1952 Love Waits (Again)

1952 Love Waits (Again)

Love Waits (Again)

EH (January 2), New York: Alone once more, in my little apartment. It is dreary with rain outdoors, and I feel how sad this world really is. Truly a vale of tears, with nothing but meeting and parting and much sorrow and suffering. I think of dear Mother at home, alone now after a happy Christmas with all the family. As I look forward to my departure for the field, it is very hard to think of what it will mean to her. The Lord alone can sustain us. . . .

This being alone is an awful thing to me. I do not know why. It was the same when I spent three weeks alone in a trailer in Alberta. There is an overwhelming sense of uselessness, and a pall of darkness that seems to “veil His lovely face.”

Just now I read in Psalm 90:15, “Make us glad according to the days wherein Thou hast afflicted us.” I have asked the Father for His joy and peace. Just now I feel very close to tears. There is that tightness in my throat, and I feel that if I try to speak, I shall cry.

I know that in reading over this entry later on, I shall say, “What a way to begin a new year.” But I am honest, and after all, what is one day above another? Time means nothing to God. He is with me “all the days.”

My desire for 1952, the prayer of my heart—oneness with the Lord.

She would not dissolve into that “vale of tears” the way she’d seen others do. She often used that same expression with me—not “dissolving into a vale of tears”—when I experienced hurt and disappointment growing up, because as she helped me see, it wouldn’t do any good! If my faith was deeply affirmed and taught by the Scriptures, I could be assured the Lord was in charge, He was with me, and nothing could separate me from His love. And she could say it with such confidence because she had so often put it into practice after reading His Word.

I’m sure she faced this difficult beginning of the year with her usual stoicism and desire to do only what pleased God, not herself. Yes, waiting on His timing and direction, as she was currently doing, is probably the hardest thing He asks of a true disciple. But as 1952 dawned, despite not knowing what her departure for the field would look like, she knew His Word would hold true, and she would accept it, whatever it meant.

This was the year in which being a missionary would become more than a mere concept to her and my father. Being a missionary would now become a living reality. What would it mean for them? How would it change them? In late December, she had lamented in her journal from this same, lonely New York apartment . . .

I have been here three weeks today—and have visited not one family with the gospel. My conscience (I guess it is my conscience) condemns me constantly. Somehow I cannot bring myself to do it.

I am afraid, for one thing. Of what, I hardly know. Is this direct, deliberate disobedience? Am I defeated, Lord?—undertake! Show me what to do. Give me power or love, or both, or whatever it is I need. I know that to do anything in my own strength, even if it salves my conscience because I’m “doing something for the Lord,” is worse than useless. And here I am, a prospective MISSIONARY.

The truth, as she’d written to my father between Christmas and the new year:

I think often we “prospective missionaries” get a false idea that somehow everything is going to be different on the “field,” including ourselves. Not so. Granted, there will be much that is different in our environment, many adjustments necessary. Let us not minimize these. But on the other hand, it is the same Presence and Power that accompanies and indwells us, the same necessity for drawing from the Source.

And as old Pike used to say, “You’re STUCK with yourself.” It is the same “sad, sweet, stinking self” that we shall have to deal with. And the more trying the circumstances, the sadder, the sweeter, the more stinking that self! . . . Oh, Jim, what a tremendously serious thing—this missionary business.

Simply the mechanics of it, if nothing else. The logistics of it; the decisions to be made. Traveling by air or by sea? Leaving from what city? The shots, the permits, the paperwork. And what to take? What kind of clothes? What kind of cooking equipment? And books? And bedding? And everything!

That’s what my father was finalizing right at this moment, engrossed in his last-minute packing.

January 15

Your letter came a week ago today, and I have only had time to look at it three times. I opened it with the end of the paint brush with which I was lettering my name and destination on my packing barrels. . . . Wednesday, more packing. Thursday, all the stuff has to be taken to the dock and billed for leaving. I ended up with two steel barrels (best way to pack anything), two wooden crates, two footlockers, and a wardrobe trunk—seven pieces—1,400 pounds. I hope you will do better. Pete only had 900 pounds. I had most of the heavy stuff—slides and recorder, tubs and guns, pots and kettles and dishes.

Quite a challenge. But of all the needed preparations, none was more valuable (they knew) than hearing from the Lord, staying spiritually sensitive, remaining deeply in prayer.

As evidence of my father’s devotion to prayer, be inspired by this snatch from the same January 15 letter written from Oakland, California, where he and Pete were continuing to speak and raise pledges of support, right up to departure time.

My father in Oakland, California, waiting and praying to sail to Ecuador.

I find no time at all for closet prayer. We haven’t a room of our own here, and I miss the sense of “bowing my knees,” as Paul says. Praying while seated does not lend the effect that kneeling has, and I cannot be comfortable kneeling in the living room where we sleep. Privacy before the God who “sees in secret” is an integral part of true prayer, and one hates to be obvious in asking for privacy somehow. God knows and hears. But I miss a certain effect, with others walking about. What will Shandia be with the curious eyes of Quichua boys?

When was the last time any of us took our private praying so seriously? But just as the Lord met my father in prayer, He also answered my mother’s prayers for direction and leading. God’s timely preparation was proving more than adequate—and, as you’ll see, more revealing of her future than she could yet know. The following is from her journal:

January 18: Last Friday I spent the day with Doreen Clifford, British missionary returning to the western jungle of Ecuador for the second time. It was very profitable to talk with her and get some idea of conditions there. She gave me much practical advice on what to expect and necessary equipment.

But more than that—she told me of the burden she has for the yet untouched Auca tribe of Indians on the Napo River. Humanly, it would be impossible for women to do such work. Men have tried, and been killed. But she believes the Lord has given her this concern for some purpose—if only to pray. Or perhaps she might be a stepping stone for someone else to go in. She said she felt she should work with someone else if God leads her into the field, and asked me to pray about whether He might want me to go with her.

I feel that I can record this in my journal, for I am asking God’s direction about it. But I would hardly dare mention it to others. It would seem so fantastic and visionary. And I have no idea what it involves. I have not had experience of any kind in Ecuador, let alone such a seemingly hopeless task. I do not want to be an upstart. “Fools rush in . . .” God, and God alone, must guide. . . .

But over six years ago, when I asked His will for my life pursuit, I felt that He wanted me in pioneer work, especially with a view to linguistic work. If this is a glimpse of His ultimate purpose for me, I am glad. But I must walk softly. And I must be very sure of every step. Sometimes I think we are more concerned with what is commonly called prudence than we are to “go in and possess the land.” May God give to me the spirit that led Jesus to Jerusalem, for “as the Master, shall the servant be.”

The weeks ahead would yield greater clarity, of course. But as God would have it, her experience of discerning and applying His will (as with most of us) would come about through long days of staying diligent, staying teachable. And in her case, staying lonely.

My longing for J. does not abate. It is a hunger that causes my whole being to cry out in anguish. Oh, I am weary, so weary of being alone. How often I say in my heart, involuntarily it seems, “Lord Jesus, how long?”

I’m sure hearing word from my dad by letter was somewhat helpful, while it lasted. He was leaving soon, and she knew it. But judging from the three letters he wrote during the last week of January, the loneliness was as deeply felt on his side of the continent.

January 25

It seems like a long, long time since I’ve been with you, and even the memory, though happy, is fleeting and unreal. . . . Your last letter which awaited me here (for which I was thankful) was moving to me. It made me wish I could be with you just once more before leaving, to hold you close and soak your warmth up into me. Aunt Mabel suggested you fly out here (with what, I don’t know), and I have toyed with the idea, but feel now it would not be good. I dare not get the taste for you again, Lisa [a newer nickname he’d been calling her]—never, until it can be completely fulfilled. Even if you should come to Ecuador and we were in a certain proximity in Quito, we must guard ourselves from much loving.

They would. And they did. And my mother would do most of the guarding.

But this will be more clearly seen there, and we can decide then. God help us to “look not back.” I know it will be easier for me than for you, a woman left with no promises, and hoping toward God in a man so volatile as I. Hope thou in God, for we shall yet praise Him, who is the “help of my countenance.” I’m needing a help for my countenance these days, and I know you will need the same. . . .

I think it is part of God’s reason for bringing us together, our mutual need, and I see only good in stating it and realizing God’s purposes before one another. You say I can “take it or leave it” [referring to something she’d written, saying she felt at home by his side]. I take it. All of it. And I hope my side will one day be as home to you, your solace and haven. It’s what my side was made for.

But before he left, he wondered something. Would she be open to a phone call?

If you’re of a young enough age, you won’t relate to what the planning for this event entailed. These were pre-cellphone days, obviously. But not only that, she didn’t have a landline in her apartment. And she wasn’t at her family’s home with a familiar number. Nor could she alert him fast enough by mail with a time and telephone number where he could reach her.

The only solution was what now seems an archaic one. He phoned her parents by way of a “person-to-person” call. This was a commonly employed safeguard against racking up long-distance charges. If the person you were trying to reach wasn’t home, no minutes would be billed even if someone picked up. The one who answered heard the operator say who was calling, and for whom, and could then relay information back through the operator to the caller (who could hear all this), telling what time the person would be back or where he or she could be currently located. That’s how my dad learned what number to dial in New York.

Not the first night, however, my mother said.

February 2: Spent an agonizing night waiting for his call here at Shelton College, only to find a telegram from him in Brooklyn when I got home. He said he would call on Friday. . . . So last night, following a meeting in Newark, I came to Shelton and stayed in Phil’s room [her eldest brother], since he and Margaret had gone home for the weekend.

At long last, the call came through.

“I talked with Jim at about 11:45,” she recorded in her journal. (“I’ve no idea what it must have cost,” she later said—“nine minutes!”) “His voice—so clear, so loved, but so far away. I felt so cut off from him. But we were happy in this brief form of contact.”

He told me he loves me, and asked if I loved him. I said that I could hardly help myself. Oh, how I long for the day when I can volunteer my love to him, freely and unfettered by present limitations.

Because, truly, she loved him more than words could say, even if she’d felt the permission to say them.

February 4: O, that I could tell him of my love. I feel that I cannot let go until we become engaged. Then, then I shall tell him all that I can find words to express. And there is so much—stored up during these nearly four years! . . . I never dreamed it possible so to love. I love him with all my being—strongly, passionately, tenderly, as only one can love who has had it tried in fire and water.

And on this day—February 4, 1952—though delayed by a couple of weeks for various reasons, their love was being tried on the waters of the Pacific Ocean.

Pete Fleming and my father, ready at the dock.

Wire just came from Jim that he is sailing at noon today. It is now 4 p.m., which means he has been on the sea for an hour. . . . Now that he is no longer even in the same country, I feel more cut off than ever. The “sword-cut” [an Amy Carmichael term] is not a myth. The Lord is “touched with the feeling.” It is comfort.

As a way of staying present with him, my mother sent him letters in advance to be opened on certain days of his voyage. She knew he might not receive any more of her letters than those he’d received in Los Angeles before he boarded. “Very sweet of you to think of that, Betts,” he said. “If my wanting you increases in the next two weeks as it has in the past one, I’ll be needing a little touch from you about then.” She had a keen sense about the joy of surprises, and often planned them for me as well, which always gave me hopeful anticipation in the waiting. I’m sure her postdated letters delighted my dad on ship.

Examples of the envelope inscriptions my mother wrote on a series of notes she sent along with him, to open during his voyage.

His published journals are already rich in details of his journey on board the Santa Juana. I’ll only summarize by saying that the freighter held twelve passengers, as well as the ship’s captain and crew. Meals and accommodations were first-class, like nothing to which he was accustomed, and he expressed his awe of it. The ease of travel and the delicious food (which they ate at the same time as the captain and crew, in the same dining room) made Pete and him feel spoiled, knowing how austere and simple their life would be in the jungle. But they knew beyond doubt their only motive for going was to point the Indians to Christ, so they received this brief time of luxury as a gift from their gracious Father. My dad reveled in watching the ocean and the night sky, experiencing the incomparable quiet (unlike the bustle of modern cruise ships, with too many activities planned to allow time for even reading a book on deck), and anticipating the longed-for arrival in Ecuador.

But back in Brooklyn, in my mother’s lonely walk-up, there wasn’t much new to see or to feel. Yet God was there, and in His presence came encouragement.

February 12: Oh, it is one thing to declare, in giving a brave testimony, that there is no such thing as sacrifice, in the light of eternity and its rewards, but it is quite another to believe, in my heart of hearts, that it is not sacrifice. For there is constant longing, longing for Jim—for his presence, the comfort of his arms, the strength of his body, the love of his heart.

This afternoon, in one of those “upward glancings of an eye,” accompanied by a sigh, directed Godward, I found myself asking for a child—for a little boy of my own—that I might learn of him and give him back to God. I am past twenty-five. I read the other day in an obstetrics book that the best time for a woman to bear children is between 20–25. That prime of life is gone for me.

It is lost, I said to myself this morning. “Lost?” said the Father. “Yes, lost,” said I. “But I thought you had given Me those years?” “Yes, Lord, I did. They were Thine.” “Then they are not lost. They are kept in the heavenly storehouse. Someday thou shalt see the glory. Thou canst not see it now—thou seest only the apparent loss on earth. Thine eyes are blinded with fruitless longing. Look away to My eternal purposes.”

So, Lord—I look. I thank Thee for the word of assurance. “Give the world joy, but patience to the saints.”

Isn’t it true, we never know the “eternal purposes” God has in store, no matter how certain we feel of what’s over and done with. He even knew of her need for a daughter, not a son. She often told me of her gratitude that God gave her a daughter, believing a girl was easier to raise without a father than a son would have been. And speaking of “patience,” she would need lots of it as she continued the work of seeking support for her upcoming missionary undertakings. From two of her February letters:

February 12

I am wearied-wearied of meetings, teas, contacts, letter-writing. And this after so short a time! I don’t know how you stood it for at least five months straight. Last night, Plainfield; tonight, Palisades Park; tomorrow, Jersey City; Thursday, White Plains. I don’t know how I’ll live through it much longer. And these women are the eatingest crowd—they feel they must serve tea and cake at every meeting. It seems so useless to me. One has plenty of opportunity to become acquainted without eating all the time. If only the money spent on needless food—

I am not complaining. The Lord is sweet to me just now, and He has given great cause for thankfulness. The truths concerning Himself which He is unfolding seem to be opening a whole new realm to me—chiefly along the line of His Fatherhood and my sonship. The book of John is tremendous on this truth.

Your letter from Mexico came Monday. . . . It is good to hear that your trip has been enjoyable so far. You didn’t say whether or not you’d been sick! That might help keep your weight down. You must be positively blubbery by now. Horrors. (I am the same charming crowbar.)

Thank you for describing your stateroom. It is those little things that help me picture you in your surroundings—and I want to be able to picture you. But who uses the Avon cologne? The very idea is revolting to me. It goes along with suede shoes and greased pompadours. Let me know when you start polishing your nails.

Your exhortations on accepting what is, and not longing for what is not, were helpful to me. There is no possible comfort to assuage the “fury of desire” of which you speak—and which I too experience—except for the constant “looking away to Jesus, who for the joy”. . . the recognition of that eternal weight of glory, which surely is stored in the heavenly garners in mammoth proportion to every earthly “sacrifice.” But there are times when the short-range view makes it seem a very real sacrifice.

February 21

You and Pete must be having the time of your young lives. My, what a contrast your situation is to mine! And by the time you receive this, things will be even more interesting, I imagine. I have to remind myself now and again that I am writing to a foreign missionary. You are actually “on the field” (what a strange terminology—how did we get it?) and in the place of God’s choice for your life. It is a milestone, indeed. But it is no different, I suppose, than any other place. You have the same Lord. (I’m not giving a homily—only putting down the thoughts that come as I try to imagine your setup.)

The other day as I passed the Statue of Liberty on a ferry, I could not help wondering how long it will be before I actually steam down that same river, headed for Ecuador. It gives me a shudder whenever I see those big ships now—and it is nearly every day that I see them.

But even as they thought to the future, they couldn’t help reflecting on the past.

Your reminiscences awakened memories which I have not thought of for some time. The Lagoon—oh, the scenes and emotions which come—the heavy mist that night when the watchman surprised us! That was the first time you ever put your head in my lap. We sat quiet, and watched a piece of moon rise from the dim lake. You took my wrist in your hand, and slid your hand up my sleeve to the elbow—another of those “first times.”. . .

And, oh, I can remember the anguish of walking back to the dorm. The prospect of never seeing you again. The fears that I was not pleasing God even then by allowing myself the bliss of being with you for the few days that remained.

One night—it must have been the following September when I was on my way to Prairie—we stood on the steps of the house where Van was living. You were a few steps below me, your foot up on a step, your elbows resting on your knee, your head down. You said nothing for a while. Then, “Betty, to marry you would be an admission to myself that Christ is not sufficient.” And then, in such a wistful tone, “. . . but I always thought He was.” I don’t know what I said. I only know that I crept softly up the dark stairway to Van’s room. I got undressed without waking her. Then I lay there and sobbed.

At the end of this particular letter, with its long recollection of memories, she curtly said, “I must stop.” Having taught me from a young age to keep boys at arm’s length, as her own mother had taught her, she knew when enough was enough. Whenever she allowed herself to daydream about my dad during this time, she did it determined not to accept the luxury for too long, or else she’d descend into self-pity. And this, she would not allow. It was time to set this down and look only ahead. God had clearly confirmed the direction He’d given for Ecuador. He’d done it time and again during her months of learning Spanish, of living in a missions context, and of growing ever closer to His heart through hardship. Now was not a time for looking back. She’d be home in a few days, “having bid our Brooklyn apartment adieu without tears. I have a booking on the Santa Isabel for April 11 from New York. Doesn’t seem possible.”

She wrote to him again in early March:

March 7

Well, as you know by now, plans are already made, and I’m afraid I didn’t consult you very carefully. Tidmarsh had written D. back in December, urging her to come as soon as possible.

“D.” was Dorothy Jones, a young woman my father knew from among his assembly connections, who had come to New York earlier in the year with similar ministry aspirations as my mother. Dorothy and my mother even shared the apartment—a great blessing during this season of loneliness.

Then he [Tidmarsh] wrote both of us in January, earnestly asking that we not delay. As the steps of a good man are ordered of the Lord, He has once more ordered them, and I feel almost as though I had no part whatever in the present prospects. But I am thankful, and want to follow when He leads, as well as where.

You ask how I feel about our being within close range—as to whether it would “bother” me, and how I thought it would affect you. Well, if I had my choice, I would have remained in the States until you were in the jungle, simply as a matter of expediency. As to how it will affect you—I’ve no idea. You say you’ll be “wild to see me.” Can you, then, “serve without distraction”?

These are rhetorical questions—I have asked God to do all that is in His heart. He will lead us right. If He wants us to see one another again before we go into the jungles, it is not for us to set up barriers.

(Do you realize it will have been six months since we said goodbye? Hard to believe.)

March 9

I know I just wrote to you a couple of days ago, but I just feel like talking with you this afternoon, Jim. You said in a recent letter that you’d like to have forty-five minutes with me—now when, pray tell, have we ever been able to spend that little time together? Remember the night we got home from Franconia? We were going right to bed—and it was two hours before we even looked at the clock! But I’d give anything for even five minutes with you just now. But then—every meeting involves a parting. And I don’t know how many more of those I can take. . . .

Had lunch last week in Kearney with an Irishman and his wife. My—he refreshed my spirit! Talked incessantly from the moment he got in the house until we left for the women’s meeting, but often spoke of the Lord.

Asked me if I knew the young men who were going to Ecuador. Asked which one was “the one with the big shoulders.” I finally decided he must mean Jim Elliot, and his face lit up. “My, that young man has a smile like the light of heaven on his face! There was no question about his call!” was his comment.

I smiled and nodded assent. I can always say I was at Wheaton at the same time as you and the Cathers. Then folks are satisfied. Sometimes I wish I could tell them more. But what? Oh—the Lord knows. He knows it all. But often I feel, “How long can I give silence—my whole life long?”

The Lord has dealt with us in mercy and judgment. I do not question His dealings. I praise—oh, I praise Him, with you, for the memory of completely happy hours with you. It never fails to bring pleasure when I recall the many good times spent together. “Who could ask for anything more?”

My dad’s next letter (March 11) was chock-full of action points and equipment lists for her to consider bringing. How exciting it must have been to him to anticipate her soon arrival and feel protective of her as he provided counsel from his firsthand knowledge of the situation on the ground. He was not only protective but was quite thoughtful and gracious. He even asked if she’d be interested in letting him help her get an organ. She answered:

How I would love to have one! As I’ve often thought, I could get along without almost anything in the world except a piano or organ—something to play on! . . . But I had really put it out of my mind for the field, knowing that I could get along without it, and regarding it as a needless expense. But I have now written to Mr. Anderson (a friend in the Evangelical Foreign Missions Assoc. Purchasing Dept. who has already helped me a lot) to ask him about organs. He gets 60% off on some musical instruments, though I don’t know about organs. I will let you know if they are reasonably priced.

He soon sent a check which he hoped would be enough to pay for it. “I fear that if I wait to get the exact cost, you may not have time to purchase. If there should be any balance, use it as you feel best. If it is not enough—bill me later. But on all counts—get one!”

The amount was exactly enough, she wrote to report.

March 26

Jim, how can I thank you enough for the check for $100? It was an excellent guess, as it cost $95, plus a nominal service fee from EFMA. . . . Ordinarily they run around $185, so you see he got a good discount. I am praying that it will get to the boat on time.

As you may know, my sailing date has been pushed up to April 4, so things are pressing heavily now. Had a complete physical this morning, and was found to be outrageously devoid of disorder of any kind.

Went to New York on Monday to get my yellow fever shot, and dropped in to see about the wood stove I mentioned—only to find they are not making them anymore! The days are filled with “trivial care, burdens too small for other hearts to share,” but in so many ways I find that God shares them, and has helped me wonderfully. I am asking particularly that nothing may be forgotten which should be attended to. What a multiplicity of things are involved in getting out of this country—to say naught of getting into another.

For instance, “I just heard the other day that it is not at all expedient for one to wear red in Ecuador. Is this true? If so, it’s tragic for me! Half my clothes are red! Why don’t people tell me these things?” But red clothes or not, “Is it possible that in eighteen days I shall be in Ecuador?”

The boat pulled out on April 5.

Last goodbye picture taken on the deck of the Santa Margarita. My mother is at right, along with Aunt Ginny and the captain.

April 5: Exactly two hours ago we streamed slowly out of the dock in New York harbor. Is it actually I who sets out on this mission? “I, the Lord, have called them . . .” And so I go.

It means leaving all that is dear to me—except Jim, and he is dearest—behind. But God is with me—He has wonderfully sustained. I ask above all that He may lift up dear Mother, and comfort her loving, grieving heart as only He who is the God of all comfort can do. She was so brave—only a few tears, and visibly noble efforts when the hawsers were thrown off. . . .

How I miss them all now. They sang “He Hideth My Soul” as the gangplanks were lifted, and stood waving until the last great door was lowered to block them from view. Only then did I give way to tears, but the Lord stood with me and strengthened me.

I realize for them it is so much harder than for me—I have Jim to look forward to, though just now that is not much comfort, somehow. He seems so remote from all this. Home has always meant more to me than I ever expressed to anyone, and I know it will be harder than ever to think of it with equanimity when the newness of this experience has left me.

Oh my—to put down what I feel just now would be impossible. I love them all so much—each one so dear. . . . One day we shall know one another’s hearts, I believe, and then there will be no need for words.

One of the only times Betty Howard was photographed in shorts.

A prayer of Amy Carmichael, she thought, said it best. “‘For my beloved (plural!) I will not fear—love knows to do for him, for her, as hitherto. Whom my heart cherishes are dear to Thy heart too.’ Oh, I know it is true, Lord—I will trust Thee for them.”

Still thinking of God first, still thinking of others second, still thinking of herself last, even as she sailed off alone toward the utterly unknown.

Spring and Summer

April 15: “Behold, I am with thee in all places whithersoever thou goest.” This verse came to me with my first consciousness this morning, as I woke here in a somewhat shabby, very humid hotel in Guayaquil. The noises of the street and square below woke me, and I tried to realize that I am in Ecuador, the place of God’s choosing for my life, I believe.

This was the same Ecuadorian port city (pronounced GWY-a-KEEL) where my father had docked, not quite two months earlier. He wished he could have been there to greet her. But the undeclared nature of their relationship called for not overdoing his level of interest in a certain young missionary arriving from America.

There was talk of it, “on the quiet, of course,” he said in his letter of April 9.

But you will know soon enough that nothing is kept that way here. Ruth (Stam) Jordan said something up at the station a couple of days ago that indicated someone has already got the word around. I find Pete most understanding in the whole matter. In the long run, you and I will simply have to develop a smiling patience. You must have done so already.

Oh, yes. If he only knew.

But just because she’d made it to Guayaquil didn’t mean there was any rush to greet her. It would be a while yet—as it had been for him—before all her belongings were unloaded and cleared customs. In the ten days she waited for the final leg of her trip to commence, she got her first taste of South America (“I could scarcely believe that I was seeing the real thing, such as I’d often seen in pictures”) along with an onrush of encroaching fear.

April 15: This morning I feel that nameless depression which comes to me when alone and in new circumstances. I wonder if I shall ever learn Spanish (I know, of course, that I will, God helping me), how long I shall have to stay in Guayaquil, whether I shall have to stay in Quito any length of time, when I shall be able to see Jim, etc. . . .

April 18: Had I known that I would still be in Guayaquil today, I should have been hopelessly discouraged! But each day brings hope that my gear will come through and I will be able to fly to Quito. God has been so good in providing for me to stay with friends from PBI, new GMU missionaries. . . . It is a miserable house, but quite ritzy for Guayaquil in general. All the houses here have extremely high ceilings and are built in a narrow, rectangular shape.

They house dozens of children, as well as roaches, scorpions, rats, lizards, mice, etc. There is a dank, damp-plaster smell, and outside there is always the stench of “something burning.”. . .

The contrasts are most notable. Indescribable filth and squalor, nestled right up against beautiful, shiny American cars, a few very fine homes, and modern public buildings. The average streets are unpaved (85% of them), with goats, children, skinny dogs, donkeys, mules, vultures, and rats all thrown into the melee. . . . Oh the filth! And many of the children wear no clothing at all. The men use the lampposts and fireplugs as do the dogs, unconcerned by spectators. Women sit on doorsteps nursing their babies. Surely this is no place for a single woman. Men here do not know the meaning of the “cold shoulder,” and ogle and whoop at me. It makes me long to get away to the jungle, where at least it is not so filthy and populated. I used to have the idea that missionaries who lived in cities had it easy—now I am very thankful God has called me to the forest work. I don’t think I could stand this very long.

April 21: And still I wait! The Lord is testing the effectiveness of lessons hitherto laid before me. Just the delay, when time seems to be lost, would be difficult, but the prospect of seeing Jim in Quito makes it doubly hard. To think that every day here means one less day with him—O Lord, Thou knowest. . . .

Yesterday afternoon we went for a walk along the waterfront. How it saddens me just to see the common sights. Literally almost every person one sees is pathetic. Such misery written on faces, I’ve never seen before. Such rags of clothing, such utter lack of industry or desire for improvement. The street by the river is by far the most popular thoroughfare, yet by the shore were some nude men, bathing and washing clothes. My whole being recoils at such sights—not that I am shocked, in the sense of “surprised” or horrified, but it is a shock to my nature. I cannot express just how it affects me. . . . I kept thinking, as I walked along the shore, of A.C.’s poem which ends, “When shall the goddess flee away, and India (Ecuador) walk her shore with Thee?” How true it is that here (as in any mission field outside of the States or Europe) one is faced with life in its primal state, life stripped of all tinsel and show—bare, ruthless reality—a vale of tears in very truth. It makes one long for the coming of the King, “more than they that watch for the morning.”

But at least one element that had kept this “vale of tears” impression so prevalent in her 1952 thinking was finally drawing to a merciful end.

She came today;Stepped off an airplane And watched her feet walk down the steps;Looked up at friends And frowned a little.The sun was brighter than the plane,That made her frown;That, and the not seeing me Among the friends.

She hesitated Wondering which side the fence To walk up toward the building Where I was waiting,Watching her. And then She saw me;Came straight on,Stepped up and stood Before me, wondering What I would do.I took her hand, smiled And said,“Sure good to see you.”So it was, and so it is Now that she has come.

Hard to say it any more dramatically, I think, than how my father’s poem captured their reunion. My mother, in her journal, said it this way:

April 28: I arrived here on April 24, having flown from Guayaquil in 1 hr. 20 min. (450 miles) via Pan-American. I am at present living with a cultured Ecuadorian family, Arias by name. They are very kind and helpful. Speaking Spanish constantly, of course. Yesterday I spent most of the day at HCJB [the mission’s radio station]. It is a remarkable place, and God has honored it abundantly.

And what can I say of Jim? He is here, of course, living with Tidmarshes on the other side of town. The last three days have been maddening—not a moment alone with him.

But this morning after our class in homeopathy with Dr. T., we went for a little walk down into a eucalyptus grove . . .

JE: Having prayed last week that the Lord would arrange a time for us to be alone together, this seemed ideal, and I took the great privilege to embrace.

EH: He took me in his arms, and he told me once more that he loved me—for being willing to wait God’s time for us.

JE: I could not find another woman like her who would wait without commitment indefinitely.

EH: With his arm close around me, he asked if I was happy.

JE: “Are you happy?”

EH: Oh, what to say? Even at such a moment of bliss, there is the stabbing pain and dread of being separated from him even for a moment. I feel sometimes that I can bear no more.

JE: “Is there anything I can do to make you sure?” “I don’t know”. . .

EH: God knows (and only God—not I) what I can bear, and He will lead us aright.

JE: “. . . it’s just that it gets worse all the time.”

EH: We talked of marriage—Jim says it will of necessity be years before we can think of it. He believes he must give the prime of his life to the work, which means living in Shandia (T.’s jungle station) for at least two years before doing itinerant and pioneer work, pressing on to other tribes. I have asked God to give me the same steadfast assurance and peace that Jim has in this regard. I had felt it could not be more than two years hence before we could marry.

JE: Tears, quiet sobbing.

EH: Lord, do Thou fulfill this Thy word unto Thy suffering servant—preserve me from evil, sustain my trust in Thee, and lift up my soul that I may praise Thee for these my sore testings, for I do love Thee, and long to fulfill Thy will.

Surely just being there was part of God’s will. And because He had led her there so clearly, she knew His protection and care would stay with her and keep her. Whatever the difficulties and the hazardous possibilities, whatever the outcome of her and my father’s relationship, God would help her (and him) be the missionary He wanted.

Now just to be clear—Quito was the site of their in-country training and orientation. While there, they would be taking classes, obtaining skills, practicing the language, and becoming acclimated to the culture. In time, they would narrow their focus onto the specific openings for ministry that were then available in the area, as well as those that were continuing to develop. Both my mother and dad were affiliated there with the same missionary organization, under its general umbrella. But exactly what form their individual assignments would take was constantly in flux. The nature of “pioneer work” is that you don’t know. The bridges and paths, though somewhat explored, are still largely untested. Primarily then, this season of theirs in Quito was one of working and waiting.

Nice, though, that they could finally do most of their working and waiting in the same location.

My father in Quito. I believe my mother took this picture.

Yet because of this, they naturally had no need for writing letters to one another during this time. So we lean on their journals now in following them through a compelling spring and summer that once seemed so unlikely, even a year ago.

I’ll mostly stay out of the way and let their writing do its own describing, connecting the two whenever their separate journals recall the same event.

EH (April 30): The Lord has answered prayer and given me peace once more about Jim. He allowed us a wonderful morning yesterday—we sat on a sunny slope of a beautiful valley, where we could see for miles across great fields to rugged peaks.

JE: Overlooking the Valle de Guápulo. She seemed small before me, almost frail. “Are you comfortable?” “Yes, and happy.” Broad daylight!

EH: Then we walked down into Guápulo, a village in the valley, late in the afternoon. It was misty and lovely.

JE: Spoke of engagement. She thinks I’m inconsistent, Lord, seeming to be self-contradictory so often in speaking plainly of marriage and then seeming to be so unsure about it all. I guess You understand, Lord. So long as I can do a work in reaching a primitive people better as a single man, I will stay single.

“And that brings me to the other thing we’ve been digging around,” he added in his journal of April 30, pondering where he felt the Lord might be sending him after this training phase was completed. “The Aucas. I see no reason now to stay single if I’m only sent to the Yumbos—Tidmarsh didn’t, Cathers hasn’t. But Aucas! My God, who is sufficient for them?” Indeed, they would prove another class of savage entirely.

JE (May 4): Dorothy Jones arrived Friday, and it looks like my “larks” of last week are over. [She and my mother lived together.] D.J. and Betty came over for breaking of bread [Sunday Communion]—refreshing, and I trust pleasing to God. Worship is excellent exercise for the soul. Makes a man big inside, makes him feel like he has found what he was built for, though he is conscious that he is inept.

“Inept.” I realize, in his saying this, he was referring more broadly to the shared nature of our human depravity, our brokenness as fallen people. But as the spring and summer wore on, an emergent sense of inferiority, especially in comparison to my mother, became a real issue for him, quite maddening in its intensity. This entry of May 4 is his first real disclosure of it—of “it,” you’ll see him say—meaning he must have been grappling with “it” for some time.

JE: Couldn’t keep my eyes off Betty. She is attractive in so many ways. I had to catch myself from breaking into a laugh of joy as we all were at Frank Cook’s for supper. She knows so well how to handle herself in public—artistic in conversation, a ready and refined laugh, and always a soft look for me. Sang with HCJB chorus over the air again, and she has a beautiful voice, too. Well, do I thank God for her; she is on all counts unusual!

She brought me three letters from Thomas [her younger brother] to read. There is something strong between them, something so like about them that they are closer than any other members of the family. They exchange Latin phrases, or hymn quotes, or tidbits from some author I’ve never read. Felt a strange envy creep over me as I realized what a place he has in her.

I had to face it again—I can never be all she ought to have in a husband. Too dull witted, too slow a reader, too poor a memory. Her ability to hold tiny details in mind over years (she told me what coat I wore at Saint Michael’s cemetery in ’48 just yesterday!). Lord, let me make up to her in other ways what I lack in supplying that sort of thing for her. I just wasn’t raised a scholiast. She will ultimately have to be satisfied with my body in exchange for what I lack in mind, and I, with her mind in exchange for what used to appear to me a lack in her body. Strange how I am quite satisfied with it now, and having such boyish fears.

He’d come a long way from making comments on her “angular figure” or criticizing the acerbic impression given off by her posture and demeanor. (My mother never forgot him saying, “You’ve got the brains, and I’ve got the body!”) But apparently it was mostly bluff, a masking of hidden insecurity. Here, though, seeing her at a much more mature twenty-five—spiritually, relationally, yes, physically—he was surprisingly taken aback. God was bringing them together, and purging old attitudes, in ever new ways.

JE (May 8): I can’t get her to believe that I am really satisfied with her body. She still has me holding my first impressions stated in our former days together: “banana nose . . . sandpaper . . . skinny.” I don’t know how to explain or clarify the change in this which has come since I really knew that I loved her last September 20. All I know is that it doesn’t matter if her breasts are small, or her shoulders are slight, or her nose not finely shaped, or her front teeth set apart. I wouldn’t like her any more if they were “ideal”—partly, I think, because she would not be what she is psychologically if she were anything but what she is physically.

Conscious of these things, she has become realistic in her outlook on life generally, and has developed a humility through them she might not have, had she been built otherwise.

This much I know: we were made for each other—if I for “comfort,” then she for “speed”—though I have not found her incómodo [uncomfortable] in the least! My arms are for her “homing,” a place to rest. Shelter, shield, and strength. What having her there means to me cannot be said. God has brought her there and prepared her before He brought her. I am wholly satisfied with His doing.

And yet the uncertainty about their future continued to cloud things. Marriage, they knew, would definitely need to wait. Though saddened, they were in full agreement that my dad couldn’t afford the distraction of setting up house as he was being inserted into the jungle. But what about engagement? Why couldn’t he go ahead and declare his intentions now? What would that cost him? How would it undermine or negate these reasonable convictions of his?

In reading Scripture one day, he believed he’d found the biblical parallel that supported his view for staying uncompromisingly single. Uriah the Hittite, removed from battle by King David after the incident with Bathsheba, refused the king’s appeal that he go spend time with his wife. “The ark, and Israel, and Judah abide in tents; and my lord Joab, and the servants of my lord, are encamped in the open fields; shall I then go into mine house, to eat and to drink, and to lie with my wife? as thou livest, and as thy soul livest, I will not do this thing” (2 Sam. 11:11).

JE: It was not time to return to his house, though he had the right to do so and the encouragement. It was the time for battle, and Uriah was a warrior; there could be no mixing of home goodness and the business of his life.

So it came to me. Marriage is not for me now; it simply is not the time. (I do not say, and never did say, “It is not the thing for me.”) With tribes unreached which I now believe reachable only by unattached men, “I will not do this thing.”

There. That sounded strong. Biblical. Unassailable.

EH (May 9): Today we walked in the streets of Quito. Jim spoke to me of his having asked God again for reasons for not being engaged. He answered him with the story of Uriah’s refusal to lie with his wife and enjoy his home when there was a battle on.

JE: I don’t know why, but it seemed unreasonable to her, and she laughed at me.

EH: Jim said, “Do you realize what it may cost?” (speaking of the possibility of his going into work among the Aucas). Yes, I realize what it may cost—death. And it is not as though I have not considered this possibility before.

JE: Flaring back at first, I soon lapsed into silence, and by the time we reached her bus stop downtown, I was seeing only sidewalk and biting my lip.

EH: As Jim tried to explain his feelings, he broke down.

JE: . . . and then I cried, and we walked. I couldn’t understand why I was unable to explain sensibly just why it was not time for engagement.

EH: He feels that if he were to become engaged, he could not take the risks he may be called upon to take. For me, this is a purely technical difference, for I don’t believe it could cost any more if we were engaged than in our present status, for I love him with such utter completeness and abandon, and feel myself so one with him even now, that the prospect of his being killed is unthinkable! I could not love him more at present, though I believe God can increase our capacity for loving.

JE: My reasons didn’t hold up today, not even to me, and I am now aware that my reasons for not getting engaged are hidden in the counsels of God’s Spirit, the same as my reasons for loving her. . . . It may be that there are no reasons to be given. She says it is enough to know that I know, that I don’t have to summon reasons (thanks, Lord, for a girl who not only will wait here, but be happy to wait here).

EH: I need know no reasons for our present state—I only need know that we are doing the will of God, who will never fail us nor forsake us. O the comfort of His words, the peace that keeps our hearts and minds through Christ Jesus! And may the grace that is all-sufficient make of me a true child of the Father, loving, trusting, praising, and resting in His acceptable will.

Apparently, despite their lack of total consensus, they’d left the matter in God’s hands, contented in His will and gracious toward one another. But the more my dad thought back on this day’s conversation, the more troubled he became (again) by that now familiar “it.”

JE: I learned something about Betty today. She makes me feel “on the defensive” in arguments (in the kindest sense of the word). She often sees clearer than I, and faster, to the end of things, and moves ruthlessly and rapidly to state what she sees.

From her point of view, we ought to be engaged—though she is not trying to force me to it. . . . When I couldn’t explain well why we shouldn’t be, and I choked up, she immediately changed her attitude and went on the defensive herself, saying she understood, that she was sorry she had to say anything, that she hoped I didn’t think I would have to produce “reasons” for staying apart.

I was sorry I couldn’t control myself, because I fear to make her less expressive than she is in these matters. I want her answers, suggestions, outlook—no honest man could fear them—and today I may have been too sensitive to them, so that she thinks it hurts me to hear her “debate.” But I swear it was not against her that I cried, rather against myself, that I could not say what I know, or even against the Lord, that He had left me verbally defenseless.

Most surely it was not against her. I kept saying to myself of her, “You’re right; you’re so damned right—but there is nothing for it, nothing to say, nothing to admit. I agree with you, but somehow I can’t ever make you see what I know.”

I’ve thought of how my including the curse word from this last paragraph might refresh some who are burdened with trying to be perfect, though it might shock some who would never use such a word. Either way, I hope you see his genuine humanness and his natural, fleshly writing, so that if you’ve idolized my dad, you will instead give thanks and bear with his faults, as we must do for example when reading the lives of many characters from the Bible.

In larger terms, I simply view this whole event as tension between the flesh and the spirit. He and my mother wanted desperately to do God’s will. To my dad, this meant being able to sense God’s showing him exactly when he was supposed to engage her. He felt strongly that even though God would ultimately bring them together in marriage, it had to be after a length of time spent in the jungle. But to my mother, it meant an agony of waiting, trusting, trying to be quiet and content. “Oh, it is agony—to act unconcerned and distant when I am all but overwhelmed with tenderness toward him. When shall I be free to tell him???”

But thanks to their sincere, devoted hearts, God kept their days afloat with blessed and divine distractions from their inner turmoil.

EH (May 15): Yesterday was one of the outstanding days of my life. At 2:30 a.m. Bill Cathers, Rob Gill, Abdón (an Ecuadorian), Pete, and Jim came for me, and we started up Pichincha [a 15,000-foot volcano]. It had been very rainy and doubtful, but as we began to climb, the moon shone out brilliantly.

JE: Nearly wept with the beauty of it . . . wonderful with Betts.

EH: At about 11 a.m. we reached the pinnacle—a steep, jagged rock formation quite strikingly resembling the Matterhorn. It took some pretty rugged rock climbing—at least, I thought it was something, though for Jim and Pete, who have climbed in the Northwest, it must have been tame.

We came partway down the mountain together, and then Jim and I took a different route. We spent some time just resting in the warm, soft grass on the slope of the valley. Jim went to sleep . . .

JE: . . . feigned sleep in her arms . . .

EH: . . . and I drank in the incredible beauty of the vast vistas before me.

JE: And unless I am mistaken, she pressed a kiss on my cheek as I lay there, desperately trying to keep my breathing slow! At least she went through all the motions.

EH: Oh, it is good to be with one who also loves God’s handiwork.

JE: “I’m glad you’re the kind of man that likes this sort of stuff”—mountain climbing, that is.

EH: It was so much fun, pointing out to one another all the loveliness about—from tiny, exquisite flowers to the brutal grandeur of the peaks and cliffs about us.

JE: The tranquility of being with her is indescribable, and I find it has a mellowing effect on me, makes me easier in social converse. Also, I find it “sensitizes” me, makes me more alert to feel situations. Praying that God will make me wise enough to treat her right, love her well, and control our playing. And He deigns to do so, insofar as I can now measure it. The joy of just loving, giving and taking, waiting and holding, is at peak now.

True, as she notes constantly, there is a pain in it, being unable to consummate now as we are, but then there is no real love without suffering of some sort. I pity her as I see she worries over the future—loving and losing. God, let me be faithful to her. And let me live to love if it please.

EH: The Lord has given me some happy times with Jim since I last wrote—two afternoons up at the bodega, and one evening coming home from “the station” (HCJB). He got a bit piqued at my attitude about something he said. Every so often, when I want with all my heart to take his arm or tell him that I love him, I say something sarcastic or cutting or very offhand, in order to restrain myself. This is what happened Thursday night. He reproved me for my attitude (it was only an apparent attitude, for such thing never represses my feelings toward him), and finally in some measure I brought myself to explain the reasons. He seemed to understand in part, and almost melted me with his gentleness.

JE: Her restraint from speaking of her love—to me or to anyone—is a hard thing for her, and I must learn to be satisfied with answer responses for now. She cannot be aggressive until engagement, she feels, and I am glad there is that restraint, for I feel none.

How I thank God for her! I find He is answering my prayers for wisdom to treat her properly—not through my understanding of how far to go or just how to love her—but through her attitudes, restraints, and liberties. She is a marvel for having the right “feeling” for things. And after I try to figure out her feelings, I find that they are often the best reasons for doing or refraining from any given thing.

I’m so glad to hear my father say that. I don’t think he’d have been one bit surprised to know she maintained this same “right feeling for things” her whole life long. I was a living witness to it in our home. And while I know his impulses urged him to want more from her physically than she was willing to give, I treasure both of them equally for their inner commitment to purity.

I can say, without any risk of overstating, much of my own decision to stay pure until marriage came from my mother’s joy in telling me about their marriage, and about her and my father’s determination to keep their promises to God during this time in their lives. They each ached for the other, as all lovers do. But as the woman, she understood well that she, even more than my dad, was the one in greater control over how much leeway they allowed themselves in touch and enticement. There’s much wisdom on display here, amid much tension. Be inspired by it. This is an actual demonstration of God wanting His children’s best and of His children believing—despite their passion, despite their feelings—that nothing, nothing, offers any substitute. Times may be different today, but this truth is not. And never will be.

So with the arrival of summer came an awareness that the call of the jungle was drawing nearer for my father. Up until now, he’d felt “liberty to allow myself luxuries in getting acquainted with the country,” wanting to both learn and love everything about this place where God had called him. Intent on fulfilling his missionary calling, he knew the time was approaching when he must “necessarily curtail” some of these adventures.

Sure, there was value in every new experience. “Learning a language means meeting people in all their circumstances and trips. As long as you are with nationals, it will always contribute to the end.” But he couldn’t afford for his Spanish to be merely passable, not if he hoped to accomplish what he’d set out to do there.

June 8: Giver of the gift of tongues! Let me speak to them as they ought to be spoken to, so they do not have to hide their real reaction with polite praise. Glad to be in a national home—at least to hear it spoken as a living-thought medium—not merely as English translation.

It meant, of course, striking a balance between work and love.

The discipline of distance has passed into the discipline of proximity for me these days. Living right across the street, eating a meal a day together, on the bus, walking—it puts me on an entirely different basis than I have ever known with her before. . . .

So far the Lord has given a good balance, it seems to me. I don’t feel like I’ve really abandoned my Spanish for her or any of the other big purposes of being in Quito. I’ve had to keep myself from staying out too late and from going out too often. And love never gets “full” to the point of satiation, although at times I have the sense of having had “just enough for now.”. . .

June 15: Still, we haven’t kissed. I can’t believe it sometimes, but it’s so. Who ever heard of people in love, like we are in love, sporting as fondly as we do and as often, who have never met at the lips? Can it really be there will be more thrill than now?

Yes, but “life cannot be all love,” as my mother said. And events were coming together on the ground that directly influenced their subsequent missions tasks, as my father recorded in this journal entry.

June 23: Wycliffe Bible translators made public the news of their recently signed contract with the government to enter tribes in Ecuador and reduce their language to writing. This will bring changes in our plans for the Oriente [eastern region of the country]. Especially does it seem to affect Betty. Where will You send her now, Lord?

Meanwhile, he was venturing out on some reconnaissance excursions.

July 2: Buzzed Shell’s deserted field at Ayuy [Shell Mera, headquarters of Mission Aviation Fellowship]. Made inquiries about Quichua population in the Canelos region. Estimates uncertain. Would guess one thousand to fifteen hundred. Saw the necessity for our being single to reach these people—too scattered to reach with the mission-station method.

Through experiences like these, he was learning to experience God in new, unexpected, invigorating ways.

July 11: I wonder sometimes if it is right to be so happy. Day follows day in an easy succession of wonders and joys—simple, good things like food well prepared, or play with the children, or conversation with Pete, or supply of money for rent and board within hours of its time to be paid. Grace upon grace in the outside sphere of living.

But, simply because I am not really studying the English Bible, fresh truth for inner soul refreshment is rare. . . . I was reading my diary notes [of 1949] and noting the contrasting soul soreness of those days with the freedom and joy of these. Those were certainly more productive from a point of view of getting things from the Word; these are more casual and less fruitful, but for reasons. Spanish must be gotten. I want badly for God to speak as He did then, but I want Him to begin speaking in Spanish, and I am not yet used to that—perhaps not ready for it. . . .

How well I see now that He is wanting to do something in me! So many missionaries, intent on doing something, forget that His main work is making something of them, not just doing a work by their stiff and misunderstanding fingers. Teach me, Lord Jesus, to live simply and love purely, like a child, and to know that You are unchanged in Your attitudes and actions toward me. Give me not to be hungering for the “strange, rare, and peculiar” when the common, ordinary, and regular, rightly taken, will suffice to feed and satisfy the soul. Bring the struggle when I need it; take away the ease at Your pleasure.

And my mother, though journaling only seldom throughout the summer, found both her love for the field and her love for my father growing steadily.

July 20: For some reason, I’ve not felt like writing in my journal. But there is so much I could have said. It has been a month in which God has helped me wonderfully with the study of Spanish, and also one in which I’ve grown to love Jim more than ever before.

We have many perfect times together, in the fields, through the eucalyptus groves, and on Quito’s lovely hillsides. One day we set out at 3:00 a.m. and climbed Pichincha [a second time]. Jim had been sick at his stomach just a few hours before we left, so he was very weak, and we could not go far without resting. It was very cold—frost coated the grass in solid white, and the moon shone full over the lighted snowcaps to the north, east, and south. It was enchanting. At dawn the sunrise was appallingly lovely, with the fading moonlight on the other side of the valley. We were exhausted, and Jim looked so pale it almost scared me. I took turns carrying the heavy pack every hour or so.

Near noon we found ourselves skirting (and half scaling) a great rock wall at the head of a ravine. This really scared me, and Jim was a bit dizzy. If he had lost his balance for a second, there would have been no recovery. Then after the strain of this piece of the journey, we had to cross a great field of volcanic ash and sand. When we finally reached the valley by which we were going home, we found it a quagmire of mineral springs, into which we sank over our shoe tops!

Discovering at last a patch of dry grass, we flopped down and fell immediately asleep for an hour. Then we followed a long, long trail which dropped very gradually, and at 7:30 arrived in Quito.

Other pleasant times have included reading poetry together, exploring sections of the city and surrounding country with which we were not familiar, and just short walks, to be together.

In love, in Quito.

But time for such enjoyments was drawing short. The prospect of parting within a few weeks, not knowing when (or if) they’d ever be this close again, began to wear on both of them.

JE: Sense great moving of heart wanting to be fair to her, wanting to marry her, wanting, wanting. But now I feel no guiding from God, not even for engagement. The “years” weigh on me often, awake and going off to sleep, thinking of the length of a year, worrying over the real view I should take of engagement, feeling my previous arguments fall, one by one. . . . We talk of it freely together, she and I, and my reasoning must be making it worse, but I know—reason or not—now is not the time. . . .

The acceptance of that as the will of the Father is no gladdening thing—not that my wants (for her, for the work of God, perhaps among Aucas) conflict. They are not contradictory, but they do not seem to mesh. They have come at the same time, so that instead of fitting into one another, as cogs would, they grind against one another, sometimes with awful concentration. . . .

It is too soon for me, not having seen the Oriente, to believe that God may not want me there entirely unattached. . . . But all the while, I’m mad for her, wanting to be with her night and day, the haunting hunger of body, the loneliness of mind making book study a farce at times and making life itself seem useless without her.

EH: This morning I feel overwhelmed once again with the thought of Jim’s going. This time next week he will have left, if things go as planned. Time is slipping away, and we have no time to be together.

Saturday and Sunday he was sick, and we could not go out. Monday we went to Alangasí, and hence were with the others nearly all the time. Tuesday I had hoped to be with him in the afternoon, but instead he went home after lunch and studied. At four o’clock, when I thought surely we would go for the mail together, he came over and said that he and Pete were going down to the Tidmarshes. So I hoped for the evening—he had not come to call for his mail when I went in to supper; good—he would have to come in the evening, and then perhaps he’d stay on a little while. No—in the middle of supper he appeared to get his mail. So the evening was spent alone. . . .

Oh, sometimes I feel that I simply cannot stand it any longer—this present set-up of love and intimacy, about thinking with one mind, and yet the great chasm of not being engaged. The strain, when I long in utter anguish to tell him how I love him, and cannot.

JE: She noticed today, as she did not on the twenty-fifth, the spirit of heaviness that comes over me. I told her that I felt weepy, sighful, and that I couldn’t tell her why now, but that I would later, when she could do something about it. Also, that it concerned things about her that I didn’t want changed; and that I would get over it. Not very clear. It isn’t to me either.

I don’t understand what there is about loving her that makes me such a damned woman. I can hardly begin to describe it; I only know that I feel it strong and that I can’t talk of it without twists coming to my mouth. Lips get dry and tears seem to brim at my eyes, and there is a crushing sense in my chest. At the bottom of it is a tremendous weight of sheer unworthiness. I don’t feel fit to be in her company; I can’t think of things to say if she doesn’t readily come back in conversation. . . .

I know it would help to talk to her, but can’t bear to think of speaking of this thing in daylight when she could see me cry. She wouldn’t believe me, anyhow. I don’t give the impression of feeling underdog, and I don’t usually display any humility that would suggest I felt myself the lesser.

EH: This separation now, for example, when I am here in my room sobbing because I cannot keep from it, sobbing for love of him, and praying only, “Thy will be done”—while he is laughing and cracking jokes with Sanchez and Pete. Oh, if he knew—but he cannot know, and I cannot tell him. There is no one to talk to. O Lord—forgive me, give me grace, patience, unselfishness.

JE: Oh, if only she felt that she could tell me she loved me and why, perhaps that would bolster me somehow. . . . If only she could come to me instead of my having always to go to her, letting her control, having to follow so many times when I feel that I should be leading. But what is to be done? She can’t, simply can’t do otherwise until engagement—says it just has to be that way now. My God, what a vise I’m in.

And just as the pressure was feeling its most acute, news arrived that—while good—required a stiff upper lip of surrender.

JE: She had word the sixth that Ginny was engaged to Bud DeVries on Sunday.

EH: I am stunned—but, oh, so happy for her—my “little” sister, seven years my junior.

JE: Crying when I came over to ask her for a walk in the evening. . . . “Is Ginny engaged?” “Yes—and two letters from Dave about his new baby.” (Long pauses.) “It’s just that I can’t see why they should have it so, and we have it this way.”. . .

Thursday was not much better for her. But we went downtown together, took a taxi up the Panecillo [a prominent hill in Quito] and walked down. She was much freer to chat—her very touch filling me with tenderness. We played in the grass down below the house, and she taught me to “two step” in the street afterward—after midnight!

But in the dark of the next Friday morning, he was gone.

August 17

I walked over to your wall and stalked the length of it while Pete checked the room for the last time. Almost called your name to your dark windows, thinking you might be awake. . . . Then I dropped into silence, knowing I was leaving you and ending the happiest weeks of my life, sorrowing a little in the silence.

This was the first of many letters that would begin sailing again between them. But only to his journal did he commit the thoughts that had run through his mind as he lay in bed the night before, his final time of being just across the street from her in Quito.

Slept restlessly, with recurrences of last night as she knelt over me in the field. I told her that I had gotten liberty to hope for engagement in less than a year. She said, “That’s good to know.” Feel more and more that my reasons against engagement do not carry the weight of those in favor of it.

It will mean years of “promised” life, likely, and that involves some problems, but they do not compare with what I am assigning Betty to, in this uncommitted period, with her great reserves and pressures. For us both, I believe engagement would be a release for easier thinking, both present and for the future.

Thinking now of asking Ed to bring a ring.

Autumn

Shell Mera was to be only a brief stay for my father. After two weeks there, helping lead a Bible camp for boys, he would be on to Shandia, the Tidmarsh’s station among the Quichuas. But despite his many responsibilities, despite all the adjustments to a new location, and despite the prying eyes of nosy young students wondering if he was writing again to “a certain señorita whose picture they found under the lid of my suitcase,” he managed to compose a number of letters to her, even during this tight time frame. He closed the first one with an appeal to “write, darling,” along with a charming P.S. comment that read, “Sanchez just dropped by and sends ‘casual greeting.’ Mine is not so.”

“Sanchez just dropped by and sends ‘casual greeting.’ Mine is not so.”

My mother’s response was equally quick.

August 19

What a surprise it was for me when I went out to the tea at the Station to find a letter from you this afternoon. It was so good to hear, Jim, and I want you to know I appreciate your thoughtfulness in sending one up so soon. . . .

Oh, my, I hardly knew what to think when you told of coming over to our wall on Friday morning looking for me. It’s just a good thing I wasn’t out there in pajamas, but if I’d had any idea you’d do that, I would have been up and dressed to see you. It’s not that it didn’t enter my head to get up, but I thought it would be another case of standing there alone, aching for you to come, yet knowing that you were not aware I was there, as I’ve done several nights when I wanted to see you.

That night when I was alone in the house, longing to see you, I stood outside by the front wall for nearly an hour—seeing you rise from the dining room, saunter into the sala, play with the kids a while, light the light in your room (was hoping you’d gone for your coat!) and then (my heart sank again) I saw the desk light go on. After you started typing, I walked up the street till I could see just the edge of your face through a crack in the curtains. Well—I thought it would be easier to let our goodnight at the gate on Thursday be the last. But, oh, I’m sorry, Jim—you know I would have come!

The Lord has been so good. I can’t describe the peace He’s given since you’ve gone. I have no tears to tell you about, except just a few (and not really bitter, desolate ones). The feeling that predominates is one of deepest thanksgiving—first of all, for the blessing of your love, and then for all the time God gave us together. It is, to me, literally, “peace that passeth understanding.”. . .

It seems strange to be seated by my window now, writing to you instead of expecting to see you at the gate at any moment. As I go upstairs at night, I don’t see Pete swinging his arms in the living room, or you hoisting one of the kids up in the air. But somehow it seems just as normal this way, and I find that I can be perfectly content even though I’m not looking forward to seeing you at noon! The only explanation I find for it is a miracle of God. He is abundantly able.

This peace from the fading summer of 1952 is reminiscent of what she’d written in her journal the previous Thanksgiving: “I believe that perhaps the most effective ‘balance wheel’ in a believer’s life is just this. In each event of life, we are to give thanks.” And that’s exactly what she was doing here—giving thanks for what God had given them, rather than bemoaning what they’d lost.

My father’s next letter from Shell struck the same thankful, peaceful, contented tone:

August 21

This will have to be a short one, Betts. It is after 6:00 a.m. and I have just come over to one of the sheds facing the airstrip to get away from the wake-up skirmishes of the bunkhouse. Tidmarsh arrived yesterday afternoon and said he would drop by on his way out this morning, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to drop you a note. I suppose you will be like I was yesterday, expecting against reason that word would be in the packet of mail. Knowing how sharp is even the smallest disappointment, and wanting to spare you as many as possible, I will try to get this away. . . .

Thoughts of our Quito days are refreshing and restful. I find my mind always turning to you when I am ready for sleep. You and my relation to you are one of the surest “relaxers” I can bring to mind—the one subject over which I have prayed and thought and studied sufficiently to be completely at ease about.

Back and forth they wrote, nearly every day now.

August 23

Tidmarsh came up yesterday a.m. with your letter. It was a second surprise. But so good to hear, Jim, so very good. . . . Sitting in Tidmarsh’s living room the night they went to Shell Mera, I remembered those mornings of April and May, when I waited for you to come in for a minute or so before class. There has been marked development in my feeling since then.

August 25

Thanks so much, Betty, for your letters and the enclosures. I need yours as badly as you need mine. And now somehow they make you seem so much closer than our other correspondences, not merely because you are nearer but because I can read more of you into your letters, knowing you so much better than I ever have before. And feeling too, as I do now, hardly without knowing how it happened, that I can share all with you—your family letters and affairs that I felt quiet about before, like meaningless happenings in my own life and family. Quito was a get-acquainted period, and we needed it more than we know. . . .

You won’t know how glad I was to hear of the hardly-believed-for peace you describe. May the Spirit who gave maintain. More than once the feeling of being cruel has come, accusing me for leaving you without engagement or more promise, making me wonder at the ways of God, a wonder that shaded into resentment. And it is easier to know that He who led gave grace.

He knows better than you, Bett, why, and how intensely and how long I have desired you, and the struggle it has been to commit you to Him alone to comfort when I wanted devilishly hard to have you committed—insofar as engagement would make it possible to me. But now I know that His loving kindness, forever better than life, is better too than further human loving; for I doubt if even engagement could have wrought the impossible peace you speak of. Praise, then, praise for Peace.

A few days later—Thursday, August 28—he sat down to write one final letter from semi-civilization, hoping to “get some fresh word through” before moving on to Shandia, delivered by those who were returning to Quito with the boys the next day.

You will know whether Tidmarsh preceded us in. If he arrives this afternoon, he will likely go to Pano the first time the weather breaks and get the house swept out for our arrival. The only thing we have to wait on is the arrival of the schoolteacher. He is due Saturday afternoon, and if things go as scheduled, we will be going in then on Monday, the weather being the only foreseeable variable factor in the plan to date. I personally hope we will get in for the weekend, as we sense we are a burden to the missionary folk here.

Our first move will be to get settled comfortably, trekking with Indians with all our stuff the 4–5 hours to Shandia from Pano, and getting housekeeping established next week. Then we settle down to language again and cleaning and building.

Even as he hurriedly, prayerfully tried to finish off this letter, writing of how “I hope for you and the McCullys” to come join him someday, Dr. Tidmarsh arrived—but not alone. The gear he’d needed to bring down had been too much to fit inside a single vehicle, so his wife, Gwen, had accompanied him in another car. With one extra passenger.

EH: Jim, it was so good to see you. Just to walk with you for that brief half-hour while you shared your mother’s letter with me was good. And the next morning . . .

JE: Woke at 3:30 a.m., unable to sleep knowing that she is here. Up at 4:30 with the boys. Packed, breakfasted, and said good-bye to them all. . . . But she was here, and we talked odd bits—about the greetings Monday night, about the unfinished letter I gave her because her coming caught me in the middle of it. Then, as we stood, stalling at the kitchen door with the others outside . . .

EH: . . . I’m still trying to figure out just how we came close that minute.

JE: Suddenly we leaned toward each other and pressed hard, face to face, only for an instant.

EH: I don’t remember you pulling me, nor do I recall coming to you. I just know that your face was against mine suddenly, warmly, briefly.

JE: That’s all—but, oh, it was a full instant, full of telling things. She came toward me without being pulled, full of quick passion. Then we went out to the car together.

EH: Jim, I know that His mercies are new every morning—but that mercy, that morning—I think it was an especially great one.

Another goodbye, but a dear one.

Returning to Quito, she read the half-written letter that her visit had blissfully interrupted, the letter he’d been able to place directly into her hand. In it, he picked up on a line she’d recently written, where she noted “marked development” in her feelings for him. Those words had intrigued him enough to ask:

Next time you write me, would you mind enlarging on a theme embodied in this lone sentence in your last: “There has been marked development in my feeling since then”? It refers to the days when you used to sit in the living room at T’s waiting for me before class. For me, there has been change in nothing but intensity, from the day we held hands coming in from the airport. Not that that is a small thing, but I am tantalized to know your attitudes then and now.

He longed to hear her saying more, saying anything about her love for him, realizing (of course) she might not choose to go into it any more deeply, demurring with “one of those wonderful, ‘Jim, I can’ts.’”

No, she was glad this time to oblige.

September 1

Regarding your question of the statement I made about my feelings having shown development—I, too, of course have felt an intensifying since April 25. But in Saturday’s letter you say that you feel now that you can share everything with me. That’s what I mean.

I find in this an analogy to our relationships with God. The man who doesn’t know Him intimately brings to Him only the great needs, the “significant” things. The man who dwells in His presence knows, as did Jeremiah, that “I know the thoughts that come into your mind, every one of them”—but he knows also that, apart from His omniscience, God also has an intimate and loving interest in the “small” things.

There is no great with Thee,There is no small—For Thou art all, and fillest All in all

Perfect love casteth out fear. It is this simplicity that constitutes in a great measure, I believe, God’s profundity. And so with us, Jim. I find happiness in sharing with you not only the many things we have in common—the things which drew us together initially—but now also the little things we don’t have in common: my family, your family; my daily happenings, yours; the things that make us individuals; the things that are involved in your being a man and my being a woman. I think you will understand what I mean.

Yes, he understood. He just hoped she understood “how intensely and how long I have desired you, and the struggle it has been to commit you to Him alone to comfort, when I wanted devilishly to have you committed to me—insofar as engagement would make it possible.” His experiences of the coming months in Shandia would confirm to his heart that he’d been right all along in not needing to be married yet. The conditions were too primitive; the demands, too all-encompassing. Engagement, however, was something he was bending on. And in thinking of it—in thinking of her—he missed her all the more.

September 2

Woke wanting you, squirming in bed at the remembrance of the sudden and short but somehow full embrace here at the door of the kitchen. I can hardly remember how it happened, but I think I felt you coming toward me with hardly a suggestion from my outreached hand, and I remember to this moment the hard pushing of your face against my neck. Thanks, darling. It seemed very fitting for that moment, fitting to the place and the brief occasion of your visit. The next one can hardly be fuller—but I hope it can be longer.

He went on to write of pulling flower samples up by the roots to take with him into the jungle: “shoe orchids, white with brown-spotted centers, growing on a fallen tree over the creek. They are now in a small packsack—the one we took up Rucu together—with other orchid roots, roses, naranjilla, a coffee root hibiscus, geranium starts, and a poinsettia shoot. I hope things grow like folks say they do—I’ve got the flower craze worse than I get it some springs in the yard at Portland.” My mother loved this, she said:

That is one of the things that pleases me so about you, Jim—your love of the lovely things of life. Not just the grand and the wild and the majestic—things which, knowing your apparent personality, I would expect you to like—but also the small, the exquisite, the aesthetic, things which indicate another side of you, not so apparent at first acquaintance. It has been one of the happy discoveries in the past year, along with your devastating tenderness and thoughtfulness. No longer do you seem “crude” to me, but rather I recognize a certain polish—not the artificial, surface polish of convention, never—but, shall I say, intrinsic. And I appreciate it.

He wrote also of a man being brought to their location “who, in a drunken scrap Saturday night, had been cut across the back of the neck, from ear to ear, with a pocketknife.” Many of his later letters from Shandia would be dotted with heartbreaking accounts of local people they tried to assist with medicine and basic health care.

And your letter—I almost laughed out loud in reading your remarks about “The Embrace,” after writing almost the identical this morning. The sweet smell of Tweed is a tender comfort, Betty—do keep them scented. . . .

Now I will close. The afternoon has cleared, so that the big pillars of cloud, rising in a haze over the jungle (I am writing in the kitchen and can see the Oriente through the door), stand pure white against a blue sky. Silhouettes of distant birds are sharp against them, going east.

And tomorrow, happily, and in the will of God, I will follow only too well, I know, against the inner weakness to return, to go back to you. But I feel that I have set my hand—and to look back now would be dishonor. He knows the inner part—and He knows how much of me I really leave with you. And He knows why I leave, and for how long.

Lovingly, Jim

“Now I will close . . . and tomorrow, happily, and in the will of God, I will follow.”

Despite the pangs of heartsickness he was feeling, this pioneering adventure is what my father had always prayed for, hoped for, and seen himself doing. It’s why he came to Ecuador. It’s why he’d trained and worked and traveled and sacrificed.

And with similar anticipation, and similar longings, my mother also began feeling waves of excitement, seeing that all her devotion and linguistic study was ready to be put into use for mission work. She wrote:

September 4

The days are amazingly full for me. I don’t know just what I manage to do to keep so busy, except that I’ve been studying so consistently that I find it hard to do anything else. The mornings that used to lag so, when I was waiting for you to come to dinner, seem to fly by, and likewise the afternoons. I’ve hardly finished dinner before it’s 5:00 and time to go down for the mail.

Again, it is of the Lord’s mercy. I never thought it could be this way! And already five months (yesterday) have passed since I left home. And if the time is flying for me, I’m sure it must be even more so for you, with so much to get done. I am so anxious to hear about everything. . . .

I want to know all about what you’re doing, what you eat, what it’s like there, so that I can picture you, Jim. That little taste of Shell Mera sure gave me ganas [desire] to get into the jungle. May God speed the day.

As always, Betty

But days never really “speed” when you’re missing someone as dearly as these two were now missing each other. The ministry tasks before them were often challenging, sometimes in the extreme, especially in my father’s case. Yet rarely did a day pass when they weren’t sitting down at some point to add another page or more to a letter already in progress. This season of their lives was by far their most prolific season of correspondence, even though the mail delivery coming in and out of their various locations was subject to unpredictability and delay.

Much of the content of their letters involved details of jungle life and missions work, as well as the lively stream of updates on news, family, and personal matters you’d expect from two people eager to share and hungry for information. I wish I could include it all. Any reader would find their exchange of experiences fascinating. They were discovering that even the “small details” held great interest. But rather than going into the triviality of those exchanges, I will let the profundity and poignancy of their letters speak for themselves with only an occasional comment.

Here’s my father, recalling the trek into Shandia:

September 7

We made the three-hour walk in two-and-a-half, sloshing through streams, sliding over roots, greasy with mud. It’s not a hard walk, but one can hardly enjoy the forest for having to watch each step so closely. The forest here is not unlike the west—only, of course, much bigger and much emptier, but for that, much more interesting.

You came to mind in one spot on a sharp ridge where the trees slid away on both sides into a deep green which seemed bottomless—those queer trees, not with round trunks but with concave surfaces between the roots that ribbon out in all directions. You came to mind because I could look up and see the notched horizon of hills that hid you up there in Quito. And I wondered what you were doing, and of course, why you weren’t there to share it with me

Even more forcible thoughts of you flooded back as we burst, a little surprised, into the clearing of the play field. Right ahead and to the left, a huge, full moon was balanced between the forest and a straight cloud, and in sixty steps the river below caught up with the reflection. . . . I had a few moments alone to think of the past four moons [May, June, July, August], and how we warmed each other watching them. Oh, Betty . . .

Oh, how I want to share, share, share hourly, momently, the wonders of this forest with you, Bett, and I am not resigned in the least to the poor compromise of letter writing. There are times, for sheer bulk of the things to be shared, when I just have to say, “We’ll talk of this later.” Sorry, but I’m afraid even words in conversation won’t do—you’ll just have to come and visit! . . .

This morning I was reading Psalm 13 in the Spanish Moderna [Spanish translation of the Bible], and felt as though it spoke for me in verse 2: “How long will I join counsels in my soul, bringing longing in my heart every day?” Whenever I take time to think about us, “counseling” with myself, it brings longing to me, Bett—man’s wanting for woman, and more keenly, my own personal reasons for wanting you. I can’t help “counseling,” and it brings you automatically before me. I don’t always follow it to the end that David did, but usually I can “sing to the Lord” (v. 6). I hope it is the same for you. But there remains the problem, “HASTA CUANDO?” [“Even when?”] There is still no fulfillment in sight for us, as I see the work ahead here. It is, like it or not, still to be “a long, hard wait.”. . .

She had asked for details about Shandia, and he sent them.

Now, Betts, dearest, I think eleven pages will suffice! I hope it is not scattered, as to give the impression of being impersonal—an accusation you’ve made of my letters before. There is lots of detail yet to be filled in, but I want to finish the page telling you how thankful I am to God for you, for our history together, and for the present rest we have in loving as we are apart. And then, too, I believe Him for a happy future for us—so much that I often feel myself thrill—just imagining doing some little social act with you. I don’t know why, but I went to sleep last night thinking how nice it would be to have you at my elbow while I drove the car—like coming home from the Pacific that night, and like times en route in New England.

Goodnight, Betty

Her answer, when his letter finally came . . .

September 20

It was two weeks ago that you began your 11-page letter, but only two hours ago that I read it. Oh, thank you, Jim, for such a long one, and for telling me the things I want to know. Now I feel that I can picture you at least a little bit, whereas up until now I’ve been at a complete loss. I wake in the morning and try to imagine how it is with you, what your room is like, what the day holds for you. . . .

It is really too late for me to begin comments on your letter or relating Quito things, but I just wanted to talk to you for a few minutes. As always, it is difficult, when I have to restrain the pen from writing things that come to mind. But I will let you know this—when I came home (a dark, rainy, very cold evening) and read your letter over for the second time, tears came. I’m not sure why, besides the fact that I missed you tremendously—unless it was the sentence about “no prospect for fulfillment—a long, hard wait.”

Jim, it is not that this is news to me, or that I am not at least as aware as you are of the price we are asked to pay—it is just that I don’t want you to say it. It brings it home with brute force, making me face it again, when I have been living only one day at a time, in peace. If the inklings I have now prove to be the will of God, it promises to be longer than we know.

These “inklings” included a long talk the day before with Doreen Clifford, the missionary she’d met the past January in New York, who had returned to Ecuador as well. “She is beginning lessons in the Colorado language,” my mother wrote in her journal, speaking of a work taking place to the west of Quito, whereas my father’s work was off to the east. It would put them on opposite sides of the Andes Mountains—requiring longer plane trips, and longer bus trips, with many stops and often breakdowns in between. Yet “when I came home,” she said in a September 19 journal posting, “I began to wonder if God would have me to go down there and help her with the classifying and organizing of material, since of course it is an aboriginal language and no one has as yet done any formal work on it. In a way, I do not want to go down there. I cannot help but feel that Jim and I will become engaged sometime within the coming year. And it will be hard to settle in one place and then pull up stakes and perhaps go to the Oriente. But God knows that I want to do only His will, and all of it, without thoughts or consideration of my own feelings.”

Oh, Jim—how I need the grace of obedience—of obedience with cheerfulness, without shadow of hesitation, without any “But Lord—it’s been so long already!” I want to be one of those who “follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth.” He cannot be unmindful of us. He will make up to us all that we feel is lost—all the “years that the locust has eaten.”

I often think—perhaps I should say, of late it has come to me—of the analogy of you, in my relation to you, and heaven, in relation to us as Christians. Both to me are synonymous with rest. We think of the “bosom of the Father,” of that eternal rest that remaineth for the people of God—of the joy of adoration, a complete service in itself—of the many references to the “rest” which is heaven. And here upon earth, as I have told you, I have found in you rest. To bring it down to very mundane things, I’ve not been sleeping well lately, and often long to be in your arms, as you have let me do so often, and just rest.

Jim, I just can’t get out of my mind the way you said, “Were you asleep, darling?” I don’t know how many times, in the strangest places, that has come to me. But now I must go to bed, the next best substitute for rest, I suppose.

She continued writing him every few days.

September 24

A year exactly since I felt God was pointing the way to Ecuador—never shall I forget that day, alone in my room, struggling to discern between my own feeling and the Shepherd’s voice, until He kindly showed me that there was no discrepancy between the two. And about this time in the morning, peace came, and I began looking forward to seeing you Friday night at Tidmarsh’s farewell meeting in Plainfield. That was the night of our first embrace, that Friday. “O God of stars and flowers, forgive our blindness—no dream of night had dared what Thou hast wrought.”

Last night I went over to T’s and the doctor showed his pictures of Shandia for Bill and Irene and me. It was so good to see the place where you are—I could see your window in one picture. It looks lovely there. Of course Dr. T. related numerous incidents in his inimitable way. I nearly died when, after Gwen had spouted off about the terrors of the crossing every adjective she could scare up, Dr. T. said, “Yes, it’s a veddy (sic) trying experience.” I am sure the word “trying” could never be called an exaggeration.

He gave me the bird you sent up—it’s beautiful, isn’t it? I don’t quite know whether to thank you for it or what. The doctor simply said you wanted it kept up here in Quito, so had asked him to give it to me. However, I appreciate that, anyway, and for the present it is hanging in my room.

Now as for your letter—a wonderful one—You say the forest there is “bigger” than in the west. I wonder if you mean in area, or if the trees are bigger. I must confess I was a bit disappointed when I saw the western forests, as it just seemed to be bush, without many really big trees—none, it seemed, with thick trunks. The birds and flora must be beautiful, and those rivers, judging by T’s pictures, looked quite different from what I would have expected. I am glad you don’t have your nose in a vocabulary book all day—you have more than a one-track mind. It must be a lot of fun to see what you can make out of nothing, so to speak. I’m just dying to try it myself. I was sorry to hear that you’re using a plastic tablecloth, but sorrier still to hear of the meager fare you put on it—rice, plátano, yucca. I do hope you’ll be able to add some variety later.

List of things my father needed in Shandia. Thankfully he drew pictures of certain items she might not immediately recognize.

Now as for the stuff from the bodega: you asked for a yellow card with a set of steel drills. The only yellow card in the barrel had hacksaw blades. I couldn’t find a leatherette case with steel punches either, but I found a leatherette case with what look to me like steel drills, so I’m sending that down. I took everything out of the barrel looking for the punches, but couldn’t find them—so sorry. It surely is a good thing you drew pictures—I’d never have identified some of the items. (Incidentally, your list says that the punches should be in the blue barrel, so since I couldn’t find them there, I didn’t go through every other piece.) The 3 x 5 papers I’m having made—there was no such thing in Quito. Hope they’re ready Saturday, as they promised. Pilar escorted me up to get the honey—good stuff, and cheap, so we bought some, too, for the Arias.

Your notes about the onomatopoeia of the language were tantalizing—how I’d love to get my talons into something like that! God knows my heart—I believe He is going to lead that way sometime (to language work, I mean).

Doreen has been up since Tuesday a week ago, and has spent two nights with me and is coming back tonight. We’ve had some wonderful talks together. I feel a unity with her that I’ve not felt with anyone since Bunny. We talked till 2 a.m. both times, and then I’ve been with her several afternoons.

September 28

As you will have discovered, I’m sending quite a few letters for you to read, along with mail for Eladio and Pete which I picked up. . . .

I was so glad to hear from Van. I’d written her when I was in Guayaquil. Funny that she speaks of our being in Peru—she had the address on the envelope correct. Her letter is an honest one—in contrast, I fear, to many of the “missionary reports” Dr. Nida used to speak of. Oh, Jim, yesterday I just beseeched God for truth in the inward parts. . . . It has been shattering to realize the things that have gone on in the name of Jesus Christ. People always said that a great many disillusionments were in store for us when we reached the field. Dr. Harris impressed this on me. But I shall never forget the conviction with which Mrs. Harris quoted, “When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee . . .” I have been praying lately on the ground that the psalmist used—in English often, “for Thy name’s sake”—in Spanish (and I think I like it better), “por amor de tu nombre.” It is a sure ground. God must preserve His own glory, but there are times when we must leave it entirely up to Him, when it looks to us, as Service puts it, that His glory has been “dragged in the mire.” I read through A.C.’s God’s Missionary again last week. “Crooked patterns”—may God have mercy upon us, that the only pattern shown may be that “of the light of the knowledge of the glory of God, in the face of Jesus Christ.” For the kingdom of God is not in word, but in power. It is no game we find ourselves in. It is the war of the ages, and we wrestle against principalities and powers. And without purity in us, there is no power. The hymn “O Make Me Pure” has been running in my mind.

It has come to me that part of God’s reason for taking us (you and I) through suffering is for the answer to this prayer. When I think “Why should I have to go this way?” I realize that there may very well be special testings ahead for which I could not be prepared in any other way. Had a letter from a close friend of mine who is now entering her first year of med school, and has just become engaged to a man who is going to Indonesia as soon as possible. She has five years of med school ahead of her before she can think of going to the field. She says, “It will be a hard road, Bets, and not the one we would choose to travel, but we rejoice to think that the Lord has called us to go the hard way.” She knows nothing about you, but it was encouraging to have one more evidence that we are not the only ones! (Sometimes I feel as though we are.) What Van says about the lonely way for those who choose Christ cannot be denied. I realize (if not fully yet, to some extent) that loneliness would not end if we were to be married—partings would only be that much more poignant. And if now, when we are one only in mind and in spirit, I feel torn when you go, what would it be if we were “one flesh”?

Tidmarsh tells me that Ed and Marilou expect to be here before Christmas. That’s wonderful. And of course I cannot separate the idea from what you said about coming out to meet them. I wonder if we shall be able to see each other. Oh, Jim—here I am anticipating it already! The Sra. Navarrete says their apartment should be finished in November, and she’d love to have Ed and Marilou there. Says she could help Marilou with shopping and such that would be difficult at first. I think it would be an ideal set-up. Bill and Irene are looking for some sort of apartment that they could use for bodega and for living quarters while in Quito. I do wish we could find such a place for all of us. Incidentally, I have my suspicions that Irene is pregnant—but I didn’t ask. Neither she nor Bill look too well, though the baby is fat and healthy. . . .

I guess I had better let this suffice. If I leave now, I may get to T’s before the rain. You should have seen the hail we’ve had—one day a whole shoulder of Pichincha was completely white, just like snow, and it didn’t melt for almost twenty-four hours! Thank you again, so very much, Jim, for your eleven pages. I really appreciate it, knowing how much there is to do.

Following these three of my mother’s, here are the next three letters my dad wrote.

September 27

Pete and I should be doing something besides writing letters this afternoon, as there are plenty of things which the doctor left on the list to be done in his absence which we haven’t completed yet. But we were waylaid between 2:00 and 3:00 by a siesta and haven’t recovered yet. It’s hot, humid, and threatening rain, not at all conducive to walking back to the school and cutting down bench and table legs for the smaller boys—our scheduled project for this afternoon. Besides, since it was too hot to sleep during siesta, and all I could think about was you, and since I want to have something ready to go early Monday morning, I really should be writing you. . . .

No one, not even Pete, really knows how close we have been and, resultantly, are. I have not made secrets with you to broadcast them but to keep them for my lonely thoughts, looking out at the stars from my bed, or smiling at the dawn, or watching cloud forms come to pieces in the blue afternoon heavens—like today. I was reliving that afternoon in the little straw hut while it rained just now. Were those two really us? And the day I found you running down the road, hoping to beat us to the bodega, and ripe with tears. Was it really broad, sunny daylight?

Yes, yes, I shout back at myself, and what was may well be again. I wonder if I could stroke your cheek tenderly now, with broken nails, calluses, and a dozen blisters all in different stages of development, a dark, hammer-smashed thumb, and singed hair all up my hand and wrist from working with gasoline stoves and rubbish fires? I know it would not feel the same, but I would sure like to try.

October 1

It is such a pleasure to write you now, Betty. I’m beginning to feel what you said several times—that you often had to resist writing, almost as a temptation. So I find it these days, composing ideas at odd moments that I should write down but feel that I must not, that it would be something akin to extravagance to write to you every time I wanted to. So I desist, to study, to repair an Indian’s gun, to go out and see how the men are working and maybe lay a hand to it with them. And now, when I am seated to write, I always wish I had set down the rush of ideas as they came. Those seem better, somehow fresher.

And, if writing is pleasure, how shall I describe receiving? Especially now that you seem so much freer to express yourself. . . .

But why must I always make you cry? I’m sorry I stated what we both know, Bett, but it doesn’t help me any to say “I’m sorry.” It is a serious molestia to me [an annoyance] occasionally to think how far I can really be from your feelings, and completely failing to understand how things react in you. . . . I really feel sorry at such times, for I sense that it is a basic distinction of nature between us, that I can write or say a thing without a thought, and find it wounds or troubles you. I wonder at myself, because it is not hard afterward—hearing you explain why you are troubled—to understand clearly. But why, now that I know you so well, should I still have to blunder out such things and be told afterward? I don’t know, Betts, dear, but I wish I could be more sensible to you. I suppose it will take living together to adjust such things, and I hope I am not too hard on you in the meantime.

October 8

This time a year ago, I was sitting a little self-consciously and quite sunburned in the Howard’s home in Moorestown. All day today my last birthday has come back in daydreams, and I have lived a hundred little things we did together in making it “the happiest birthday ever.”

And now, with rain and thunder bringing on bedtime, come back those hours lolling on the shore at Great Bay Harbor, and the remembrance of how thick that quilted jacket was to feel you through—and walking to the beaver dam, thinking how hard it was to really be comfortable walking with my arm around you on that sandy, rutted road—and how you pushed me off in the moonlight by the Keswick lake and went and stood away from the bench—and how you slept in my arms at Birdsong.

It makes me downright happy, Betty, just to remember it, and so thankful that God led us that way then, when you and love itself were so new and fresh to me that I didn’t know quite what to make of it all. My diary notes are scanty, but sufficient to reveal the bewildering joy that overtook me last fall.

I shall never forget going into Dave’s room one of those nights, and standing for a moment—more than a moment perhaps, almost a full minute—realizing that this was it, and telling myself, “Elliot, you are in love with this woman.” It had never touched me so keenly before, never really shook me with a thrill until then. And the suddenness of it (my naiveté and absolute lack of direction or plan in coming to Moorestown amaze me now!), with the realization coming simultaneously that I not only could love as a man ought (I had doubted that seriously since Wilma), but that I actually did so love, made the sheets coldly memorable that night. And a phrase came back from some snatch I wrote years ago as I tried to sleep, something about curling inside myself and “glowing in amber gladness over you . . .”

Well, it remains the happiest birthday of all for me, and marks the beginning of the happiest year of my life so far. I never knew, no, not in dreams, the joy of really loving, this giving of oneself, not to be made happy, but to make another so, and finding in it what happiness is. Oh, thank you, Betty, for the bringing of love to me—by just being what you are, and by sharing what you are with me.

“Elliot, you are in love with this woman.”

Perhaps this is why, lost in such beautiful musing, the news of my mother’s decision to go west with Doreen struck him with such force. She had written in her journal, “I lean strongly toward going down to San Miguel to help Doreen get a start on the Colorado language. She hasn’t had linguistics, and since I have, it seems almost incumbent that I should go.” Her only real reluctance (other than the obvious) was whether she should commit to a place like “tiny San Miguel, where most of the residents are Christians—and vast reaches of the northern Oriente without one witness! O Lord—direct!”

By mid-October, though, she’d made up her mind. “The Lord has given peace about my going down to San Miguel.” This news, along with other standard relays of communication, had been reported by shortwave radio to the others, including the men down in Shandia, during one of their scheduled linkups. He told her of his reaction to it, in the remainder of his October 8 letter:

I don’t know why the sudden word over the radio this morning about your going to San Miguel should have affected me as it did. Formerly, I had even hoped you would do just that, but now that it actually comes to seeing you leave Quito—well, it made me quietly pensive all day. It was something like saying “goodbye” all over again—it puts you so much farther away, and I know that if I ever should make a sudden trip out to Quito now, you wouldn’t be there. There is, of course, no prospect of any such thing, but the idea haunts me. It has been a help to know your surroundings and something of your schedule there, to be able to think of you different times during the day, and picture you. . . .

But remember, it will mean your letters will have to be full and frequent, for my sake, even if they do pile up in Quito. I’m glad you have decided to go—glad when I’m in my right mind, and grateful for guidance for you now. But I’m not always in my right mind.

Oh, I don’t know how to tell you, Betty, or even if I should, but our months in Quito put me on an entirely different emotional level toward you than I was on before. Does it sound wrong to say that where you have been given rest since parting, I have had only uprisings of stronger want than ever? Where you have had peace, I find myself at perfect war.

Continually I am experiencing things now that I heard you describe of your pre-Quito problems, and of which I knew little then, but which I feel fully now. I mentioned last letter the strong urge to write, write, write, and the something that makes one restrain. I could add the crazy wish of wanting years to pass suddenly, the old rebellion of “why should it have to be so with me?” The needing of a place to rest. Could it be that we are crossing the same river, but far enough apart to be at different depths, wisely kept so that we would not sink together? I seem to feel it all much more keenly out here. There comes a sighing even as I write.

On a recent Wednesday, in fact, “in the cool of the day,” this sighing had turned into a little “chat with the Lord” out on the airstrip.

Decided finally what I have been thinking for months. Engagement is the best thing for Betts, for me, for the work. Wrote Ed to buy a ring for me and bring it. I am withdrawing all my feelings about long engagements and getting ready for one. When? When God brings Ed.

And whenever God brought Ed, my dad’s plan (as he wrote cryptically to my mother) was to be the one who went to meet him in Quito. And wouldn’t that be a good time for her to come back for a visit as well? “So let’s plan in the Will to meet in Quito after Ed arrives—Christmas, or June! Not a very definite date, but I hope we can keep it.”

There might be a little surprise waiting for her.

“Christmas, or June!” He hoped they could meet in Quito then, once he was able to find an engagement ring to give to her.

Funny, she almost found it out by complete accident, when the surprise ended up literally in her lap one day at the mission office. If she hadn’t been such an honorable woman, with such a sensitive conscience . . . let’s just say I’m not so sure I would have had as noble a response as she did to the dilemma in which she found herself.

October 15: Yesterday I faced one of the greatest temptations I’ve ever had. I found that Jim had written a letter to Ed McCully, and put “please forward” on the envelope. Knowing his correct address, I thought I would just transfer it to another envelope with the right address. In doing so, I allowed myself to unfold it, and found that there was a page which began, “Dear Buddy—this is a private letter . . .” My eyes caught the words “Betty.” And “engaged.” I immediately slapped it into the envelope and sealed it.

But my heart asks, was he confiding to Ed the things he can never tell me—telling him, for example, what has made him hesitate to become engaged, what barriers exist in his mind, what doubts he may have of his love? Or was he, perhaps, telling him that he has been thinking of engagement? God knows. I must be honorable with Jim, above all others.

Secrets really stayed SECRET with my godly mother! And even as curious as she must have been to see what was inside (can you even imagine?), she knew she couldn’t read it. No!—it was private. And she didn’t want to hurt my father or breach his trust, even in this wholly innocent way. What an upright and wonderful trait of hers. I admire it so much, just as I do her commitment to follow God’s will without reservation . . .

October 17

Gwen tells me you seemed a little taken aback when she told of my going to San Miguel. I guess it’s not to be wondered at. I would have told you in my last letter had I been absolutely certain, but it was still in the question stage.

You may remember our talk the day before you left—we were by the piano. I told you that although it seemed very simple to you, for my part I was not at all sure of going to the Oriente, and felt no special urge to learn Quichua.

You know that for six years I have been sure of God’s call to linguistic work—and I felt it was to be pioneer. This is my opportunity, and I am as clear about it as I was about my call to Ecuador. The way God led me was unmistakable, as I had practically put all thought of San Miguel out of my mind, for various quite logical reasons. But the Lord leads us by paths we know not, and I am grateful for knowledge of the next step. What it may mean to you and me personally, I cannot consider now. I know that you will understand and agree that neither of us owes anything to anyone but obedience to God.

I had one of the happiest dreams I’ve ever had of you, the other morning. I had waked early but went back to sleep, only to wake an hour or so later with the most delicious, relaxed, peaceful sense of having been with you. The details were all erased with the coming of consciousness, but, oh, it was wonderful to wake and know that you love me, which, I believe, is not only a dream. . . .

Thank you, Jim, for your kindness in apologizing for “making” me cry. I felt no need of apology of any sort, but your tenderness is always a wonder to me. Just your phrase “living together” did something to me. The thought had somehow never come to me in just those words, and your saying them left me shaken. The joy of such an idea is unimaginable at this stage.

A phrase from a song I love came to me . . .

I bring a prayer that God will bless and keep you Through every moment with its joy or tears;I pray His arms may tenderly enfold you,To guard you . . .

Sometime perhaps I can write the whole thing. But I do pray, and trust that He will be your Rock and Deliverer from every peril of the Enemy and the forests.

As ever, Betty

When she wrote again, it was nearing the time of her leaving, and the tears were flowing again.

October 25

Jim, I hardly know how to write to you tonight, but I cannot help writing. I have been crying, and I fear I will not be very coherent. Why am I crying? I suppose it is a number of things, none of which ought to bring tears. But you say that even as you write, you “sigh.” I wish that’s all it were with me.

Oh, Jim, there are days when I am sure I can’t stand it any longer—the uncertainty, the constant restraint, the “rising doubt, the rebel sigh.” Your letter intensified this feeling, knowing you are at last experiencing something of the same. On top of all this, I spent all of yesterday and half of today in the bodega [sort of a storage shed]. I can’t tell you what it does to me to go through your things, and even to go through mine. I see your handwriting, your clothes, some things familiar. In the unfamiliar, I see you buying them, packing them, using them there in Shandia when I send them down. I am glad to do this for you, Jim, getting stuff out, I mean. And it is in no way any “trouble” to me. It is only the association that makes it hard.

As I went through my stuff, in packing for San Miguel, I opened my barrel for the first time, and floods of memory came back over each thing. The barrel was packed by Dad, Mother, Jim, and a couple of professional packers. There was little Jim’s prized, shiny jack-knife that he wanted me to have. In the list of equipment contained in the barrel was the handwriting of all three, Dad’s with Scripture verses related to many of the items. Homesickness came over me, and I wanted to go to Moorestown, not to San Miguel. If it were not that I know God has called me, I would never in the world go down there. There are reasons for dreading it, and there are moments, verily, when I do. . . .

It is not with a light heart that I leave Quito. I have been happy here, God knows, and feel that I’d like to build three tabernacles. The thought of being that many more days away from you, as far as mail goes, is not easy. If I write more fully and frequently, as you have asked me to do, will you too? What happens to all those theories that were expounded last fall, in connection with Vine’s exhortation on missionaries getting heavily involved in correspondence? We cannot blithely ignore things that were serious issues with you a year ago, Jim, unless God definitely leads on, farther, or in another direction.

I pray for you, for strong preservation from the Enemy of souls, for facility in Quichua, for clear guidance and direction, and that He will “grant to His servant strength, and bless with peace.” You are in my heart, and I miss you.

Betty

October 27

Oh, Bett, how I thank you for pushing through all that stuff again. I know it was a “flunky” assignment, and no job for you, but it saved us days here, and will make any further getting things from the bodega a real chore, not having anyone to do it.

And now, I suppose you are in bed, readying for a long day tomorrow. The room is bare and cleaned to a pin, I know. And I know something else—that I would give nearly anything to walk in without knocking and slip quietly into an embrace.

It is 9:30. Your last night in Quito for a while, and your going leaves our meeting as uncertain as mine did a year ago when (in that blessed green suit and red leather bag) we pressed cheeks in public at the station, and I was on my way west. This I know too—that if next year is as full of sweet surprises and things to be wondered at, as has been this last one (and I have no reason now to expect anything less; the situations are analogous in their impossibilities), it will be but stronger evidence of the good hand of God upon and over us, keeping His promise and confirming all we have hoped in Him.

Is it not, for all its sting, a wonderful way to live, Betty? To dream and want and pray, almost savagely, then to commit and wait and see Him quietly pile all dreams aside and replace them with what we could not dream—the realized Will?

With this indomitable charge in hand, my mother took off by banana truck to Santo Domingo, where she stayed with the Cathers for a night, before leaving next morning on horseback for San Miguel. “Here I am tonight, sitting by a gasoline lantern in a bamboo and thatch house, having just come from a good prayer meeting of the believers here. It is my hope,” she continued journaling, “that God will give the key to the Colorado language. On Monday, Doreen and I hope to begin our work together.”

My father, meanwhile, along with Pete Fleming, kept up the hard work of building out their little school, station, and clinic, even as they continued drilling on their language studies, in prayerful hope that Shandia would be their launching point to other tribes in the rain forest.

Sadly, though, it wouldn’t be launching him to Quito by Christmas, as he’d at first alluded. My mother was disappointed but understood.

November 23

When I’d read of the impossibility of your coming out for Christmas, I went out in the kitchen and cried. . . . I have been counting the weeks. This morning I thought, “Surely a month from today—together!” I have been planning how perhaps you could come down and meet me on the trail between San Miguel and Santo Domingo. We would go together to Quito, have Christmas together. God knows the disappointment. . . .

If I had not perfect confidence that He is ordering all things after the counsel of His own Will, I should implore you to come to Quito, no matter what it involves. But Jim—do not think of any of what I have written as reproach. You know well how sure I am of God’s hand in all His dealings with us, and I ask only, whether they be of joy or pain, that through them we shall be brought to Him. I have no doubt that we are to see one another again sometime—but, it’s just that I wanted so much that it be Christmas.

Why do I write all this to you? As I have said, not because I hold you in any way responsible. It is simply that it’s what I am thinking. Perhaps it is what you feel too. And I want to share. I don’t like to hear of your tearing up pages you’ve written to me. No matter what you’ve said, it is something thought—and lost (to me, at any rate). For this reason I write in my journal many of the things that I cannot write to you now—that nothing be lost, if perchance the day may come when all can be given.

Your letters were new strength to me (and, oh, you do not know how I need it). Even the details, the lovely descriptions (and the sad ones), the account of your little parrot, the plane accident, the happy fellowship with Bill—it helps me, Jim.

Oh, there are times, of course, when I laugh at myself, and think life is wonderful and complete, engrossed in my Colorado work. I enjoy tearing around in jeans on horseback, walking with one of the girls in the jungle—with that, “Reuben, Reuben, I’ve been thinking . . .” attitude. Tomorrow Barbara and I are going on a fishing trip with a group of Colorados. We will be gone three or four days. I love that sort of thing. I also love the linguistic work. But always, and underneath, I try to imagine you there, working alongside, coming “home” to the house, riding the trails with me, struggling over some phoneme or allomorph. And such a thought is always better than this, no matter how much fun I may be having.

I really can’t imagine how this letter would sound if I were to read it over a week from now. I’d probably tear it up. But I won’t have a chance. I shall leave it here for Bill to take when he comes in on Tuesday for his Bible class. . . . I was going to sign it “As always”—but it seems a little different now.

Betty

“I just tore up a page I had written.” My dad’s longing for her.

December 5

The doctor came in this morning, and after the frenzy of getting supplies stacked away, I had a chance to get at my mail about midday. Usually I save yours and the family’s until last . . . but I couldn’t today—just tore yours both open and read them slowly, eating every phrase like a morsel. It had been too long, Bett, too long since receiving your last, and I don’t think it’s good for me to wait too long. Not for you. That’s why I’m writing tonight. . . . It can only be a note, as I have nothing especially to recount, and little time to recount it, but I want you to know, though I seldom put it on paper (because I think it looks strange here), that I love you. . . .

You make me sorrier than ever that we cannot be together for Christmas. I had gotten over the disappointment, from sheer weariness of it, and your first page brought it all back. For you see, I chose not to come out at Christmas. T. gave us several opportunities to state our preference about the thing, but it would have meant leaving Pete alone here, for Gwen is insistent that the doctor be in Quito then, and I think it is only right that it should be so. Do I then care more for Pete and feel sorrier for him alone here than for you there? Not exactly. But how can I say it? I feel like I really need not, knowing you and trusting your love to interpret the thing in my favor. There will be no way to make it up to you now—I only hope I can come out in January.

But even January might be wishful thinking.

The doctor, apparently forgetting all that I told him of my hopes for going up to Quito when Ed gets settled there, casually remarked today that he didn’t know if he would come in January or not. So please, Betty, don’t be saying to yourself anymore, “a month from today, surely we’ll be together.” I will come when I can with a clear conscience before God, and I will let you know of our plans if it is humanly possible.

I write this, not in rebuke, darling, but that you may not have to go into the darkness of the kitchen again to cry. If you like, I will come and meet you on the trail to San Miguel. I promise to make the next time we are together conform as closely to your preferences as is possible.

Wonder when that “next time” might be? My father tried to guess.

December 6

There is a very good possibility that I will not get another letter to you before Christmas and your birthday. That means this should contain all I want to give you for those events, but it cannot possibly. . . . I know you are not silly in expecting impossibilities from me out here, and I am grateful you are that sort—I know certain other women are not. So I will hold my surprises until we can be together again in Quito—asking only that you be patient with me, as plane travel is very uncertain, and that you make some attempt to be on hand up there after the first of the year, if you can get some gauge of my date of leaving. I will try my best to keep you informed by a letter, but if you should be unable to get any clue—stick it out and I’ll go down to Miguel and see you. . . .

I strongly sense the rightness of God’s leading you and me as He has, Bett. I could not be doing now what I am doing and needing to do (such things as letting the Indians invade my bedroom anytime we’re here) if I were a family man. As it is, I feel we are making contacts and friends on such a level as is most advantageous for the future of our work here, playing and sharing with the Indiana in a way I could not have time for if I were married. It is temporary. I, like you, don’t feel that a plastic tablecloth is for life, but in our present circumstances, there is nothing else for it, and we gain by having a table the Indians can touch with muddy hands. . . .

Reading in Psalm 119 the other day, I was struck with the verse you wrote in my gift copy of Toward Jerusalem, or rather referred to. “Thy statutes have been my song in the house of my pilgrimage.” This is what all houses are, and I feel it keenly about this one. There is a poetic sense in which it may refer to the body, as you seemed to suggest, but I am thinking now of life, and particularly my present experience of it, as a pilgrimage. And the goal of it, I see not only as heaven, but as a certain culmination with you which will sort of be an end to a great deal of wandering I’ve been doing since 1949—Oklahoma, Milwaukee, Huntington, Chester, Portland, the East, and now here. Or, at least, so I am led to hope. . . .

Sometimes—this month especially with its rush of pressures—I have felt lost without you, Bett, felt like the world was going by in a whirl of wonder, and I was dazedly letting it go by, my body participating but somehow standing apart, looking for something that didn’t show in all the wonder—and aware that that something was you.

It all goes over my head, it seems, and I go through the motions of keeping in the tide, but if anyone was watching closely, they would know—by the quiet sigh in a rowdy game of volleyball, by the faraway glance up the river and over the treetops, from mid-current to the clouds way off to the west . . . they would know I was not really all there where I seemed to be. . . .

Your picture, the framed one you gave me for Christmas, has been a great help somehow. It depicts you as I like to think of you . . . the dozens of times it has surprised me by looking up sideways from a suitcase. It makes it seem like it has been forever with us, through everything, the way it is now, and seems to say, “Take it easy, Jim, we are not through the story yet, and you have no basis for believing it will turn out to be a tragedy.”

Still I do, Bett, I do fear sometimes, like a worrying mother, that something would happen to you and I should lose you. And then what would I do? Where would I be when I wasn’t where I seemed to be? Which way would my imagination go when I went to sleep?

Funny, but I never think of my having the accident and your losing me . . .

His final letter of the year sparkled with a bit more joy and—what shall we call it—boyish jitters? “You will know that Ed is to arrive this weekend, and it is maddening to think that I’ll have to wait weeks to see him,” thanks to the now familiar delays of passing through customs. Even so, “it brings our being together again within sight, of course, and I have been losing some sleep over it.”

December 16

I think sometimes that it will be impossible to meet and speak casually with you, saying, “Hello, Betty,” in the presence of other people, feeling sure that my voice will crack or I’ll do something that will embarrass us both. But I suppose it will be like always—the greeting, the not-too-long glance into your eyes, the handshake and the small talk about things that really don’t matter. Well, if the Lord preserves me in my right mind until then, I shall be grateful, for quite frankly, I have never been this way before.

And nothing, he knew, was going to be the same about this visit.

Does Dorothy’s case of jaundice, along with several others who have visited HCJB folks, to say nothing of themselves, give you any qualms about a ten-day or two-week visit there? I don’t care how thin and healthy you are, I won’t hear of risking jaundice just because it might not look right for you and me to be quartered at T’s. Betty, I beg of you, this once, not to let what people think influence your decision about us being together. I want to be as near you for as long as I possibly can, this one time. . . .

Oh, may it be as you said, Betty!—that “we shall be brought to Him,” brought to Him in a new nearness and with a new weight of joy, for having denied, by the grace He supplies, for His sake, this special sort of want. “There is no man that hath forsaken—for My sake—but who shall receive!”. . .

You may think my suggested stay at T’s is a little strange. It may be. What we may discover is that there won’t be room for us both with Emma there—although I don’t know why, unless the room I used to have is really packed with stuff. We’ll see, but please don’t disregard the suggestion. I want to see all I can of you.

So with this tingle of excitement in the air, my mother made her final journal posts of 1952, trusting she would “see Jim in a few weeks. He plans to come out on Dr. Tidmarsh’s next flight in. It worries me somehow, but yesterday I read, ‘Jehovah guardara tu salida tu entrada.’” [“The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in.”] So I will trust His promise.”

December 28: As Jim said in his last letter, he wonders if he can possibly meet me casually in the presence of others—“hello, Betty,” handshake, etc. I sometimes feel that I shall not be able to restrain myself from rushing to him. For him, however, this seems to be the first time he has felt thus. For me, it is the sixth (I mean, the sixth meeting after long separation). . . . At times the thought comes to me that it can’t be again that we should see one another, that surely something will happen to one of us. “But the Lord is kind—be not blind, be not blind.” And His is the Will that willeth only good. “We rest on Thee, our Shield and our Defender.”

What is this Lord Jesus

That Thou shouldst make an end

Of all that I possess and give

Thyself to me?

So that there is nothing now to

call my own save Thee

Thyself alone my treasure

Taking all, Thou givest full measure

Of Thyself

With all things else eternal.

Things unlike the mouldy pilf

by earth possessed.

And in God’s garments

dressed am I

With Thee an heir to riches in the

spheres divine.

Strange I say

that suffering loss

I have so gained everything

In getting me a Friend

Who bore a cross.

Jim Elliot

I cannot give myself to thee

For I am not my own.

Christ claims this life—His sacrifice

Made me bone of His bone.

Upon thy life, beloved, too

Our Lord has set His sign.

Will, purpose, and command are His—

Obedience, yours and mine.

He is the object of our love,

And He is love’s great force.

“We love because He first loved us.”

Love finds no other Source.

If, in mysterious design,

He sets our paths apart,

Can we not gladly take the road

Planned by a Father-heart?

But that these lives should be as one

Is His alone to give.

To separate or to unite,

Divine prerogative.

Elisabeth Howard

↑ Back to top