Macario, and a Stolen Suitcase

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

— Isaiah 55:8-9, KJV

Don Macario

The informant Elisabeth Howard needed came to her in the person of a man named Macario, to whom she gave, as Ecuadorians did, the courtesy title of Don. Accounts of him differ in detail. By her own account he had grown up on a hacienda alongside Colorado children, and he spoke both Colorado and Spanish with complete ease. That alone made him precious, for people who could move freely between the two languages were very few. But he was more than a bilingual speaker. He was, by her account, a believer in Christ, intelligent and patient, and he was willing to give his time to the work. Elisabeth could hardly have hoped for anyone better.

With Macario at her side the work began to move. Day after day they sat together while she asked and he answered, and she wrote down, tested, sorted and wrote again. Words became lists, lists became patterns, and the patterns began to show the shape of the language underneath. The cards multiplied. She began to see how the sounds of Colorado could be represented in an alphabet that its own speakers might one day learn to read. She began to work out how its verbs were built and how its sentences were put together. After months of slow and lonely labour, it must have seemed that God was at last confirming the call that had brought her to Ecuador.

A Shot in the Forest

Then Macario was killed. By the account usually given, he was clearing a piece of land he regarded as his own when a group of men arrived and claimed it for one of them; when he refused to give way, he was shot dead. Disputes over land were common on the forest frontier, where settlers from the highlands were pressing in and titles were uncertain, and they were sometimes settled with violence.

The man who had been the key to all her work, and a brother in Christ, had been murdered in a quarrel about a few acres of forest, and there was nothing to be done. There was no one to take his place. The few others who knew both languages could not or would not do what he had done, and the work that had been moving so hopefully came to a halt.

She did not understand it. She had prayed for an informant, and God had given her one, and now God had allowed him to be taken away in the most senseless manner imaginable. She was young, she had given up a great deal to come to Ecuador, and she had done nothing, as far as she could see, but try to obey. If obedience did not guarantee results, what did it guarantee? She asked the question honestly, and she did not find a quick answer.

Another Direction

In the midst of these months her life turned in another direction altogether. In January 1953, in Quito, Jim Elliot at last asked her to marry him, and she accepted. The story of the engagement, and of the condition Jim attached to it, belongs to the next chapter. Its immediate consequence was that Elisabeth would leave San Miguel and the Colorado work and go east, to the other side of the Andes and a different people. The work she had begun in the western forest would have to be left for others to take up, and the fruit of her labour there would be all she could hand on to them.

That fruit was on paper: the notebooks, the files of cards, the charts of sounds and forms, the beginnings of an alphabet and a grammar. It represented the greater part of her months of work, and all that remained of Macario’s patient help. She packed it into a suitcase so that it could go on to the colleagues who would carry the work forward, and, as far as the accounts tell, there were no copies.

She never saw it again. Word reached her, by letter, that the suitcase had been stolen from the back of a truck on its way. Whoever took it can have found nothing of value to them in it. Nothing was ever recovered. In a moment, almost everything she had to show for her time among the Colorados was gone.

These Strange Ashes

Elisabeth Elliot did not write about her year at San Miguel until more than twenty years later. When she did, in These Strange Ashes, published in 1975, she took her title from a poem by Amy Carmichael, the missionary whose books she had first heard read at Hampden DuBose. The poem asks God about the ashes left when an offering has been burnt, the nothingness and “this baffling sense of loss”, and answers by pointing to Christ’s own stripping on the cross, and to ashes as simply what follows when fire falls on a burnt offering. The book tells the story of the year plainly, without heroics and without a tidy ending: the woman who died in childbirth, the murder of Macario, the theft of the suitcase, and the questions they raised.

It was a brave book to publish. By 1975 Elisabeth Elliot was a well-known Christian author and speaker, and many of her readers knew her as the widow who had told the story of 1956 as a story of faith triumphant. Here she wrote, instead, about a year in which she had done what she believed God wanted and had nothing to show for it, and in which God had not explained himself. She did not claim that she had later discovered the hidden reasons. She concluded, rather, that the reasons were God’s business, and that the question she had to answer was not why God had done what he did, but whether she would go on trusting him without an explanation. The losses at San Miguel taught her, earlier than most Christians have to learn it, that faith which depends on visible success is not yet faith. Many readers, facing losses of their own that made no sense, have found the book a greater help than any success story.

Her first year as a missionary, then, ended in what looked like failure. She had not translated any Scripture. Her informant was dead, and her work was lost. She was twenty-six, newly engaged, and about to begin again from nothing, with a new language and a new people. It was not the last time that God would take from her the thing on which she had built her hopes, and it was perhaps a preparation for what was to come.

The verse at the head of this chapter is God’s word through Isaiah that his thoughts are not our thoughts, nor his ways our ways. It is not an explanation. It is a reminder that no explanation is owed. Elisabeth Howard learned in the western forest to live by that word, and she would need it, in the years ahead, more than she could possibly have imagined.