8 October 1953

“Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour.”

— Ecclesiastes 4:9, KJV

A Wedding Without Fuss

By the autumn of 1953 Elisabeth had learned enough Quichua to satisfy Jim, and they set the date. They were married in Quito on Thursday 8 October 1953, which was Jim’s twenty-sixth birthday. It was a civil ceremony, conducted in Spanish at the government registry office, as Ecuadorian law required of every marriage. There was no church service afterwards, no procession and no reception of the kind their families at home might have expected. A handful of friends from the missionary community in Quito were present, and the whole affair was brief.

Some who hear this for the first time assume that the young couple were too poor or too remote to do anything more. That was not the reason. Both of them disliked show, and Jim in particular seems to have had little patience with what he saw as the fuss of the conventional church wedding. He had grown up among the Brethren in Portland, where ceremony was distrusted. Elisabeth, for her part, had been raised in a home where family worship mattered far more than occasions, and she seems to have been content. Whatever others thought, the two people most concerned were satisfied that they had been married before God and the law, and that nothing essential had been left out.

Their families were thousands of miles away and could not be there. Letters went north to Moorestown and to Portland. Both families learned of the wedding at a distance, as missionary families of that generation often did, and had to be content with letters and, later, photographs.

Panama

After the wedding they went away together for a short honeymoon, travelling north to Panama. Some accounts add a few days in Costa Rica. It was brief. By the late autumn they were back in Ecuador and on their way east to the forest.

It is worth pausing on what they brought to the marriage. Jim was intense, energetic and outspoken, a gifted preacher, a wrestler at college, a man who loved the outdoors and could be impatient with people who did not share his urgency. He was also warm, funny and deeply affectionate, and his journals show a man who could be very hard on himself. Elisabeth was more reserved, more analytical, and more inclined to see the difficulties in any plan. She had a sharp wit and could be blunt, and she was not afraid to disagree with him. Friends who knew them both have described a marriage of real affection and real equality of mind, if not of temperament. Each sharpened the other. Each sometimes exasperated the other. Neither was the plaster saint that the later legend made of them.

Elisabeth herself, many years later, was firm on this point. In her books and talks she discouraged readers from imagining that she and Jim had enjoyed a perfect marriage, or that their love story was a pattern that God would simply repeat for anyone who waited long enough. She had been married to Jim for twenty-seven months. They had been, by her account, happy months, but they had been ordinary ones too, full of the small irritations and adjustments of two strong-willed people learning to live in one small house.

The First Home

That small house was not yet built. When they reached the eastern forest at the end of 1953, the Shandia station was still being rebuilt after the flood, and the newly married Elliots did not move straight into it. Instead they went to Puyupungu, a Quichua settlement to the south of Shandia, where a local headman named Atanasio had asked for a missionary to teach his people and to start a school for their children. The Elliots set up house in a tent while a simple building was put up. It was an unpromising start to married life. The forest was wet, the insects were relentless, and every meal had to be cooked over a fire or on a small stove. They seem to have enjoyed it.

At Puyupungu Elisabeth had her first real test as a speaker of Quichua. The work was not hers alone or even mainly hers. Jim preached, taught and organised the school; she looked after the household, helped with simple medical care, and worked on the language. But she now had to use what she had learned, every day, in front of people who would laugh at her mistakes, and she did. The months of study in 1953 had not been wasted.

The Puyupungu arrangement did not last long. In June 1954 Pete Fleming married Olive Ainslie, the girl he had left behind in Seattle, and after a period of language study the new couple took up the work at Puyupungu. The Elliots moved back north to Shandia, where Jim built them a house on the rebuilt station. Shandia was to be their home for the rest of their married life.

Two Are Better

The verse at the head of this chapter comes from Ecclesiastes. The Preacher, who distrusts nearly every human achievement, makes an exception for companionship. Two are better than one, he says, because they have a good reward for their labour. It is a modest verse and an unromantic one. It makes no promises about feelings. It simply observes, as the next verse goes on to say, that if one falls the other can lift him up: work is easier, and burdens lighter, when they are shared.

Their gifts fitted together in just that way. Jim had picked up Quichua largely by ear and by use, talking with the schoolboys and the men of Shandia, and he spoke it with an ease that people warmed to. Elisabeth came to it as a trained linguist, listening for the patterns beneath the words, and she was better placed than he was to write it down, to teach others to read it, and in time to put Scripture into it. He was the preacher; she was the one with the notebook. Neither could have done the other’s work as well, and both knew it. The partnership was not always smooth, but it was a real one.

That was the shape of the Elliots’ marriage. They did not marry in order to be happy, though they were. They married in order to do together a work that each had already committed to doing alone, and they believed that God had joined them for that purpose. The marriage that began in a registry office in Quito, with no music and no flowers, was a working partnership as much as a love match, and it was both. Elisabeth would spend much of the rest of her life insisting that these were not opposites, and that obedience and affection, rightly ordered, belonged together. She had learned it in Ecuador, in a tent at Puyupungu, in the first year of being married to Jim.