The Next Thing

“A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows, is God in his holy habitation.” — Psalm 68:5 (KJV)

On Sunday evening the silent radio could still be explained. By Monday morning it couldn't. Another pilot, Johnny Keenan, flew over the Curaray and saw the little yellow plane on the sandbar with its fabric torn away. There was no sign of the men. The five wives gathered at the mission base at Shell Mera to wait.

A search party set out overland: missionaries, Quichua men and Ecuadorian soldiers. The US military sent aircraft and helicopters. During the week four of the men's bodies were found in the river and identified by their watches and wedding rings. A fifth, almost certainly Ed McCully's, had been seen by Quichua men further downstream but could not be recovered. In a violent rainstorm, the searchers buried the four together beside the beach and left in a hurry, afraid of being attacked. A photographer from Life magazine went with them, and his pictures of the widows and their children made their faces famous around the world.

People who were there were astonished at how calm the wives were. That calm was real, and it came from real faith. But it was later turned into something it wasn't: a picture of women who didn't grieve, or grieved less because they believed more. Elisabeth spent years correcting that. She did grieve, deeply and for a long time. She knew loneliness, exhaustion and fear. She had questions that weren't answered. What she didn't do was decide that God had failed her. Her calm wasn't the absence of grief. It was a decision about where to take it.

She was twenty-nine. Valerie was ten months old. She had no husband, no fixed income, and nothing to keep her in Ecuador. Most people expected her to go home.

She went back to Shandia. She took Valerie back to the house Jim had built and picked up his work: teaching, medical care, the young Quichua believers. She didn't see it as heroic. The work was there, the people were there, she spoke their language, and nobody else could do it. It was simply the obvious next thing. For the rest of her life she loved an old anonymous poem whose refrain, in its quaint old spelling, was “Doe the nexte thynge.” You don't have to see the whole road. You don't have to understand your grief before you get up in the morning. You only have to do what's in front of you. The other widows chose differently, and she never suggested hers was the only faithful choice.

Letters poured in from strangers. Many said they had given their lives to God because of the story. And she was asked to write it herself. In the first months of widowhood she read page after page of her husband's private journals and rebuilt, hour by hour, the weeks that had ended in his death. The book, Through Gates of Splendor, came out in 1957, named after a line in a hymn the men had sung before they left. It was plain and restrained. It didn't preach, and it didn't claim to know why God had allowed it. It has never gone out of print, and thousands of people said it led them to serve God. A year later she published Jim's life, and she let his journals stand as he wrote them, earnest and sometimes immature, rather than polishing him into a saint.

If you have lost someone, don't let anyone tell you that strong Christians don't grieve. Psalm 68 says God is a father to the fatherless and a defender of widows. He kept that promise to Elisabeth, not by taking the loss away, but by being with her in it while she did the next thing. If grief or heaviness is crushing you and won't lift, tell a safe person: a parent, a pastor, a teacher, a doctor, or a crisis line where you live.

One thing to do this week: the next time you feel overwhelmed, don't try to fix everything. Write down only the very next thing you need to do, do it, and then write down the one after that.