small tools, trinkets, tokens of goodwill. To their encouragement, the Waorani sent gifts back up. Saint found a narrow sandbar on the Curaray River and named it "Palm Beach," and on 3 January 1956 the five men landed there and made their camp.

On 6 January the first friendly contact came: a small party of Waorani, including a young woman, walked out of the forest to the sandbar. There was curiosity, laughter, even a short flight in the plane for one of the men. For a few days it seemed the impossible might be happening.

Palm Beach

On 8 January 1956, a group of Waorani warriors came to the sandbar and speared all five men to death.

The detail that has held the world's attention for seventy years is this: the men were armed, and they did not defend themselves against the people who killed them. They carried guns, but they had agreed among themselves beforehand that they would not use those guns against the Waorani — that if it came to it, they would not take the life of a man who had not yet heard the gospel in order to save their own. Their reasoning was as plain as Elliot's journal sentence: they were ready for heaven, and the men coming down the beach were not. Accounts of the last minutes differ, and this one will not pretend to a certainty the record does not hold. What is not in doubt is the intent, settled in advance and kept: they had agreed not to use their guns against the men who came to kill them.

He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.

— the line he wrote at twenty-two, and lived out at twenty-eight

The story that outlived the men

The killing might have been a private grief for five young families. Instead it became a public witness. Within weeks Life magazine ran a ten-page photo essay on the men and their deaths, and the story reached far beyond the missionary world. Elisabeth Elliot told the whole account in Through Gates of Splendor in 1957, and her husband's inner life in Shadow of the Almighty in 1958. A generation of young Christians read them and gave themselves to missions. The men had spent what they could not keep, and the gaining had begun.

The gospel reaches the killers

But the deepest part of the story was still to come, and it is the part that turns a tragedy into a testimony.

Rather than leave the Waorani to their reputation and their guilt, two women went to live among them: Elisabeth Elliot, with her small daughter Valerie, and Rachel Saint, the sister of the pilot Nate. They learned the language none of the men had lived to master. They stayed. And over the years that followed, many of the Waorani became Christians — among them some of the very men who had thrown the spears.

It is hard to overstate what this reconciliation asks a reader to believe: that the men who murdered a father could raise his son as their own, that the water of a killing could become the water of a baptism, that an enemy could be gathered into the same household as the family he had bereaved. It is exactly the reconciliation the gospel claims to make — normally too slowly, or too privately, for the world to see. Here it was made in a single generation, on a single river, in the sight of everyone who had read the story.

What he leaves

Jim Elliot left no books of his own and few finished works. What he left is a sentence and a demonstration.

The sentence has been carried by millions who never learned to say "Waorani," because it states a truth that does not depend on his death to be true: that everything we clutch — our safety, our years, our comfort — is already slipping through our fingers, and that the only wise thing to do with what cannot be kept is to spend it on what cannot be lost. He wrote it as a student, before it cost him anything, which is the only honest time to write such a thing.

The demonstration is what he and four friends did on a sandbar: they held to a decision made in cold blood — that they would die before they would kill the people they had come to save — and they kept it when the spears came. And the God they trusted answered the prayer they prayed there, not by sparing them, but by giving the killers the very gift the five had carried into the forest to give.

He was twenty-eight. It was enough.