The Shadow of a Cross

“I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.” — Romans 12:1 (KJV)

In the autumn of 1944 Betty Howard arrived at Wheaton College, near Chicago, to study classical Greek. It was an unusual choice for a young woman then, but she had a reason: if she was going to translate the Bible, she wanted to work from the original text of the New Testament. She read Homer and Plato as well as the Gospels, and she drilled grammar the old way. Greek suited her precise mind. Finding exactly the right word, and refusing to settle for a vague one, became a habit for life.

At Wheaton she was serious and rather solitary, more respected than popular. She prayed constantly about God's will. She had decided she would rather stay single and serve God on the mission field than marry the wrong man.

In 1945 a new student arrived from Portland, Oregon. Jim Elliot was a year younger than Betty: handsome, athletic, outspoken, funny and intense. He was on the wrestling team and the missionary fellowship, and he too studied Greek. He had little time for what he called frivolity, and he was deeply moved by the diary of David Brainerd, a young missionary who had died at twenty-nine. Jim's closest friend was Betty's brother Dave. At Christmas 1947 Dave brought Jim home to Moorestown. Jim joined the family prayers and hymn-singing and stayed up late talking. When the new term began in January 1948, he and Betty started studying Greek together. Both were good at it, and both were competitive.

By spring it was obvious to both of them that this was more than friendship, and neither knew what to do. Betty believed a woman should not show her feelings until a man had declared his. Jim had come to believe, from Paul's words in First Corinthians 7, that God might be calling him to stay single so he could go to hard, dangerous places without dividing his heart. He wasn't sure. And he wasn't willing to let his feelings decide for him.

On the evening of 9 June 1948, just before her graduation, they went for a walk south of the campus and came to a cemetery. There, for the first time, they told each other what they felt. Jim also told her that God might be leading him to stay single, and that he could promise her nothing. They agreed to give their love back to God. The picture they used was Abraham in Genesis 22, laying his son Isaac on the altar: a gift from God, precious, and for that very reason offered back to him with no conditions. As they sat there, the rising moon threw the shadow of a large stone cross between them. Neither treated it as a magic sign. But both remembered it as a picture of what they had just decided.

Then she graduated and left. There was no engagement and no promise. They would write, sometimes often, sometimes hardly at all. Her private journals, read long afterwards, show that she sometimes found the uncertainty almost unbearable. Years later she told the story in a book, Passion and Purity, which many young people found a lifeline. Others felt it turned one couple's unusual path into a rule for everyone. That criticism is worth hearing. Their exact path isn't a pattern you have to copy.

What is worth copying is the heart of it. Romans 12 doesn't describe one dramatic moment of giving something up. It describes a living sacrifice: something you keep offering, day after day. The full-length biography puts it well: the altar was not a moment, it was a place they had to keep coming back to. Maybe there is something you want so much that it's hard to pray honestly about it: a relationship, a place on a team, a dream. Trusting God with it doesn't mean pretending you don't care. It means caring, and still saying, “It's yours.”

One thing to do this week: write down the one thing you want most right now. Then pray about it honestly, telling God how much you want it and that you are putting it in his hands. Do it again tomorrow.