Preface

“When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee: when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee.”

— Isaiah 43:2, KJV

The earlier volumes of this series told of a Chinese church leader who died in a Communist labour camp, an American who prayed his way through the villages of the Punjab, a Dutch watchmaker who hid Jews behind a false wall, a Scottish mill girl who went alone up the rivers of Calabar, an African bishop who had once been sold as a slave, an Indian widow who built a home for thousands of outcast women, and an Oxford don who was found by God against his will. This eighth volume tells the story of a woman whose name, for most of the people who know it at all, is attached to a single week in January 1956, when her husband and four other young missionaries were killed on a sandbar in the Ecuadorian rainforest.

Elisabeth Elliot was twenty-nine that week, with a daughter of ten months. She lived for almost sixty years more. This book is about the whole of that life, before the sandbar and after it, and it is written in the conviction that the courage of the long years was no smaller than the courage of the short one.

Why Courage?

Some of her courage was of the kind the world recognises. Less than three years after the killings, she walked into the forest with her three-year-old daughter to live among the very people whose men had speared her husband, sleeping in their houses, eating their food and learning their unwritten language. Many people admired the decision, and a good many thought it reckless. She made it anyway, quietly, and she lived with its consequences.

But there was another kind of courage in her that is easier to overlook, and it may have cost her more. It was the courage of candour. Elisabeth Elliot would not let the story of 1956 be told more neatly than it had happened. She wrote a novel about a missionary whose best efforts end in a death she has caused, and it disturbed many of the readers who had loved her first book. She admitted in print that she did not understand why God had allowed what he allowed, and she refused to supply the tidy explanations that others found comforting. Late in life she added a frank epilogue to the most famous book she ever wrote, acknowledging that the sequel among the Waorani had been far more tangled than the first telling suggested. For a woman whose public standing rested on that story, this was not a small thing.

There was courage, too, in simply going on. She was widowed twice: Jim Elliot was killed after twenty-seven months of marriage, and her second husband, Addison Leitch, died of cancer after less than five years. She married a third time, and she kept writing, speaking and broadcasting for decades, often to people whose suffering she knew from the inside. And at the end she went through the slow loss of her own mind, in the care of a husband who stayed beside her. The long obedience of a life is not dramatic. It is made of ordinary days and next things. But it is not easy, and it is not small.

What This Book Is

This book is a narrative life. It follows Elisabeth Howard from her birth in Brussels in 1926 to her death in Magnolia, Massachusetts, in 2015, and it tries to give the people around her their due: her parents, her four brothers and her sister, the headmistress who took a shy girl in hand, Jim Elliot and his companions, the Colorado and Quichua people among whom she first worked, the Waorani women who led her into the forest, Rachel Saint, Valerie, and the two men she married after Jim. It is not an account of her teaching. A companion volume in the Ochorus library, The Key Teachings of Elisabeth Elliot, sets out what she believed and taught about suffering, obedience, discipline, singleness, marriage and the sovereignty of God. The present book touches her ideas only where they are part of the story of her life.

A Word About Her Words

That is not only a matter of arrangement. Elisabeth Elliot’s books, letters, newsletters and broadcasts are still in copyright, and those who hold the rights in them are entitled to guard them. This book is an independent Ochorus biography. It is not published by, affiliated with, or endorsed by her family, her estate, or any publisher or organisation that holds rights in her writings. It tells her life in its own words. It quotes her only in a handful of very short sentences, each given with its source, and where it reports what she thought or felt it does so in paraphrase. Her books are named so that readers can find them, and readers are warmly encouraged to buy them, or borrow them from a library, and hear her for themselves. Her prose was spare, exact and often surprising, and no summary can stand in for it.

How This Book Is Written

Elisabeth Elliot told parts of her own story many times, and she was an unusually honest witness. But she was also a writer who shaped her material, and in recent years her own journals and letters, now opened to her authorised biographer and edited in part by her daughter, have filled in a fuller and sometimes different picture. Historians of the Waorani mission have added their own careful accounts. Where the sources agree, this book follows them. Where they differ, it says so and gives the main views fairly. It does not invent dialogue, and it does not put thoughts into anyone’s head that the sources do not support.

Gratitude runs through these pages, but this is not a book of praise. Elisabeth Elliot could be brusque, and some who worked with her found her hard. Her views on women and marriage were, and are, contested by Christians who love Scripture as much as she did. She made decisions that others would have made differently, and she would have been the first to say that she was a sinner saved by grace. A portrait that left out the shadows would not be a portrait of her, and it would not have pleased her.

Scripture in This Book

As in the earlier volumes of this series, all Scripture is quoted from the Authorised (King James) Version, the Bible of the household in which she grew up, which is in the public domain. Each chapter opens with a passage that carries its theme.

The verse at the head of this preface is a promise she knew well. It does not say that God’s people will be kept out of the waters or the fire. It says that they will pass through them, and that he will be with them there. Elisabeth Elliot’s life was a long passing through, and this book is the story of how she found that promise to be true.