Waiting Well

“It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the LORD.” — Lamentations 3:26 (KJV)

In the autumn of 1948 Betty went north to the Prairie Bible Institute in Three Hills, Alberta, a farming town on the Canadian plains. Winter there is bitterly cold. The school was plain and strict, and its founder, L. E. Maxwell, preached about dying daily to self. Students rose early, worked hard and lived simply. Betty had laid her love on the altar and meant to leave it there. She was lonely and far from home. When Jim's letters came, they were careful and promised nothing. Afterwards she stayed on in Alberta for a while, teaching Sunday school among the farms around a hamlet called, of all things, Patience.

Jim finished at Wheaton in 1949 and went home to Portland, working, preaching in small churches and asking God where to go. In the summer of 1950 he attended a linguistics course in Oklahoma, run by Wycliffe Bible Translators, and there he heard about Ecuador: about the Quichua people of the eastern rainforest, and beyond them a people called the Waorani, whom no outsider had yet reached in friendship. Within months he was sure God was sending him there. A gifted young man from Seattle named Pete Fleming agreed to go with him, and on 4 February 1952 they sailed.

None of that made things simpler for Betty. Jim still wasn't sure about marriage, and he still said so. For a while he seemed to lean towards it, then away again. In four years after Wheaton they met only a handful of times, often briefly and sometimes painfully. Their letters, later published by their daughter, show two people who loved each other and were trying hard to be honest with God and each other, and who didn't always understand each other. There were misunderstandings and silences.

Meanwhile Betty kept preparing for her own calling. She took the same linguistics course, learning to analyse the sounds of an unwritten language, invent an alphabet for it, and build a grammar from nothing. She was good at it. Then she chose Ecuador, where there were peoples whose languages had never been written down.

Did she choose Ecuador because Jim was there? The biography is honest: the sources don't settle it, and maybe she couldn't have settled it herself. What is clear is that she went with no promise, no engagement and no understanding. She went to do her own work, as a single missionary. If Jim decided to stay single, she would be a single woman in Ecuador, and she knew it. She sailed in April 1952 and went up to Quito, the capital, high in the Andes, to learn Spanish. Jim was there. They saw each other. They still weren't engaged.

The years from 1948 to 1952 were some of the hardest of her life, not because something terrible happened, but because nothing did. She didn't know if she would marry the man she loved. She didn't know if her own calling would bear fruit. She just had to keep doing what was in front of her each day.

That might sound familiar. A lot of life as a teenager is waiting: for results, for a reply, for someone to notice you, for life to start. Lamentations was written by a man sitting in the ruins of his city. Right in the middle of his grief he says it is good to “hope and quietly wait.” Quiet waiting isn't doing nothing. It's refusing to grab what God hasn't given yet, and doing today's work well in the meantime. Betty learned it in these years, imperfectly and with plenty of tears. She would need it again.

One thing to do this week: think of one thing you are waiting on. Each time you catch yourself checking, refreshing or worrying about it this week, stop and do one useful job that belongs to today instead.