The Questions She Would Not Hide

“Trust in him at all times; ye people, pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us. Selah.”

— Psalm 62:8, KJV

Franconia

In 1963 Elisabeth Elliot came home. She was thirty-six. She had spent eleven years in Ecuador: first among the Colorados of the western forest, then among the Quichua of the eastern jungle, and for three years among the Waorani on the Curaray. She brought back with her Valerie, then eight, who had spent a good part of her early childhood in a Waorani clearing and now had to learn how to be an American schoolgirl. The two of them settled in Franconia, New Hampshire, in the White Mountains, the place where the Howard family had spent its summers and where Elisabeth had known, since she was a child, the woods, the granite and the long, hard winters.

She was by then famous in a way that very few missionaries had ever been. Through Gates of Splendor and Shadow of the Almighty had sold in great numbers. Her photograph had appeared in Life. Churches, colleges and conferences across the country wanted the widow of Jim Elliot to come and tell them the story of Palm Beach. She had a child to support, and her living now came largely from writing and speaking, so she accepted a good many of the invitations. But the woman who stood up to speak was no longer quite the woman her audiences expected, and over the next few years that became increasingly plain.

What Ecuador Had Taught Her

The story of January 1956 had been told, in her own first book and in countless sermons since, as a story with a clear shape. Five young men had laid down their lives, and God had used their deaths to open a closed people to the gospel. Elisabeth never denied that God had been at work. She had seen it with her own eyes. Men who had speared her husband had become her neighbours, and some of them had become believers. But she had also seen, at very close range, how much of what happened did not fit the shape.

In San Miguel her language helper had been murdered and her work had been stolen. At Shandia she had lived on a station that the river had already once swept away. Among the Waorani the work had brought misunderstanding and rivalry among the missionaries as well as faith among the Indians, and her own time there had ended in strain with Rachel Saint. She had come away with hard questions about whether the missionaries, herself included, really understood what they were doing to a people’s whole way of life, and about how much of what they called the Lord’s work was in fact their own plans dressed up in pious language. Nothing in the sequence of her years in Ecuador had followed the logic of sacrifice and reward that devotional storytelling seemed to promise.

She came to believe that the honest thing was to say so. That conviction is the thread running through her writing in the 1960s. It made a good many of her readers uneasy, and it is a large part of the reason she is still read.

No Graven Image

In 1966 she published a novel, No Graven Image. Its heroine is a young, single missionary who goes to the highlands of Ecuador to reduce an unwritten Indian language to writing, in circumstances not unlike Elisabeth’s own at San Miguel. She longs for a faithful language helper and for the kind of fruit she has been taught to expect. Near the end of the book, trying to help, she gives an injection to the very man on whom her work depends, and he dies. The novel does not turn this into a lesson. It ends with the missionary stripped of her assumptions about what God must do, and with the unsettling suggestion that the God she had been serving was, at least in part, an image of her own making.

Many evangelical readers were dismayed. They had come to the author of Through Gates of Splendor for another story of triumph, and they found instead a missionary whose labours end in a death that serves no visible purpose. Some concluded that she had lost her faith, or was close to losing it. Others, then and since, have seen the novel as the most searching thing she ever wrote: not an attack on God, but on the idols that well-meaning Christians set up in his place. The title comes from the second commandment. The book was her way of saying that a God who must always produce the results we have planned for him is not the God of the Bible, but a carved image with a Christian name.

Two more books followed in 1968. Who Shall Ascend was a life of R. Kenneth Strachan, the general director of the Latin America Mission, who had died a few years before. She had been asked to write it, and she wrote it in the way she now believed a missionary life ought to be written, leaving in his doubts, his inner conflicts and his sense of failure rather than polishing them away. Some of those who had hoped for a tribute were disappointed. Others recognised in it a rare and humane honesty about the cost of Christian leadership.

The Liberty of Obedience, a short book, set out a theme that would run through the rest of her life. Christian freedom, she argued, is not found by escaping obedience to God but inside it. In the same book she questioned some of the rules and taboos by which evangelicals of her generation tended to measure holiness, and asked whether they had become a substitute for the harder obedience of the heart. The book was both a defence of submission to God and a protest against submission to mere convention, and readers on both sides found things in it they did not like.

Pouring Out the Heart

It would be easy to read these years as a crisis of faith, and some did at the time. The sources do not support so simple a picture. Her letters and journals from the period, on which her authorised biographer has drawn, show a woman who was lonely, often unsure of what she should do next, and doubtful about much that passed for missionary strategy. They do not show a woman abandoning Christ. What she abandoned was the habit of tidying things up. She came to think that the Christian’s business is to trust God, not to explain him, and that the faithful thing to do with an unanswered question is to bring it to him rather than to hide it, whether from him or from other people.

Her honesty was not always gentle. She could be blunt to the point of severity, she had little patience with sentiment, and some who met her in these years found her cool and hard to know. Part of that was temperament. Part of it, perhaps, was the armour of a woman who had been widowed young, who had been made into a public symbol of a story she knew was more complicated than its admirers wanted, and who had decided that she would not pretend.

That is what the psalm at the head of this chapter commends. The psalmist does not tell the people to compose themselves before they come to God, or to present him with a cleaned-up account of their lives. He tells them to pour out their hearts before him, because God is a refuge, and a refuge is a place for people who are in trouble. Elisabeth Elliot’s refusal to hide her questions cost her some admirers in the 1960s. It also prepared her, in ways she could not yet see, to speak in later years to the bereaved, the lonely and the bewildered with an authority that no tidy story could have given her.