Elisabeth Elliot | Stray Thoughts

Carrie’s Reading to Know Book Club has been featuring classics this year, trading off between adult and children’s classics. Carrie asked several blog friends to choose a book for each month. I was honored to be asked, but had a hard time deciding on which of multitudes of favorite books to choose. Finally I decided I wanted to include a missionary classic, which is one of my favorite genres, and Through Gates of Splendor by Elisabeth Elliot seemed recent enough and its story well-known enough that I felt it would be accessible to anyone who wanted to read it.

Through Gates of Splendor was, I believe, the first missionary book I ever read, sparking a lifetime of exploring other missionary books and Elisabeth Elliot’s writing. I’ve read it multiple times since. I listed it among the 98 Books That Have Enriched My Life and Books to Read Before You Die. It’s the story of how five men and their families came to minister together together among Indians in Ecuador, how they became interested in what was then known as the Auca tribe, fierce warriors who killed any outsiders (as well as their own tribesmen), how they determined to try to reach them, how they went about it, how they were killed, and how a wife of one man and sister of another were eventually given the opportunity to live with this tribe.

It’s not just fascinating for the sake of the story: it’s fascinating to read how each of these very different men and their wives came to know the Lord and then felt called to their particular field. These men didn’t know, when they went to the mission field, that they would be martyrs, though once they began to consider reaching the Aucas, they knew it was a possibility. But they each gave their lives to God to use in any way that He saw fit, and their faith and walk with Him is inspiring.

Some like to watch the films of books along with or after reading, so you might be interested to know there is a DVD called Through Gates of Splendor here (it seems to be also on YouTube here), narrated by Elisabeth Elliot, using footage that she, Nate Saint, and Life Magazine had taken. Also several years ago the film “End of the Spear” (linked to my thoughts) came out. The book is much deeper and fuller, and some have various problems with the film, as I discussed, but it’s okay if you want to see a general visualization. I would highly recommend Beyond the Gates of Splendor: it is a documentary made fifty years after the events of the book. Here is an excerpt:

At the wrap-up post at the end, I’ll have some other resources for those who might want to read more about those involved in this story which has been used by the Lord in remarkable ways.

If you’d like to join in the Carrie’s Book Club to read it, just leave a note at her place saying so, and at the end of the month she’ll have a post where all those who read it can post comments or links to their own blog post about it. That’s one of the most fun parts of this book club: discussing the book we’re reading with others.

It was the first week of January, 1956, that Operation Auca finally began to come to fruition for five missionary couples in Ecuador: Jim and Elisabeth Elliot, Roger and Barbara Youderian, Nate and Marj Saint, Ed and Marilou McCully, and Pete and Olive Fleming. On January 8, one of the men radioed the wives back at their stations, “Pray, girls: today’s the day!” On this date, January 9, the scheduled radio contact did not come and a missionary friend flew over the area where the men had been camped and saw their airplane stripped of fabric but saw no one. It was two days later that the first bodies were found. The men had been speared to death on January 8.

I can only imagine what it was like for those five women to go through those days with hope but no word and then to finally learn that their husband were gone and they were alone thousands of miles from home.

Yet, as many of you know, God used this incident to greatly impact both the Aucas (now know as Waodani or Huaorani) and the rest of the world. Later Rachel Saint (sister to Nate) and Elisabeth Elliot and her daughter Valerie were invited to come and live with the Aucas, and eventually many of them were led to the Lord: one of the killers even became a surrogate grandfather to Steve Saint’s children.

And not til eternity will we know the full impact of these men and their wives. Many lives have been touched, stirred, and inspired. Sometimes we still wrestle with why things happened as they did, but there is no doubt God used them.

A good post on the impact of Jim Elliot in particular is Today Jim Elliot was Killed. If you ever have the chance, see the documentary Beyond the Gates of Splendor. It is in four parts on Vimeo (Part 1, 2, 3, and 4), but I found the audio a bit hard to hear even turned all the way up.

In June for Carrie’s Reading to Know Book Club I’ll be hosting the reading of Through Gates of Splendor, Elisabeth Elliot’s book on the five families, what led them to Ecuador, and how their families coped in the aftermath of the men’s deaths. But when I realized this was the anniversary of that time, I couldn’t let it go by without acknowledgment.

I’ll leave you with some excerpts someone put together of the wives’ testimonies from Beyond the Gates of Splendor.