This week’s Border Watch piece is a reflection on the lives of Elisabeth and Jim Elliot, Elisabeth having died during the last week.
The paper titled this ‘Lives Sacrificed To Help Strangers’.
The story is more amazing than any work of fiction. Elisabeth and Jim Elliot were newly married in 1953. They had spent their five-year engagement as missionaries on either side of the Andes in different parts of Ecuador. Part of their engagement promise was to learn the Ecuadorian Quichua language before their marriage. They entered this new season of life with a plan to begin a missionary work among the elusive and violent Ecuadorian tribe known as the Auca a word from a local dialect that means ‘savage’.
The Elliots and their colleagues knew the dangers of this undertaking; others who had tried to contact this tribe had been killed. Tragically, Jim Elliot and four others were speared to death by the Aucas.
Widowed Elisabeth, along with her ten-month-old daughter Valerie, continued working among another group in Ecuador. After a time she encountered two women from the Auca peoples. Those two women lived with Elliot for a year, and through that contact she would eventually move to, and live with, the Auca tribe for two years.
In that time the seeds were sown for a work that would help see the tribe renounce their violence. They are now more properly known as the Huoroni.
Elizabeth Elliot realised the dream she shared with her late husband, working among those who had taken his life in brutal fashion.
Eventually she would leave Ecuador and return to the United States where another life of writing and speaking would follow. She died during the last week aged 88, some 62 years after Jim’s death (Elizabeth had remarried, been widowed and remarried again).
Though separated for so much of their lives, their shared beliefs were as one.
Jim’s philosophy of life was “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.”
Elisabeth would write “One does not surrender a life in an instant. That which is lifelong can only be surrendered in a lifetime.”
The vast majority of us will never have experiences such as these in our lives. We will never find ourselves speared to death trying to help a group of strangers; we will never find ourselves living among those responsible for the death of our beloved, helping them learn the way of peace.
Is there anything we can learn, those of us who live less remarkable and more secure lives?
They lived for eternity.
Jesus said “Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will keep it.”
The Elliots were in Ecuador seeking to live among people renowned for murder because their lives did not belong to them. Instead, they knew they had received a gift from God that was worth more than anything they could secure for themselves. Personal health, wealth, security, long life or fame were not their goals. Their aim was to serve a people group numbered in the hundreds, in obscurity, at the end of the earth.
Following Jesus is not about personal fulfilment. It’s about sharing what we’ve received with those who need it most.
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