The Waiting Years

“It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the LORD.”

— Lamentations 3:26, KJV

Three Hills

In the autumn of 1948 Elisabeth Howard went north to Canada, to the Prairie Bible Institute at Three Hills, Alberta. It was a long way from Moorestown in every sense. Three Hills was a small farming town on the open plains north-east of Calgary, bitterly cold in winter and remote at any season, and the institute was a large, plain, intensely disciplined Bible school founded in 1922 by L. E. Maxwell, an American who had come to the Canadian prairies as a young man. Maxwell was a preacher of the cross. His great theme was the believer’s union with Christ in his death, and the call to die daily to self. His students lived simply, worked hard, rose early, and were expected to take the cost of discipleship with complete seriousness. Many of them went on to the mission field, and the school sent out missionaries all over the world.

Elisabeth went to Prairie for a year of Bible study after her Greek degree, to prepare herself further for missionary work. The austerity of the place, and its stress on self-denial, suited the mood in which she had left Wheaton. She had laid her love on the altar, and she was determined to leave it there. The year was not easy. She was lonely and far from home, she did not know whether she would ever marry, and the letters from Jim, when they came, were careful and uncommitted. But she worked, and she prayed, and she later counted the year as part of her training.

After the year at the institute she stayed on in Alberta for a time, doing rural Sunday school work among the farms around the hamlet of Patience, and learning what it meant to work far from the support of family and friends. It was, in its way, an apprenticeship for what was to come.

Jim’s Road

Meanwhile Jim finished his studies at Wheaton and graduated in 1949. He went home to Portland and spent a good deal of the next two years there, working, studying the Bible, preaching in small churches and assemblies, and seeking God’s direction. He was impatient with what he saw as the complacency of American churches, and he was increasingly certain that God was calling him to pioneer missionary work, though for a long time he did not know where.

In the summer of 1950 Jim attended the Summer Institute of Linguistics at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, the training school run by Wycliffe Bible Translators. There he met people with experience of Ecuador, and he heard about the Quichua people of the eastern rainforest and about the Waorani, a people beyond them whom no outsider had yet reached in friendship. Within months he was convinced that God was sending him to Ecuador. He looked for a companion and found one in Pete Fleming, a gifted young man from Seattle with a master’s degree in literature, who after much prayer decided to go with him. The two of them prepared for more than a year. On 4 February 1952 they sailed from San Pedro, California, and they reached Ecuador later that month.

None of this made things simpler for Elisabeth. Jim was still not sure about marriage, and he still said so. For a time he seemed to lean towards it and then away again. The two of them met only a handful of times in the four years after Wheaton, and their meetings were often brief and sometimes painful. Their letters, many of which their daughter later published in Devotedly, show two people who loved each other and were trying hard to be honest with God and with each other, and who did not always succeed in understanding each other. There were misunderstandings and silences.

A Call of Her Own

Through these years Elisabeth held on to the conviction she had formed at Hampden DuBose and at Wheaton: that God had called her to translate the Scriptures for a people who did not have them. She took the course of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, learning how to analyse the sounds and structure of an unwritten language, how to devise an alphabet for it, and how to begin the slow work of grammar and dictionary from nothing. She was good at it. Her ear and her training in Greek gave her a head start, and she found that the work suited her careful, methodical mind.

The question was where to go. In the end she settled on Ecuador, where there were peoples whose languages had never been written down, and where missionaries already at work were glad of a trained linguist. It is natural to wonder whether she would have chosen Ecuador if Jim had not been going there. The sources do not settle the question, and it may be that she could not have settled it herself. What is clear is that she went with no promise from Jim, no engagement and no understanding, and that she went to do work of her own, independently, as a single missionary. If Jim had decided in the end to remain single, she would have been a single woman in Ecuador, and she knew it.

She sailed for Ecuador in April 1952 and went up to Quito, the capital, high in the Andes. Jim was there already. He and Pete Fleming were living in the city and studying Spanish before going down to the eastern jungle, and for some months the two of them were in the same city for the first time in years. They saw each other. But they were not engaged, and Jim was not yet ready to say more than he had said before. Elisabeth threw herself into learning Spanish and preparing for her own work, which would take her not east to the jungle but west, down the other side of the Andes, to a different people altogether.

Waiting Well

Elisabeth Elliot later wrote and spoke a great deal about waiting, and about loneliness, and about the temptation to seize what God has not yet given. She knew what she was talking about. The years between 1948 and 1952 were among the hardest of her life, not because anything dramatic happened in them, but because nothing did. She did not know whether she would marry the man she loved. She did not know whether her own calling would bear fruit. She had to go on doing what was in front of her each day, without knowing how any of it would end.

The verse at the head of this chapter comes from the book of Lamentations, written in the ruins of Jerusalem by a man who had lost almost everything. In the middle of his grief he says that it is good to hope and quietly wait for the Lord. Quiet waiting is one of the hardest things God asks of his people. Elisabeth Howard learned it in these years, imperfectly and with many tears, and it was a lesson she would need again.