The Next Thing

“Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.”

— Ecclesiastes 9:10, KJV

An Old Poem

Among the things Elisabeth Elliot quoted most often, in her books, her newsletter and her broadcasts, was an anonymous poem of the nineteenth century that had been printed and reprinted in devotional collections for generations. It begins, “From an old English parsonage down by the sea,” and tells of a message found there, carved in an old-fashioned spelling. The message was four words long: “Doe the nexte thynge.” The poem goes on to commend those words to anyone who is anxious, overwhelmed or uncertain of the way ahead. One need not see the whole road. One need only do, in faith, the duty that lies nearest.

She had known it for many years, and it became a kind of motto for her. It is easy to see why. Her life had been a series of moments in which the larger picture was hidden. In January 1956 she had not known what had happened on the Curaray, and then she had known only that her husband was dead. In 1961 she had not known what she ought to do among the Waorani, or whether she should stay. In 1973 she had not known how she would live without Addison. On each occasion, the sources suggest, she did what lay in front of her: she cared for her child, she kept up her work, she answered her letters, she wrote the next page. And the next thing, done, revealed the thing after it.

The phrase became one of the best-known things about her. Listeners to Gateway to Joy heard it many times, and readers of her newsletter came to expect it. To some it sounded too simple. But she did not offer it as a technique for managing life. She offered it as a form of obedience, and as a cure for the kind of anxiety that tries to live tomorrow before it has arrived. It sits close to the Lord’s teaching in the Sermon on the Mount that each day has enough trouble of its own.

Never for Nothing

The other conviction that ran through all her later work was that suffering, in the hands of God, is never wasted. She did not mean that suffering is good in itself, or that Christians should pretend it does not hurt, or that every sorrow can be explained. She was impatient with all three of those ideas. She meant that God, who had brought the greatest good the world has known out of the cross of his Son, could be trusted to bring good out of the suffering of those who belong to him, even when they could not see how.

She came to that belief by the hard road. She had lost a language helper to murder and years of work to a thief. She had lost a husband to the spears of the very people she later went to live among, and another to cancer. She had seen the mission she had given herself to divided by quarrels. She did not claim to understand why any of these things had happened. What she claimed was that none of them had been for nothing, and she held to that claim to the end of her working life.

She was careful to distinguish this from a fatalist’s shrug. The Christian who suffers, in her teaching, is not simply giving in to what cannot be helped. He is trusting a Father who is known to be good, taking what comes as from his hand and giving it back to him. What happens may look the same either way; the difference lies in the One who is trusted. That distinction, worked out in her own losses, lay behind a great deal of what she said to the bereaved and the disappointed in her books and on the radio.

Correcting the Story

One of the next things she did, in the middle of her busiest years, was to go back to the story that had made her famous. In 1996, forty years after the deaths on Palm Beach, a new edition of Through Gates of Splendor was published with an epilogue in which she looked again at what had happened among the Waorani since 1956. She acknowledged that events had not unfolded as simply as the first edition, and the many sermons based on it, had suggested. Historians have since filled in that picture. Killings among the Waorani did not stop at once; the growth of the church among them was real but uneven; and the dealings between the outsiders and the Waorani, missionaries included, were more complicated, and in places more painful, than the early telling allowed.

It was not a recantation. She still believed that God had been at work in 1956 and afterwards, and that the five men had been right to go. But she would not let the story harden into a legend that served the comfort of its admirers at the expense of the truth. She had been saying the same thing, in one way or another, since the 1960s. Now she said it in the book itself.

That was a costly kind of honesty. Through Gates of Splendor was by then a classic of missionary literature, and many readers loved it exactly as it was. She did not need to disturb it. Her reputation would have been safer if she had left it alone. But she had learned at San Miguel, and in the writing of No Graven Image, that faith built on a story that is too good to be true is faith in the wrong thing.

A Grandmother

Through these years her family grew. Valerie and Walter Shepard had eight children, and Elisabeth took a close interest in all of them. She had written The Shaping of a Christian Family in 1992, looking back on the home in which she had grown up, with its family worship, its hymns and its Scripture memory, and she hoped to see something of the same pattern carried on into the next generations.

She went on writing into her seventies. Collections of her shorter pieces, including Secure in the Everlasting Arms (2002) and Be Still My Soul (2003), gathered the work of many years. But by the turn of the century those around her had begun to notice changes. Gateway to Joy came to an end in 2001. The newsletter ended two years later. The next thing, for Elisabeth Elliot, was to be the hardest of all.

The verse at the head of this chapter comes from a book she knew well. The Preacher does not tell his readers to understand everything before they act. He tells them to do with their might whatever their hand finds to do, because life is short and the opportunity will not last. She spent her life doing that, one duty at a time, and she believed that the God who gave the duties would take care of the rest.