Carried

“And even to your old age I am he; and even to hoar hairs will I carry you: I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you.” — Isaiah 46:4 (KJV)

In 1996, forty years after Palm Beach, a new edition of Through Gates of Splendor came out. Elisabeth added an epilogue admitting plainly that events among the Waorani hadn't unfolded as simply as the first telling, and many sermons since, suggested. Killings didn't stop at once. The church grew, but unevenly. Relations between outsiders and the Waorani had been more tangled and more painful than people liked to think. It wasn't a retraction. She still believed God had been at work and that the five men had been right to go. But she would not let the story harden into a legend. Her reputation would have been safer if she had left it alone. She didn't.

She had lived by words: Greek at Wheaton, Spanish, Colorado, Quichua, Waorani, more than twenty books, hundreds of radio talks. And it was her words that began to go first. In the late 1990s her family noticed lapses of memory and moments of confusion. By about 2000 she had been diagnosed with dementia. Gateway to Joy ended in 2001, the newsletter in 2003, and in 2004 she gave up speaking. After that she simply disappeared from public life.

Some people asked how a woman who had taught so many to trust God in suffering could be brought to a place where she couldn't speak of him at all. She had no answer to give them now. But she had given it long before: God doesn't owe us an explanation, and nothing offered to him is wasted. In her last years she couldn't say that anymore. She could only live it.

Lars decided she would stay at home. Instead of placing her in a nursing home, he cared for her himself in the house at Magnolia for the rest of her life, the better part of fifteen years, and in the end around the clock. Whatever else is true of their marriage, this was faithful service, and it deserves to be remembered. Valerie and her family visited. Old friends came when they could.

Elisabeth Elliot died at home on the morning of 15 June 2015, aged eighty-eight. Her funeral was at Gordon College, near where she had spent the second half of her life, and a memorial service was held at Wheaton, where she had studied Greek seventy years before.

Her books are still in print. Honest biographies have shown her as proud at times, often lonely, sometimes harsh, and capable of real mistakes, and somehow that has made her more believable, not less. The story of 1956 has been retold with the Waorani's own voices: Dayuma, Mintaka and Mankamu, and the men who chose to put down the spear. Mincaye, one of the men from the beach, became a close friend of Nate Saint's son Steve and travelled with him telling his own story. In a way Elisabeth started that, by refusing to let the first telling be the last.

Isaiah contrasts God with idols that have to be loaded onto animals and carried around. The true God does the opposite: he carries his people, all the way to grey hair. Elisabeth spent her life carrying others: a baby in the jungle, a dying husband, a story the whole world wanted told, and millions of readers' sorrows. At the end she could carry nothing, not even her own memories. Someone else carried her, and behind every human hand, God did. Your worth isn't measured by what you can do. A life that can do almost nothing is still precious to him.

One thing to do this week: visit, call or write to an elderly person, a grandparent, a neighbour, someone in a care home, and spend real time with them. If you know someone who looks after a sick or elderly relative, thank them.