Earthen Vessels

“But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.” — 2 Corinthians 4:7 (KJV)

Elisabeth lived among the Waorani for about three years, from October 1958 until late 1961. She shared the life of the clearing: its food, its weather, its illnesses and its quarrels. She handed out medicine, took photographs, filled notebooks, and kept working at the language. Valerie grew from a toddler into a little girl who ran barefoot with the Waorani children and spoke their language easily.

Something did change. Over the years, several people at Tiwaeno, including some of the men from the beach, began to call themselves followers of God. Gikita, Kimo, Dyuwi and Mincaye were among those who in time professed faith, and some became leaders among the believers. Dayuma's influence was crucial. The cycle of revenge killings began to slow among those living near the missionaries, though it didn't stop all at once, and other Waorani groups went on killing and being killed for years. A few years after Elisabeth left, Kimo and Dyuwi baptised two of Nate Saint's children, Steve and Kathy, in the Curaray River, near the beach where their father died.

In 1961 she published a book of photographs about her first year there. She called it The Savage My Kinsman. Readers who had soaked up newspaper talk of savages and martyrs were faced with pictures of ordinary men, women and children, and a title that insisted they were family. The book didn't claim mass conversions. It showed a people, and a missionary, at the start of a long road.

Living there was changing her. She was seeing how much of what she'd brought was American culture rather than the gospel, and how little she could be sure of about what the Waorani actually understood. She didn't lose her faith. But she was becoming less sure of many things the missionary movement at home took for granted.

The hardest part of Tiwaeno wasn't the forest or the Waorani. It was Rachel Saint. Both women loved the Waorani. Each had lost someone on the beach. But they were very different, and the differences proved impossible to bridge. Historians describe clashes of personality, theology, method and training. Rachel was older and intensely devoted, convinced God had given her a special calling to the Waorani through Dayuma; she came to treat the work, and to some extent the people, as hers. Elisabeth, the more highly trained linguist, wanted a careful analysis of the language and worried about how much the Waorani could really understand through a single go-between. They couldn't agree on translation, which was meant to be the centre of their work.

Neither woman comes out of it simply right. Rachel's possessiveness made life hard for Elisabeth. But Elisabeth could be cool, critical and quick to spot the weak points in other people's thinking, and she wasn't easy to work with either. Both were isolated, often ill, under huge pressure, and watched by Christians at home who expected a triumph.

Late in 1961 Elisabeth left Tiwaeno, without public complaint. Rachel stayed for most of the rest of her life. Elisabeth went back to the Quichua for about two more years, and in 1963 she and Valerie, now eight, returned to the United States. She had arrived in Ecuador in 1952 single, at twenty-five. She left at thirty-six, a widow with a daughter, the author of three books, and a far more questioning and seasoned Christian.

Paul calls the people who carry the gospel clay pots: cheap, breakable, sometimes cracked. That isn't a flaw in God's plan. It's the plan, so that everyone can see the power is God's and not ours. When Christians fight, it's ugly. But it doesn't mean God has stopped working. He has always worked through cracked pots, and that includes you.

One thing to do this week: if there is a conflict between you and someone at church, school or home, write down one way you have made it worse. Then do one thing to put that part right, whether or not they do their part.