Jim Elliot: The Man Who Would Not Keep His Life

On 28 October 1949, a twenty-two-year-old named Jim Elliot sat down with his journal and wrote one sentence that millions of people have since quoted.

He was not anywhere special. He was not on a mission field or a battlefield. He had graduated from college that summer and gone home to his parents’ house in Portland, Oregon, on the west coast of the United States. He was working, studying his Bible, preaching now and then in small churches, and waiting. He knew he wanted to take the good news of Jesus to people who had never heard it. He did not yet know where. Some of the older Christians around him thought a young man with his gifts would do more good staying in America. He was restless, impatient and, by his own journals, sometimes hard to live with.

That day he had been thinking, as he often did, about what it means to give your life to God. Earlier Christians had written about it; one seventeenth-century English minister, Philip Henry, had said something very like it. But the sentence Jim wrote was his own. It said that a person is not a fool if he gives away what he cannot keep in order to gain what he cannot lose.

We do not know exactly what he was doing that day, or how long he sat over the page. We know only that he was twenty-two and no one was watching. He was not writing an epitaph. He had lost nothing, faced nothing, proved nothing. He was working out, privately and in advance, what he believed his life was for.

Six years later, he would be dead at twenty-eight, killed on a river sandbar in the rainforest of Ecuador, by the people he had gone to reach.

Portland

Philip James Elliot, always called Jim, was born on 8 October 1927 in Portland, Oregon, the third of four children of Fred and Clara Elliot. His father preached in the small Christian congregations of the Plymouth Brethren, a movement that met simply, without professional clergy, and took the Bible with great seriousness. His mother was a chiropractor. The house was busy, plain and full of Scripture. Missionaries and travelling preachers often stayed with them, and the children grew up hearing stories of faraway places where people had never heard of Jesus.

Jim professed faith in Christ as a small boy, at about six. A faith that starts so early has to be taken over by the person as they grow, and Jim’s was. By the time he was a teenager he was not a boy repeating what his parents believed. He was a young man who had decided, for himself, that Jesus Christ was Lord, and that a Lord is someone you obey.

He went to Benson Polytechnic High School in Portland, a large public school where boys learned practical trades as well as ordinary lessons. Jim studied architectural drawing. He was also a gifted and confident speaker, active in public speaking at the school, and he acted in school plays. Those who knew him remembered that he made no secret of being a Christian. He is said to have carried his Bible to school with his schoolbooks, and he was not embarrassed to talk about it. These were the years of the Second World War, and the world his classmates were growing up into was full of fear and loss. Jim had settled the question of where his loyalty lay.

There is something worth noticing here. Jim was talented: a good speaker, good at drawing, physically strong, well liked. Plenty of doors were open to him. Many of the people who make great sacrifices for God have not been people with nothing to lose. Jim had a lot to lose, and he knew it.

Wheaton

In the autumn of 1945, a month before he turned eighteen, Jim enrolled at Wheaton College, a Christian college near Chicago, half a continent away from home.

He threw himself into it. He joined the wrestling team, not mainly to win, but because he believed the discipline would make his body fit to be used by God. He studied hard, chose to major in Greek so that he could read the New Testament in its original language, and did well enough to graduate in 1949 with honours. He was a leader in the college’s missionary fellowship, where students prayed for the nations and for one another’s callings.

He was also intense, and he could be hard on people who were not. He had little patience with what he saw as wasted time: endless socialising, entertainment, campus gossip. Some students found him inspiring. Others found him exhausting. Both reactions were probably fair. Jim’s later journals show that he knew it too, and was often hard on himself.

What fed him most were books about other young Christians who had given everything. He read the diary of David Brainerd, the young missionary to Native Americans who had died in 1747 at twenty-nine, worn out by his work and his illness, and Brainerd’s single-minded devotion became something of a pattern for him. He read Amy Carmichael, the missionary in India. He was not looking for an easy faith. He was looking for one that would cost something.

In the summer of 1947, Jim and a friend went to Mexico for several weeks and stayed with a missionary family. It was his first real taste of life in another culture. He worked at Spanish, met Mexican Christians, and saw for himself what it was like to live among people of another language for the sake of the gospel. He came back sure that God was calling him to Latin America.

He also began, from early 1948, to keep the journal that would later be published. It is a surprising document. It is full of prayers, Bible verses, plans and self-criticism. It is also, as Elisabeth Elliot later said when she let it be printed as he wrote it, earnest and sometimes immature, the private notebook of a young man still growing up.

Holding Things Loosely

At Wheaton, Jim’s closest friend was a fellow wrestler named Dave Howard. At Christmas 1947 Dave brought Jim home to his family in New Jersey, and Jim met Dave’s older sister, Betty, a quiet, serious Greek student a year ahead of him at Wheaton. The next term the two of them began studying together. By the spring of 1948 they were in love.

That should have been simple. It was not. Jim had come to believe that God might be calling him to stay single, so that he could go to the hardest and most dangerous places without anyone depending on him. He was not sure. And he was not willing to let his feelings decide. On 9 June 1948, just before Betty’s graduation, they told each other how they felt, and agreed to give their love back to God, with no promises, and to wait.

They waited five years. That story belongs to Betty, who became Elisabeth Elliot, and it is told in full in her own life story. Here it matters for one reason. Jim’s famous sentence was not only about dying. It was about every good thing a person might clutch. He was learning, in the most personal part of his life, what it meant to hold something precious with an open hand. Jesus said, “For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it” (Matthew 16:25). Jim believed him, and was finding out how hard that was.

It is fair to say that not everyone admires how Jim handled those years. Betty waited a long time, often painfully, and some readers think Jim’s certainty about God’s leading was hard on the people around him. That is part of the honest picture too. Young people who are on fire for God can still hurt others, and still have a lot to learn.

The Line in the Journal

After graduation in June 1949, Jim went home to Portland. For most of the next two years he lived there, working, studying, preaching and praying about where to go. It was during that waiting that he wrote the sentence on 28 October 1949.

It is usually quoted as “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” In the journal, as it was later published, it reads slightly differently: “that which he cannot lose.” The meaning is the same.

What was he saying? Think about the things you cannot keep. Your time is passing whether you like it or not. Your health, your looks, your strength, your reputation, even your life: you will lose every one of them in the end. You cannot hold on to them however hard you grip. Jim’s point was that it is not foolish to give them to God now. It is the only sensible thing to do. And what you gain in return, knowing God and being known by him, being forgiven and made his child through Jesus, is the one thing that can never be taken away.

What did Jim believe about Jesus? That he was the Son of God, who had given his own life on the cross for sinners and risen again; that he was not just a Saviour to be thanked but a Lord to be obeyed; and that people everywhere needed to hear of him. Jim took Paul’s questions seriously: “How can they believe in the One of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone to preach?” (Romans 10:14). If there were people in the world who had never heard the name of Jesus, someone had to go. He could not see why it should not be him.

Ecuador

In the summer of 1950 Jim went to a linguistics course in Oklahoma run by Wycliffe Bible Translators, to learn how to study and write down languages that had never been written. There, by the usual account, he met a missionary who had worked in Ecuador, a small country on the equator in South America. He heard about the Quichua people of the eastern rainforest, and about another people beyond them, called by outsiders the “Aucas,” a Quichua word meaning “savages.” Their own name was, and is, Waorani, “the people.” They lived deep in the forest between two rivers, they had killed outsiders who came into their land, and they had suffered greatly at outsiders’ hands too, from rubber collectors and oil prospectors. No outsider had ever reached them in friendship.

Within months Jim was sure God was sending him to Ecuador. A friend from Seattle, Pete Fleming, agreed to go with him. In February 1952 they arrived in Ecuador. Jim was twenty-four.

He began not with the Waorani but with the Quichua, at a mission station called Shandia, on the edge of the forest. He learned Spanish and then Quichua, preached, taught, built, and ran a small school. In 1953 a flood swept away much of the station, and he rebuilt it. On 8 October 1953, his twenty-sixth birthday, he and Betty were married in Quito, the capital. Their daughter, Valerie, was born in February 1955. He was a husband and a father now, with everything a young man might wish to keep.

But he had never stopped thinking about the Waorani.

What Came After

In the autumn of 1955, Jim and four other young missionaries began a plan to make friendly contact with the Waorani. The others were Pete Fleming; Ed McCully, a friend from Wheaton; Roger Youderian; and Nate Saint, the mission pilot. All five were married, and four had young children. They called it Operation Auca, using the insulting outsiders’ name. For weeks Nate flew over a Waorani settlement while the men lowered gifts on a line from the plane, and the Waorani began to send gifts back. Jim learned a few Waorani phrases from Dayuma, a Waorani woman who had fled her people years before; it turned out later that he had learned them imperfectly. The men kept the plan almost entirely secret. Historians have since asked whether they moved too fast.

On 3 January 1956 they landed on a sandbar on the Curaray River and called it Palm Beach. On 6 January three Waorani came out of the forest and spent a friendly day with them. Two days later, on Sunday 8 January, a group of Waorani men attacked the camp and killed all five with spears. The men had guns, but they had agreed beforehand that they would not use them against the Waorani, because the Waorani were not ready to die and they believed that they themselves were. Jim was twenty-eight.

Years later, the Waorani who were there explained what had happened. A young man who had been at the friendly meeting had told his relatives, to cover up trouble of his own, that the foreigners had attacked them. The Waorani already believed that outsiders were dangerous, and some believed they ate people. They were not monsters. They were frightened people acting on a lie, within a long history of violence, both among themselves and from outsiders. Their side of the story matters as much as the missionaries’ does.

The story did not end on the sandbar. Within weeks it was known around the world. And then Jim’s widow, Elisabeth, with their small daughter, and Rachel Saint, the pilot’s sister, went in 1958 to live among the very people who had killed the men, at their invitation. Elisabeth stayed about three years. Over time many Waorani came to trust Christ, among them some of the men who had been on the beach, and the cycle of killing that had shaped their lives began to slow. Elisabeth spent the rest of her life telling the story honestly, including the parts that did not fit a neat ending: the mistakes, the conflicts among missionaries, and the questions without answers.

Jim did not go to Ecuador looking to die. The five men went in hope. Jesus once said that “unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a seed; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24). On the evening of 8 January 1956, by the silent radio at the mission base, nobody could see any fruit at all. It took years to grow, and it grew in ways none of the five could have planned.

Jim’s sentence has been printed on posters and bookmarks ever since, often by people who know nothing else about him. It is worth remembering that he wrote it long before it cost him anything. He wrote it at twenty-two, at home, in an ordinary week, deciding in advance what he would do with his life. That is the part any young person can copy.

In Their Own Words

“He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.”

— Jim Elliot, his journal (28 October 1949)

Think It Through

1. Jim wrote his famous sentence at twenty-two, before it had cost him anything. Why might it matter to decide what you believe about your life before the hard moments come?
2. Make a list of things you cannot keep, however hard you try. Which of them do you grip most tightly? What would it look like to hold it with an open hand?
3. Jim was intense, and some people found him inspiring while others found him hard to be around. Can a person be very devoted to God and still need to grow in kindness and patience? What does that look like?
4. The Waorani have their own account of what happened at Palm Beach. Why is it important to hear the story from the side of the people missionaries went to, and not only from the missionaries?

Read More on Ochorus

Jim Elliot published no books, but his full biography is on his author page. The rest of his story, and Elisabeth’s, is told in Elisabeth Elliot (For Teens), which follows her from Wheaton through Palm Beach to her years among the Waorani; at greater length in Portraits of Courage – Elisabeth Elliot; and in Men and Women Who Gave Everything. The Key Teachings of Elisabeth Elliot sets out what she came to believe, and you can hear her in sermons such as The Meaning of the Cross and Hearts Set on Pilgrimage. And you can read the book that shaped Jim at Wheaton, The Life and Diary of David Brainerd, or its retelling, The Life and Diary of David Brainerd (For Teens).