Elisabeth Elliot: She Went Back
On January 8, 1956, five young American missionaries were speared to death on a riverbank in Ecuador. They had been trying to make peaceful contact with the Huaorani people – a tribe so isolated and so violent that they had killed almost every outsider who had ever come near them.
One of the five men was Jim Elliot. He was 28 years old. He had been married to Elisabeth for less than three years.
Jim had written in his journal: He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose. He had known the risk. He had gone anyway. And now he was gone, and Elisabeth was a widow in the Amazon jungle with a ten-month-old daughter and a decision to make.
Most people would have left. Elisabeth Elliot went back.
Two years after Jim’s death, Elisabeth and her daughter Valerie, now three years old, walked into the jungle and went to live among the Huaorani people. With her was Rachel Saint, the sister of one of the other slain missionaries. They had made contact with two Huaorani women who were willing to bring them in.
What followed over the next two years is one of the most astonishing stories in the history of Christian mission.
Elisabeth and Valerie lived in a Huaorani village. Elisabeth learned the language. She ate their food. She built relationships with the very men who had held the spears. And she watched, slowly, over time, the gospel take root in the people her husband had died trying to reach.
Several of the men who had killed Jim Elliot eventually became Christians. Some of them became elders in the Huaorani church. One of them later baptized Steve Saint, the son of another murdered missionary.
Elisabeth went on to write dozens of books, including Through Gates of Splendor, the account of the five missionaries and their deaths, which has inspired generations of young men and women to give their lives to the mission of God. She spoke at universities, conferences, and churches around the world. She was married twice more. She suffered from dementia in her final years and died in 2015 at the age of 88.
But it is that moment she always comes back to. The moment she decided not to run from the place where everything had been taken from her, but to walk back in.
She did not go back because she had stopped grieving. She went back because she had something the grief could not take from her.