Her Life

My times are in thy hand: deliver me from the hand of mine enemies, and from them that persecute me. PSALM 31:15

A missionary household. Elisabeth Howard was born in Brussels on 21 December 1926, the second of six children of Philip E. Howard Jr. and Katharine Gillingham Howard, who were serving there as missionaries. The family returned to the United States while she was still a baby, and she grew up first in Germantown, in Philadelphia, and then in Moorestown, New Jersey. Her father became editor of the Sunday School Times, a widely read evangelical weekly. The household was ordered by Scripture: family worship morning and evening, hymns sung from memory, verses learned by heart, and a steady stream of missionaries passing through and sitting at the table. Summers were spent at the family’s place in Franconia, New Hampshire. Her brothers and sister — Philip, David, Virginia, Thomas and James — went in different directions; David became a leader in missions, and Thomas a writer who in later life became a Roman Catholic. Many years later she described that home, with gratitude and without pretending it was perfect, in The Shaping of a Christian Family.

School and Greek. For high school she was sent to Hampden DuBose Academy, a Christian boarding school in Florida. From 1944 to 1948 she studied at Wheaton College in Illinois, where she majored in Classical Greek. She meant to translate the Bible into an unwritten language, and she prepared for it with the same seriousness she brought to everything. At Wheaton she met a friend of her brother Dave, a wrestler and student of Greek from Portland, Oregon, named Jim Elliot.

Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths. PROVERBS 3:5–6

The waiting years. What followed was one of the slowest courtships in the annals of evangelical romance, and one of the best known, because she later told it in Passion and Purity. The two were drawn to each other, and both were determined to put that attraction under the lordship of Christ. Jim was uncertain for a long time whether God was calling him to remain single for the sake of the work, and he would make no promise he was not sure he could keep. For some five years there was no engagement and very little certainty, much of the relationship carried on by letter across long distances. In those years she studied at Prairie Bible Institute in Three Hills, Alberta, and took linguistic training with the Summer Institute of Linguistics. Jim sailed for Ecuador with his friend Pete Fleming and arrived early in 1952. She went to Ecuador the same year, not as his fiancée but as a single missionary in her own right.

The Colorados. Her first assignment was among the Colorado people, now usually called the Tsáchila, at San Miguel de los Colorados in the western forest. With other single women missionaries she set out to reduce their unwritten language to writing. The work went slowly, and then went badly. Her chief language helper, a man named Don Macario, was murdered. Later a suitcase containing a great deal of her language work was stolen and never recovered. Months of labour were simply gone. She did not pretend to understand it, and many years afterwards she wrote about these losses, and what they had taught her about the God who does not explain Himself, in These Strange Ashes.

Quichua first. In January 1953 she and Jim were at last engaged, in Quito. He asked that she learn Quichua, the language of the people he was working among in the eastern jungle, before they married, and she did. That summer a flood swept away much of his station at Shandia. They were married in a civil ceremony in Quito on 8 October 1953, Jim’s twenty-sixth birthday, and went to live among the Quichua at Shandia and nearby. Their daughter, Valerie, was born on 27 February 1955.

When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee: when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee. ISAIAH 43:2

The Curaray. For years the missionaries had heard of the Waorani — then known to outsiders by the slur “Auca” — a small people of the eastern forest feared for killing intruders. In the autumn of 1955 Jim, Pete Fleming, Ed McCully, Roger Youderian and the Mission Aviation Fellowship pilot Nate Saint began dropping gifts to a Waorani settlement from the air. On 3 January 1956 the five men landed on a sandbar of the Curaray River they called Palm Beach. Three days later they had a friendly meeting with a Waorani man and two women. On 8 January all five were speared to death. They had carried guns, and had agreed among themselves not to use them against the Waorani. A search party found their bodies some days later. Life magazine carried photographs, and the story of the five widows — Elisabeth, Marj Saint, Olive Fleming, Marilou McCully and Barbara Youderian — went round the world.

The widow at Shandia. She did not go home. She stayed at Shandia with her baby daughter and carried on the Quichua work her husband had left. In those first years she wrote Through Gates of Splendor, published in 1957, the account of the five men and their deaths that made the story known to millions, and Shadow of the Almighty, published in 1958, a life of Jim built round his journals. Both books sold in great numbers. Both would follow her for the rest of her life.

Among the Waorani. Meanwhile Dayuma, a Waorani woman who had fled her people years before, was teaching the language to Rachel Saint, Nate’s sister. In 1957 two Waorani women, Mintaka and Mankamu, came out of the forest, and lived for a time with Elisabeth, who began to learn their language from them. In October 1958 Elisabeth, with Valerie, then about three, and Rachel Saint, went with them and Dayuma to live among the Waorani. The people gave her the name Gikari, which means woodpecker. Over the following years several of those who had taken part in the killings came to faith in Christ, among them Kimo, Dyuwi and Mincaye, and in time Kimo and Dyuwi baptised Nate Saint’s children in the Curaray. Her relationship with Rachel Saint was strained, and in 1961 she left the Waorani and returned to Quichua work. The Savage My Kinsman, a book of photographs and text about those years, appeared in 1961.

Home. In 1963 she returned to the United States and settled in Franconia. She wrote. No Graven Image, a novel about a young missionary linguist, appeared in 1966; its ending, in which the missionary’s best efforts lead to a man’s death and no explanation is given, unsettled many evangelical readers who had expected a different sort of story from the widow of Jim Elliot. The Liberty of Obedience appeared in 1968, and the same year Who Shall Ascend, a life of the mission leader R. Kenneth Strachan.

For his anger endureth but a moment; in his favour is life: weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning. PSALM 30:5

Widowed again. On 1 January 1969 she married Addison H. Leitch, a professor of theology who taught at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary until his death. By her own account it was a happy marriage, and it was a short one. Leitch developed cancer, and she cared for him through his illness until he died in September 1973. She was forty-six, and a widow for the second time.

Lars, and Magnolia. In December 1977 she married Lars Gren, a former hospital chaplain who had boarded in her home. They made their home in Magnolia, Massachusetts, on the coast north of Boston, and he remained at her side for the rest of her life. Valerie married Walter Shepard, a Presbyterian minister, and they had eight children. Let Me Be a Woman, written as a series of letters for Valerie around the time of her marriage, had appeared in 1976.

The teaching years. The two decades that followed were the most fruitful of her life as a teacher. She taught as a writer and adjunct at Gordon-Conwell, spoke at conferences across the country and abroad, and from about 1982 to 2004 wrote The Elisabeth Elliot Newsletter, read by many thousands. The books came steadily: The Mark of a Man in 1981, Discipline: The Glad Surrender in 1982, Passion and Purity in 1984, A Chance to Die, her life of Amy Carmichael, in 1987, Loneliness in 1988, On Asking God Why in 1989, A Path Through Suffering in 1990, The Shaping of a Christian Family in 1992, Keep a Quiet Heart in 1995, Quest for Love in 1996, and others. From 1988 to 2001 her voice went out every weekday on the fifteen-minute radio programme Gateway to Joy, produced by Back to the Bible. Each broadcast began by reminding her listeners that they were loved with an everlasting love and that underneath were the everlasting arms.

The long twilight. From the early 2000s she suffered from a progressive dementia. Secure in the Everlasting Arms appeared in 2002 and Be Still My Soul in 2003, both gathered largely from earlier writing, and then she withdrew from public ministry. Lars cared for her at home in Magnolia through a long decline. She died there on 15 June 2015, aged eighty-eight.

Now also when I am old and greyheaded, O God, forsake me not; until I have shewed thy strength unto this generation, and thy power to every one that is to come. PSALM 71:18

What kind of woman. Those who knew her describe a reserved, formidably disciplined woman with a measured voice, a dry wit and a strong dislike of fuss. She could be intimidating. She was not warm in the easy way, and she did not pretend to feelings she did not have. But she gave a great deal of time to people who wrote to her or sought her out, and she told the truth about her own struggles in a way that made strangers feel less alone. She would not have wanted her life remembered as a story of heroism. She would have wanted it remembered as a long obedience — a woman doing, for nearly ninety years, the next thing God gave her to do.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Her early language work was lost twice over, through a murder and a theft. Is there a labour of yours that seems to have come to nothing? Bring it to God by name.

2. She was widowed twice and did not stop serving. Think of one loss that has tempted you to withdraw from God’s work, and ask Him what faithfulness looks like now.

3. She went to live among the people who had killed her husband. Is there someone you have refused to go near because of what they did? Pray for them today.

4. Her home was ordered around Scripture, hymns and prayer. Choose one small habit of that kind and begin it in your own household this week.

5. Read Psalm 31 slowly, and put your own times — past, present and to come — into God’s hand.

A PRAYER

Father, my times are in Your hand: my birth and my schooling, my waiting and my losses, my work and my old age.

Thank You for the patience with which You led Your servant Elisabeth through the waters and the fire, and did not let them overflow her.

Where my work has come to nothing, teach me to trust You with it. Where I have been bereaved, keep me from shrinking back.

Make my life, too, a long obedience in the same direction, and carry me to the end, for the sake of Jesus Christ. Amen.