Gateway to Joy

“The LORD hath appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.”

— Jeremiah 31:3, KJV

A Newsletter and a Shelf of Books

The 1980s were the most productive decade of Elisabeth Elliot’s public life. In her mid-fifties, settled on the North Shore with Lars managing her affairs, she began to write and speak at a pace that would have exhausted a younger woman, and the audience she reached grew far beyond the readers who had first known her as a missionary widow.

Around 1982 she began to send out a short newsletter of her own to anyone who asked for it. The Elisabeth Elliot Newsletter was a plain, personal publication: a few pages of reflection on a passage of Scripture or a question from a reader, news of her family and her travels, and a list of where she would be speaking. It ran for more than twenty years, until 2003, and many of her later books were gathered, wholly or partly, from its pages.

The books themselves came steadily. Discipline: The Glad Surrender (1982) set out her conviction that the disciplines of body, mind, time and feeling are not burdens laid on the Christian but ways of offering the whole of life to God. Passion and Purity (1984) told, for the first time at length and in her own words, the story of her slow, restrained courtship with Jim Elliot, and used it to urge young Christians to entrust their longings for love and marriage to God. It became one of the most widely read of all her books, especially among young evangelicals in America, and it shaped the way a generation thought about romance. In later years it was also criticised, by some who had grown up in the purity movement of the 1990s, for setting a standard of restraint that some readers had turned into a source of anxiety and shame. That debate belongs to the companion volume on her teaching.

In 1987 came A Chance to Die, her life of Amy Carmichael. It was in some ways the repayment of a debt. Elisabeth had read Amy Carmichael’s books as a girl, and the Irish missionary who had given her life to rescuing children in South India, and who founded the Dohnavur Fellowship there, had been one of the formative influences on her own call. The biography is warm but not uncritical, and it is still one of the best ways into Amy Carmichael’s life. Two of Amy Carmichael’s own books, Things as They Are and If, are in the Ochorus library.

Lincoln, Nebraska

In 1988 Back to the Bible, the radio ministry based in Lincoln, Nebraska, invited her to present a new daily programme for women. It was to be short, about a quarter of an hour, and broadcast on Christian stations across the United States and beyond. She agreed, and the programme was called Gateway to Joy. She spoke in the same clear, level, unhurried voice that audiences already knew from her conference addresses.

Each programme began in the same way. She reminded her listeners that they were loved with an everlasting love, as the verse at the head of this chapter says, and that underneath were the everlasting arms, in the words of Moses’ blessing in Deuteronomy. Then she introduced herself as their friend and turned to the day’s subject. For thirteen years, from 1988 to 2001, those two sentences of Scripture went out to a very large audience, and for many listeners they became the thing they remembered best.

The subjects were often startlingly ordinary. She spoke about prayer and the will of God, about suffering and loneliness and widowhood, about marriage and the bringing up of children. But she also spoke about tidiness and punctuality, about manners and hospitality, about washing dishes and answering letters and getting up in the morning. Her conviction was that the Christian life is lived chiefly in such things, and that the faithful doing of small duties is not a lesser form of devotion than the dramatic sacrifices people admire. The programme was carried on Christian stations across America and, in time, in other countries too, and it reached women in kitchens and cars, in hospitals and nursing homes, at hours when few of them could have gone to a meeting. Listeners wrote to her and to Back to the Bible in great numbers, and many of them said that she had addressed them as adults, without flattery and without fuss.

On the Road

At the same time she spoke at conferences, churches, colleges and women’s meetings across America and in other countries, with Lars almost always beside her. The books continued. Loneliness (1988) drew on her widowhoods and on her single years in Ecuador. On Asking God Why (1989) was a collection of short essays on trust. A Path Through Suffering (1990) used the life of plants and the lessons of the countryside to think about pain and fruitfulness. Keep a Quiet Heart (1995) gathered pieces from the newsletter. Quest for Love (1996), a sequel to Passion and Purity, told the stories of other men and women who had tried to keep their love affairs under God’s rule.

Her manner did not soften with fame. She was crisp, direct and at times severe. She disliked sentimentality, self-pity and what she regarded as the cult of feelings in modern Christianity, and she said so. Some found her cold. Many more, especially women who were bereaved, lonely, unhappily single or simply worn out by ordinary duties, found her bracing. She did not tell them that their troubles were small. She told them that God was great and that he was with them in their troubles, and she spoke as one who had been through more than most of them.

Underneath

There is a certain irony in the shape of these years. The woman who opened every programme with the assurance of the everlasting arms was, as the previous chapter showed, carrying burdens at home that few of her listeners suspected, and, by Vaughn’s account, she was by temperament a reserved person for whom public life was often a strain. None of that appeared in the broadcasts. Some will see in that a failure of candour from a woman who prized candour. Others will see the discipline she taught: the refusal to make her own trials the subject of her ministry, and the resolve to point her hearers past herself.

Either way, the promise she repeated was not hers. It was God’s, spoken first through Jeremiah to a people in exile who had every reason to think he had stopped loving them. Elisabeth Elliot spent thirteen years telling ordinary people that it still held. There is good reason to think she was telling herself the same thing.