Jim and Elisabeth Elliot: The Ones Who Went Back

Deep in the forests of Ecuador, in South America, lived a people called the Waorani, who had almost no contact with the outside world and who killed strangers who came near. Jim Elliot and four of his friends believed that even these people should have the chance to hear that God loved them. So the young men learned all they could, dropped gifts from a little aeroplane to make friends, and at last landed on a sandy riverbank to meet them face to face.

For a few days it went well. Then, one afternoon in 1956, the five men were attacked and killed with spears on that lonely sandbar. To the watching world it looked like a total, tragic waste — five good young men dead, and nothing to show for it. Jim had once written words his friends never forgot: it is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.

And then came the part no one could have imagined. Instead of giving up in anger and grief, Jim's wife Elisabeth, together with the sister of one of the other men, decided to go and live among the very people who had killed their loved ones.

They walked into the forest and made their home with the Waorani. They learned the difficult language. They cared for the sick, held the babies, and lived as friends and neighbours — sitting down each day beside the men who had thrown the spears. Slowly, as the Waorani watched this astonishing kindness, they began to ask why. And many of them, including some of the killers themselves, became followers of Jesus, and brothers to the families they had wounded.

The people who had seemed the hardest to reach were reached — not by force, and not by revenge, but because two women chose to go back with forgiveness and love. It was the very thing Jim had believed was worth dying for.