1953 Love Transcending

1953 Love Transcending

Love Transcending

“I am almost beside myself with longing for Jim,” she said in early January, writing in her journal in San Miguel. “The suspense is harder than ordinary waiting. Everything depends on when Dr. T goes back to Shandia.” And, as she went on to say, “That could be any day, or it may be weeks away.” My father was equally on pins and needles—not only from the waiting, but also from not knowing how to get timely, reliable word to her of any updates on his schedule.

January 6

Bett, it will be impossible for me to advise you of the date of my coming out. Seems strange that this is the only time so far that the doc has not seemed anxious to get in here and leave us without any stated reason for not coming.

Well, I suppose we will have to wait, but I don’t have the same spirit of hope that possessed me when I last wrote. It may be a month now, as he tells us he has hardly begun on the purchasing for this trip in, and he brought in such small quantities last time that nearly every item in the store has to be replaced. I’m not sore at the doc for this, but a little surprised at myself for having set so much stock in the hope that I might get out this weekend. I do hope you get these two notes together so that you don’t make plans to go up to Quito and have to cancel them. Forgive me, Bett, for being so extravagant in my hopes.

As to how I will finally get word to you about coming out, I have no idea. I don’t know what you want me to do, but it may be best to wait in San Miguel until I can get word to you from Quito. But if you want to wait it out in Quito—well, that will bring us together maybe a day or so earlier. If there was just some sure way of contacting you down there . . .

Eladio [the schoolteacher] is here and the walls are on the clinic and I didn’t get any language study in and hope deferred makes the heart sick and I’m missing you terribly and I love you with all my heart.

The madness was causing him to write long, lovesick, run-on sentences. After all these years of waiting, now even a day seemed to him an eternity.

January 18

Daily there is word from T that he has begun to purchase supplies and will be down shortly. Ed came to the radio yesterday morning and told us he might not come in for two weeks yet. I hear Gwen is sick and that he is busy painting.

If he has any idea what young love is, and that we intend to be in Quito together, he is being cruel. All I can say is that he has little memory or little foresight! Every day ends the same—with a wondering, Betty, and a wonder charged with wanting to be with you and hoping it can be a good length of time.

But almost as hard to take is the absence of your letters. Today makes the ink on your last letter seven weeks old—it made the last mail seem very empty not to hear even a word from you. . . .

Several folk here come down from Quito, so we could have mail every ten days. As it is, we get it about twice a month. I suppose it’s the same with you, but I do miss word from you.

“Even Pete is getting letters from Olive posted December 19, and your last date is the second,” he moaned. “Can San Miguel be farther than Seattle?”

My mother said she was “beside herself” too. But hear her classic, spiritual thinking, as written in the following journal entry, nearly a month past the Christmas reunion she’d hoped to enjoy.

January 21: I want to enter into full sonship with the Father. The present test is one of God’s means for effecting this. He is dealing with me as with a son. Let me not respond as a child, kicking and screaming and pouting. Rather, with a mature acceptance of His dealings, let me understand and adore. Then only will the chastening contribute to my spirit’s development.

How many of us can honestly say, “Let me not respond as a child,” when our whole being wants to kick and scream and wail? How willing are we to accept God’s plans maturely when all human reason and affection shouts to “do something about it!” She chose to accept the Lord’s timing, His way in this whole drama. And how glad I am that she loved to write, so that her honest journal can be published now. I know she taught these principles from the platform, but it’s good to see in her own hand what I saw her practice in real life.

My father, of course, expressed a similar trust and faith. And I’m glad he wrote of it too!

January 18: Maybe the Lord is having me wait for a full moon to be in Quito—that would be the twenty-ninth. I wonder if that is His design. . . . But it has already happened inside me. I have given myself over to the love of her, and there is no desire, purpose, or sense in any thought of withdrawal. It only lacks her word, and I could not believe that will not be given, with such square-shouldered confidence as I believe I have gotten from God. There is the “It is finished!” tone in my spirit; morally, I am already engaged. There is, or can be, no other woman now for my children and my wife, and there is a quiet, glad knowledge in writing it. I have sought slowly the will of God, and the slowness has brought strength into the conviction of it, and joy in the realization of it.

Soon, he could almost taste his long-awaited prize.

January 26: Yesterday afternoon Ed came to the radio and told us that the doctor would likely be down on Thursday. If Ed comes with him, we will probably go out to Quito a week from today together. It is barely possible that I may be engaged in ten days.

Oh, that it were certain, that I held her already after she said yes or whatever she will say. This waiting has built up pressure and released it so many times that I feel it has changed me somehow. I sense an aging and a waning—not of desire but of spirit—as though strength were washed out of me from so many nights standing alone on the cliff and watching so much water pass. It is the oldness of hope deferred, the borderland of hopelessness.

A week seems unbearably long this rainy morning; intolerably slow the river runs, though it is in the rush of flood. Pass, water; get on down to the sea. Wash away the Was, the Is, bring down What Is to Be. I’ll need special tolerance of things these days, kind Lord, a steeled patience—with rain and poor radio communications and trying schoolboys. Help me this week, and do let it be the last of waiting.

Mercifully, it was.

And here’s the account of it, in my mother’s words.

On January 31, Jim and I became engaged. I am overwhelmed with the wonder of it all. I arrived in Quito Saturday afternoon, Jim having arrived on the previous day. We had supper together, and, beside the fireplace in “Maranatha House,” he asked me.

J: “Do you want to marry me?”

E: . . . (my answer) . . .

(My dad’s journal says her answer was, “I have no reason to hesitate.”)

J: “I love you and I want to marry you. God has given me peace.” And, after quietness, and—our first kiss—he put a ring on my finger.

“O, God of stars and flowers . . .”

The relief of being able to tell him my love, of feeling free for the first time, is simply unspeakable. I literally ache with love for him and long now for the day when he will be my husband. O, I want to be possessed. I desire him, and his desire is toward me—Oh, perfect love, all human thought transcending.

Picture taken the day after their engagement. On the left, she’s turning her hand to show the ring.

What joyful relief! Her waiting for his proposal, her prayers, and her natural longing for the man she loved—his waiting to know from God His timing for the engagement—it all culminated on this last day of January 1953. Their well-thought-out words, reticence, and steel will paid off on this joy-filled evening. Would they both have said it was worth the wait? I believe they did, and they were certain of God’s timing and blessing for their union.

All of the unusual, brilliant, agonizing, trusting, hope-filled words in these journals and letters have made me wonder: Was my dad unwise to tell her of his love way back in June of 1948? He was quite sure then that God wanted him to be a single missionary, but of course didn’t yet know God’s plan. Was he too precipitous? How would I advise a young man who felt sure he had fallen in love?

I think I would say: Be very careful how much time you spend with her until you’ve met her dad and asked for his blessing on getting to know her in an intentional and serious way. And even if you’re wildly in love with her, try to keep your mouth shut until you are absolutely sure that she is the one for you. The practice of saying “I love you” has become so commonplace and cheap that it has caused untold misery by dashing one’s hopes and damaging one’s heart if there is no determination to marry as a result. Men are to seek God before seeking a wife. Women are to place all their hope in God to bring the right man into their lives, should that be His will for them. This is how God protects and provides. It reminds me of a T-shirt that one of my sons used to wear: “Seeking Him to find her.”

I believe my mother and dad would second that opinion.

The waiting is why they could experience love now afresh.

Not much was normal about the next two weeks. Their journals briefly itemized the doings, including every dinner and outing, sometimes even down to the selections on the menu. Among the more interesting events, right off the bat, which my mother summarized in a single journal entry from later in the month:

Feb. 1—Church, breaking of bread, HCJB in the evening. The whole choir burst into “I Love You Truly” as we entered the studio!

Feb. 2—Greetings broadcast when we announced our engagement to whoever was listening.

Feb. 8—Jim preached in church, I sang, dinner at Gwen’s . . .

Probably the most insightful encounter happened on February 10, as described in my father’s journal several days later:

February 14: The other night, Tuesday, I believe, we had a lunch together at the bodega and afterward a long discussion about limits to engagement relations—everything from touching her breasts to intercourse.

Earlier the past summer, he had argued in his own mind with 1 Corinthians 7:1—“It is good for a man not to touch a woman”—and concluded from the context that it was likely “speaking of an unmarried man sharing another’s wife,” not an unmarried man who was planning to marry the woman. “It does not apply to my play with Betty,” he felt, which meant he could enjoy “further liberty with her body” without being guilty of fornication, once they were engaged.

But how sweetly he honored my mother’s self-discipline and determination to set the lines of demarcation more strictly. This deliberateness in declaring boundaries gave them a depth of freedom that wantonness (which only seems like a freedom) would not.

Oh, how glad I am she knows just how much of herself to give. . . . When I came home, so I spoke, “A garden shut up is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed” (Song of Sol. 4:12). She is that until marriage, by her present attitudes.

But where this February 10 encounter had been notable for its delay of future unknowns, February 15 was notable for bringing unthinkable unknowns directly into their present.

EH: Dr. Fuller informed me today of an active tubercular lesion in one lung. Jim was with me when he told me, and we faced it together when we got here to Gwen’s.

JE: She held a brave face until we got home here; then, in telling Gwen, her voice broke. In the sala she cried bitterly, hard sobbing and much tears.

EH: I have never been so crushed by anything in my life. It may mean going back to the States, for three months of absolute rest in bed. How can I leave Jim? I cannot be a hindrance to him.

JE: She fears she can never marry me—says that I can’t be nursing a consumptive all my life. Told me that I couldn’t kiss her on the lips anymore, but she let me—in the hall just now—forgetting, I suppose, that there is a bacteria eating at her lungs.

EH: Jim and I had a letter from Dave and Gibby of congratulations on our engagement, which brought tears to both of us. Little do they know this latest dark cloud that comes on the horizon.

JE: As for me, things are unchanged. She is the same woman I loved last night before I knew the tubercles were formed in her chest. If I had any plans, they are not changed. I will marry her in God’s time, and it will be the very best for us, if it means waiting years. God has not led us this far to frustrate us or turn us back, and He knows how to handle T.B. . . .

If she really has it, it may mean a trip to the States for three or four months, or it may mean a lifetime of being an invalid. I don’t know what it means. Only I know that God is in the generation of the righteous and guides their steps aright. Beyond His counsel and will, there is no going. I am there now and want nothing more.

Either way, it surely put a damper on the rest of their time together. And back in Shandia, when he later learned that “the ‘tuberculosis’ proved to be only a shadow, which disappeared in the third x-ray,” he was none too happy—not about the false alarm, of course (praise God for that!), but about how it had needlessly interfered with their long-anticipated, once-in-a-lifetime visit. It was good news, even with the disappointment it had wrought. He would simply need to count his blessings another way.

February 23

I’m afraid I would not deal kindly with the gremlin who saw a black spot on your x-ray if I could get my hands on him tonight. When I think of the kisses his ignorance robbed from me the last three days in Quito, I could choke him outright. Oh, Betty, I knew it could not be all that you feared it would mean for us. And I think that for this—because I never fully realized, never really believed all that could be—that I didn’t break down one of those three nights. And, oh, I thank God that it was not so.

He couldn’t get those days back, and he couldn’t have her by his side at the moment. But he did have something new to be thankful for: their engagement had brought to her letters “a difference in tone and material” that hadn’t been present in any of her previous ones. Now, for the first time ever, he could read the words of love and affection he’d always wanted to hear.

Will I ever be able to tell you, Betts, what it does to me to have you call me “darling”? And to know that we are wholly and for always committed to one another, given over to one another’s power and pleasure, sold out of ourselves, each for the other’s good? The absolute goodness and rightness of it is unspeakable.

How shall I say what I feel in gratitude to God for the rights and responsibilities of your love? And, what shall I say to you? I don’t know. Only this, my darling Betts, that I am drawn to you with a fondness I can never exhibit, and held to you with a love that is at once all tenderness and all strength which my very body, at either peak of gentleness or power, does not suffice to declare.

I love you. Once that meant “I trust you,” and “I appreciate and admire you.” Now it means that I am somehow part of you, with you, and in you.

But his next paragraph is perhaps the most significant of all, and is such a needed observation in our day—worthy of all attention. How wise had been my mother’s determination not to give too much of herself to him, both in commitment and physical touch, before she could be sure of his intention to marry and could say “yes.” As a result, she had saved up her words of love for this important moment. That’s why her words were coming out in such a rush now—like a dam breaking, its waters tumbling freely into the channel. That’s why even her written words could communicate such tremendous blessing, could be such a gift to him, because she’d kept them to herself awaiting God’s perfect timing.

And how touching of my father to recognize this, to apologize even, for not being able to give her the same distinctions of stored-up expressions that were giving him so much joy to read from her.

You will not find in my writing now what I see you have saved for me in yours. Forgive me for an early eagerness. And if I seem in this as I did in my last, be kind and remember that I was not able, from lack of conviction, ability, or desire, to hold myself as closely as you were. There may not be in this the “burst” that a letter following engagement should contain, and I am sorry, in a way, knowing the keen pleasure there is in seeing things I have waited years to see in your hand. You should know by now that I really do not lack fervency.

Yes, his love was just as deep, even if already shown and spoken of. “I need a wife,” he wrote in his next letter—quite a contrast from the Jim Elliot who had once been so determined to go it alone. But not just a wife, he needed her.

March 8

When lying on the cot at night with the quiet loneliness of the dark, or seeing a very poorly washed T-shirt, or looking at a picture of you, it comes to me anew that I was meant for something else besides myself and “the boys”—specifically that I was planned and made for you . . . and that life itself was meant for me to share with you in its very smallest part. I love you, darling Betts, and pray that God will soon clear the way for us to be together.

I once heard a Christian professor say that when he began looking for a young woman to marry at his Christian college, he could have married any one of them on campus, as long as she was a Christian. I was shocked and incredulous. “Do you mean,” I asked, “you don’t think God planned a specific partner for everyone?” With an air of kindly condescension he said, and I paraphrase, “No, I don’t, because God could help any one of them be able to be compatible with me, and with His help we would be able to have a good marriage.”

This went against all my teaching and upbringing. I’d been taught that God had a specific spouse for every one of His children who married. If someone’s husband or wife dies, of course, He may have another that He brings into a person’s life, as He did for my mother. (God gave her two husbands after my dad. Addison Leitch became my stepfather during my later teenage years. I called him Dad. He died of cancer four and a half years after their marriage. Lars Gren, my mother’s third spouse, is still living.) My parents both held this belief about God’s will for marriage, as attested by their own words, and I felt the same way when I fell in love and married my husband. He was the man God made for me, and I the woman for him. When God created Adam and Eve, did He not specifically plan them for each other? Would this not be the same for all history?

I’m sure that’s what my father believed when he said he wanted “to live with you all the hours of every day I live, to share what I am at close range, and just to rest in being loved by you.” He needed her, and she needed him. “The work too needs you, dear, almost as much as I.”

Like, he said, when “a favorite little Indian girl of mine came wailing out of the forest,” saying that “her father had been drinking and picking on her, and her stepmother began repeating stories about her that made her feel sick and outcast.” Apparently they’d been accusing her of coming to the school to have “relations” with the schoolteacher, and were also spreading other lies about the work of the missionaries there.

Today when her father came, I chewed him out for saying such things, and he was sorry—he was drunk. He invited me to go “instruct” his wife (that’s the word they use for “rebuke”), and all the Indians concerned insisted that I do so.

Eladio and I and the father and the girl went to see the hard-hearted one—who promptly denied all, blaming the “lies” (as everybody says they are) on a sister-in-law now up-river. I never sweated through so much Quichua all at once in the six months I’ve been here! And now I must “instruct” the sister-in-law! . . . Seriously, I think a wife would solve many such difficulties.

The medical part of their ministry was difficult too. They’d once been giving vitamins and shots of medicine to a man who came in “vomiting great mouthfuls of bright blood last Monday. . . . He was getting along fine until Friday about 3:45, when he vomited again and became exceedingly restless—dangerously so, for one so weak. He was gone by 4:30.”

The first man I ever watched die. And so it will come to me one day, I kept thinking. I wonder if that little phrase I used to use in preaching so much was something of a prophecy: “Are you willing to lie in some native hut to die of a disease American doctors never heard of?” I am still willing, Lord God. . . . But, oh, I want to live to teach Thy Word. Lord, let me live “until I have declared Thy works to this generation.”

How helpful it would have been to come home to a wife, after such a mortal eye-opener.

And then there were the construction projects—“building houses for other people” when he wanted so badly to be building the first home where he and my mother would live.

March 11

I cannot see beyond concrete and nails and planks and aluminum now. I keep hoping some miracle will happen—something that will upset all our plans—even our hopes for the work here. Like a carpenter coming to do the building, and freeing me now to travel . . . anything that would get me doing something besides building houses for other people. (If you think living in other people’s houses is distracting, try building one in my state of mind!) And yet I feel, Betts, that God has sent me here for it, that no one else can do it who is now on the field, and that God has put me here for it, personal likes and dislikes aside.

It’s strange, but I both hope and dread some cataclysmic upset that will bring you and me together. I feel like it would have to be that now, with things so well formulated and going along so nicely.

Little did he know, God would do just that.

Spring

“The Lord has met me in new ways in the past few days, Jim,” my mother wrote from San Miguel sometime in this spring of ’53, “and I give Him praise.”

Oh, darling, there’s so much I want to talk with you about. I do hope and pray that we can be together for the conference next month [a missions gathering in Quito]. I still don’t know when it begins. You mention my suggestion about your coming over “just to see me.” I realize your situation is different from mine. You cannot simply pack up and go off for a week just any old time. . . .

I find that I very soon get stale and fed-up with life here. Contrary to your life—too busy and too full—mine is slow and event-less often, and the days drag by. . . . I find that the fact that nothing actually presses me to activity, leads me to dawdle in quiet time, let my mind wander in prayer, and daydream when trying to study. Sometimes, I confess, after a long time on my knees and very little praying done (for the thousand trivialities that beckon my attention) I finally call it quits, saying to myself, “This isn’t prayer. Might as well be up and doing something,” even if it’s only making a cake or sharpening a pencil. . . . I feel that I have lost much since college days.

Well, to be realistic, she wasn’t actually doing “nothing.” She was laboring to decode an alphabet from an unwritten, oral language, in hopes of opening new vistas of opportunity for the Colorado Indians, not the least of which was the opportunity for them to hear the gospel in words they could understand. Many of her letters to my dad that spring tell of “stewing over these old glottal stops and h’s,” sorting out problems with “nasalized vocoids” and “consonant clusters,” or trying to differentiate between “so many individual variations in pronunciation.” (“I’m having an awful time with T and D,” is one of my favorite lines.) In every interaction with people from the tribe, she was carefully listening to each sound of their Tsahfiki language, then writing down copious notes of new data. “There are some things I don’t see how I can ever be sure about.”

No, doing linguistic research may not have been the same as cutting down lumber by hand in the forest and converting it into subflooring, as my dad was often doing. But it was important work just the same—cerebral, demanding. It was something she’d studied hard to prepare for, to do well.

What I love, though, in hearing both of my parents update each other on their daily activities—in letters that were now painfully slow in arriving, thanks among other things to a national gasoline shortage—is how frequently and vulnerably they sought the other’s prayer in helping them stay on task and in the right spirit. I’ve pieced together the following excerpts from a number of their letters to one another throughout the spring.

EH: I would be glad if you’d pray for me in this matter, Jim. The inability to concentrate, the lack of any real will or desire to get anything accomplished—it is not a light thing, and I feel convicted about it.

JE: You asked what else to pray about. Do remember this week of meeting. Pete and I will be taking a meeting each, every day, and we are going to attempt it in Quichua.

EH: Yesterday I was able to decide on four phonemes [symbols which represent sounds] for the Tsahfiki alphabet. I trust they are correct. . . . Jim, do pray that I may be given special wisdom in this. Barbara just has to have a workable alphabet. Pray that they’ll be right.

JE: And I hope you are praying right along for souls—genuine conversions to Christ among our schoolboys and many Indian friends. It has been more and more on my heart since coming back—the turning of these folks from darkness to light. True, we do not have the language well, but they are understanding somewhat, and I long to see their comprehension brought to convinced believing. God is able for this, and we are asking. . . . Do pray that we will have the power of God in our devotional talks this morning. . . . We have begun the house floor, but are still short of boards and men to cut and plane them. Pray definitely about this.

EH: Jim, my darling, I pour out my heart in thanksgiving to the Lord for you, every time I go to pray. . . . I pray daily that He will keep you from harm or sickness. . . . I would be glad if you’d pray, Jim, that I may be “girded up” in the “loins of my mind”—disciplined in study and prayer. It cannot be excused because I am getting old, or because the devil is tempting me more—the Lord has promised to “lead us in triumph.”

JE: Pray that it will be so here, Betts, that God would take this work in hand and do it ON HIS OWN LINES. To see Christ honored and testified to publicly by one of these young Indian fellows we now know as friends would be something like seeing a miracle done before my very eyes, I believe. Indeed, it would be a miracle, but I have never seen it as clearly so before now. “Except the Lord . . . in vain . . .” God must do His work, or it will not be done, and we stand waiting for Him here.

EH: How I wish you were here to consult with me! But there are also other reasons I wish you were here. How I’d love to know once more the strength of your arms around me, and the wonderful sweetness of a kiss. . . . I think of you so much, and talk to the Lord constantly about you.

JE: Good-night, my brave lover, and may the God who loves you stronger than I stand guard over you. . . . Don’t discourage your folks from praying for a wedding this summer—I wish I had the faith to pray similarly. All I can do is cry to the Lord for His time and tell Him what it’s like having to wait. This summer! Bless them, and God honor their faith!

And yet he was praying with similar hope and faith, despite knowing “they are asking for something that I am afraid would be quite upsetting to present conditions—not disagreeably so, but not without taking either Pete or I out of Shandia. There is still only one bedroom in Shandia, and not much prospect of another empty turning up.”

However . . .

March 17

The only thing I can think of is what I mentioned in my last—a change that would be so shocking and catastrophic that you and I could be free to marry soon. . . . And God knows how often and how confidently I have put the desire before Him, Betts dear, saying, “Lord, Thou knowest how I desire her and how long we can take this, and Thou knowest, too, our plans for Shandia. Oh, God, direct us!”

Even others were starting to wonder when he and my mother would be marrying.

Wittig startled me when he was in with a load of cement and kerosene on Friday by pointing over to the concrete piers and saying, “Who knows, Brother Jim, that may be your house over there.”

But I don’t know how the girl of my dreams would go for that. For all the talking we did in Quito, I never really did press you as to your expectations for us out here. I remember telling you that I didn’t know what to expect for us, but all I can remember about what you wanted was a house “bien metida en la pelea” [in the heart of the activity] and talk about fireplaces and a blue-green bedroom. . . .

I know, Betts, that you feel as I do—you’d be happy on a dirt floor if only we could be living together, but what do you really hope for as far as location and proximity to other missionaries and house type and so on? Or do you feel it dreaming too far ahead to think on just now?

He was right, she didn’t harbor any real preferences about their housing arrangements. Who could, in a place such as this? But the previous winter, prior to their engagement, she had made mention in her journal (December 6) of feeling a bit taken for granted—not only about her desires for basic amenities in their future home, but even about the assumption that her calling and gifts made sense in Shandia at all.

EH: He goes ahead building, actually thinking in his own mind that I shall someday be in Shandia, but not so much as asking me how I feel about it or what sort of house I might like. I have no desire to go to Shandia, actually, and much less to live in a house planned and built by someone else. What is there for me to do in Shandia, anyway?

But this morning the word of the Lord quieted anew. “I would seek unto God, and unto God (not ‘unto Jim’) would I commit my cause.” “I will give them one heart and one way.” “In the way of Thy judgments, O Lord, have we waited for Thee. The desire of our soul is to Thy name.”

There are times when I feel I should let go and “tell Jim off”—tell him how I feel about the way he is handling me. There are other times, when I think of his love for me, and my own unspeakable desire and love for him, that the former thoughts are overwhelmed and lost. It is God that maketh my way perfect. In Him do I trust, and I will not be afraid.

By spring, then, she was well past making demands, and only wanted to be with him. (“Oh, Jim, I just find myself living for the day when I leave here to go to the Oriente.”) She’d been wise, then, to hold her tongue in winter, to wait on God to quicken these kinds of thoughtful questions in my father’s mind. Several times during this period, we hear him asking, “How do you feel? Please tell me what you are expecting in a home out here,” trying to figure out how he could paint bamboo walls blue-green.

Writing to her in April from Dos Rios, a nearby, more established missionary station, he said:

I wish you could just see Shandia once so that you could think with me about such things, but I have no idea how it could be worked for you to visit. This Dos Rios house was built with machine tools and by real carpenters—and how I envy their doing it so well. We will never be able to produce such a place, and I wonder just how we, you and I, will ever fulfill dreams of blue-green bedrooms. Hand tools leave lumber so crudely finished and so poorly fit that painting to any degree of beauty is a practical impossibility. We may have to settle for bamboo, Betts, so be thinking how you want it!

By this time, though, he had already been expressing his own lack of any frivolous demands and expectations, as in this letter from March.

March 22

You asked about a wedding dress and my preferences. Bless you, darling, but you’re comical in your sincerity at times. Whatever difference would it make to me? . . . As far as I’m concerned, you didn’t ever and won’t ever need a color to flatter you. Generally I have preferred long dresses to short ones always, but that, too, is irrelevant now. You looked lovely, I thought, the night of Dave’s wedding in a short, white suit. I may have a word to say about the length of your hair if you ask me, but beyond that, darling, it’s your show. I am a most interested by-stander waiting to see what you’ll do! . . .

How shall I tell you, darling, after all I’ve carelessly said about your features, that now I think them all wonderfully framed and that I know when it comes time for me to see them, I will remark with Solomon, “Behold, thou art fair, my love.”. . .

And now, Betty, my promised and longed-for wife, good-night. May the Shield of our spirits hover over you tonight and give you rest in sleep, making you glad and effective in His service and preparing you for me as a fellow worker. It may not be very romantic, but I like to think of you that way—as one who can sensibly share the problems of this type of work and conscientiously partake in the solution. I doubt if my comrades have any such hopes in their wives. And for this, my dearest, I love you tonight—for that part of you that is so practical and wise and helpful.

It’s humorous how my dad thought the other guys’ love for their fiancé or wife was nothing compared to his for my mother. Perhaps every couple who are wildly in love think their romance is the perfect one, greater than anyone else’s in the world. But when others would tell him of problems or difficulties in their relationships, he celebrated privately what he considered the superiority of my mother’s character and their sure ability to navigate the waters of marriage.

I have wondered if it were true what Ed said about there being times when real love, exhibited both in physical attentions and in a striving of words to understand, will not succeed in bringing you out of a “mood.” Up until now they have, I think . . . because you were willing to tell me. It would disturb me, Betts, if we came to such an impasse and you refused to complain—just shut up and wouldn’t be plied. So I think I’ll ask you to put on paper a promise of some sort that when there is something—usually described as “oh, it’s nothing”—that you will tell me. However small, I want to know what is troubling you, and I am a poor guesser when it comes to such.

This comment reflects a noticeable trend in their writing at this time, as they each tried imagining what life together as man and wife would be like. Again, these excerpts come from their various letters (and one journaling note) throughout the spring.

EH: You know, I was thinking today—although we must face long separations after marriage, you won’t be going to an office every day of your life, eight or ten hours a day, having me at home. We shall be together more perhaps, in the long run, than the average couple in the States. I want to work with you, in the Lord’s service, as much as I can, and I know that you will be far more of a father to our children than many would be in the States. I long for the day when we can share everything.

JE: There has been so much to make me think of a home and children this week [in Dos Rios] that I have gone to bed and awoken every morning with wonderings of what it will be like. I know it will be a delight with you, but just how it will be to really go at it—how we will teach our children the difference between Spanish and Quichua and English (a most interesting diversion in the home of three little ones)—how you will handle giggling kitchen help—and how we will be when company comes and the kids, sitting at a separate table, have a quarrel on.

EH: I think constantly these days of our first home together, a one or two-room shack, with cane and paja [straw]. But to be with you, Jim—what will it be?

JE: And to do it with you! Betty Howard, the Austere, the Thoughtful, the Woman with the Man’s Mind (all that from Wheaton), and the Betty who doesn’t like overhead lights, nor doubles [twin beds], nor men who spit—my Betty with the lovely legs and flat stomach and slender shoulders, and, oh, such soft cheeks. My darling, I love you, want you, need you, crave you now.

Anything could set them to thinking of the other.

EH, journal: A beautifully clouded moonlit night. Full moon, but only visible at intervals. I’ve been sitting down on the porch, watching the movement of the luminous clouds, asking God for just one uninterrupted, clear shining of the whole moon. Sort of a promise or omen. He gave it. Thought, too, of Jim’s observation: “By George, that moon is round!” Wonder if he is able to see the moon tonight?

JE: You will see by the date that it is a night of full moon, and Pete and I have just come in from standing on the cliff, awed at the utter exquisiteness of this setting under a nearly clear sky and a brilliant moon. The river is wide here at the point of its big bend, and the path of the reflection of the moon strikingly broad. The solid black of the forest broken by the sheen of moonlit water and capped with the deep blue of evening sky is sufficient to silence one and set him thinking on the wonder of Creation and the power and beauty of our God. . . . The glinting water seems solid from its lack of any transparency in the black and silver, and one would not be surprised to see Him walking on the bright path of moon right toward us on the river. The effect is like moving light or chipped obsidian, rather than a steady gleam on rolling liquid.

And I would give anything, my darling, to have you here to enjoy it—in silence—with me. It has never come to mind as it did tonight. . . . I only rest turning my back on the moon and the river, in knowing, that you will one day be here to see it with me. Did I not know it, I doubt if I could love it all so much and want it to continue thus so strongly, that we might know it together. I cannot help pressing the query to the Father—“How many moons hence?”

Many of my father’s thoughts of their life together included, naturally, its sexual, physical expressions.

JE: I went to sleep last night with one of those not-too-insignificant, but meaningful night-worries—an old one. I think I mentioned it in Quito—about whether or not you would play with me. Not only let me play with you, but be aggressive with your hands, toy with me when I’m sleepy, kiss me when I’m too tired to do anything but lie down, pull my ears and punch me in the stomach, do all those great and silly things that women should do when men want to love, but, for weakness or weariness (I get that, way down here) cannot be aggressive in it.

Will you ever come to me, on a bed and dozing, and cuddle up to me without my moving a finger to encourage you? You haven’t done a number of these things yet, darling, and I’m just wondering when I’ll experience them. I think of one time you came up behind me while I was typing at the doctor’s and bent over and kissed me—oh, Betty darling, do you know what that long, audible sigh I just gave means?

JE: Oh, Betty, I love you. Do you know how? I love you strongly tonight, with a sense of power, a huge, surging hope inside me as to the fulfillment of our love. It is not the quiet longing that is usually on me, but the upflung fists and the shouting for possession, and both arms eager to crush you to me. It is the bursting heart and the wild eye of passion, the laugh that makes the stomach tighten.

You cannot possibly understand this, and I really don’t ask you to—it is just one of the ways I love you, and it happens to seize me as I write. Love is not all a resting in me. It is a tenseness and a daring, a call to crush and conquer.

But my mother, too, ached to be held and loved by him, and to share every joy that God would one day give them to experience.

EH: Oh, I miss you just terribly, Jim. I hunger and thirst for you, with a vast aching feeling. Sleep is the only relief I know, and that has to begin and end with the realization that I am in bed alone. I love you. . . .

EH: Oh, Jim, my darling—I love you now as never before, in an intimacy never dreamed before, in a peace and confidence not experienced before. I love you as my own soul—as if you were my very soul. I feel that I belong utterly and absolutely to you, that I was made expressly for you, and that I shall never truly live until I live with you. How, oh, how shall I tell you my love? I have told you some of it. There will be a day when I can tell you far more. But never can it all be expressed, either by word or action.

Hearing her speak so ardently of her love does not surprise me at all. She was an honest, logical thinker, but also had the beauty of femininity. Unlike some of the stoic impressions of her, she was a very passionate, vulnerable, and even a hilariously funny woman.

But she was also highly cognizant, as a yet unmarried woman, to surrender all such desires to the loving command and will of the Father.

March 20: Teach us, Lord, both Jim and me, to rest in quietness, knowing that Thy will cannot be improved upon. May the peace of our relationship to Thee, and the beauty of the love Thou hast given us, be unspoiled. Let no unholy impatience enter, I pray.

This combination of self-discipline with the fullness of her love gave evidence to her humanness, her realism, and I find joy in seeing it here. I rejoice seeing both my parents writing this way, fully in love with God, and fully in love with each other, and tremendously unashamed in each aspect—both the spiritual and the physical. They embraced the truth that “perfect love driveth out fear.” They were right to want one another, just as they were right to wait until they could fulfill their desires under God’s full blessing. God made men and women to be attracted to each other and to be obedient to His timing. This is how we become whole, free, utterly sanctified people.

Let’s not then gasp to hear them speak of their full-bodied hunger for one another. Maybe each of us can learn from their determination to bring all things, even this irrepressible and often unruly thing, under the total authority of our Head.

March 25: Oh, how I long for her—all of her, her help and counsel and just her presence here, but most of all this morning, for her body. . . . I don’t know how long I can take this. It leaves me useless to study or pray or read or work. Every little thing seems to irritate me, and there is nothing that would satisfy me this morning but Betty herself—all of her. Lord God, how long?

Little did I know for what I dealt in those days I said I was willing to live for celibacy—nothing did I know about the power of love for a woman, I believe. So help me, God, I did not know! Had I been aware of what I should feel this morning as the rain falls heavily out of a low sky, I doubt if I would have made any sort of vow of willingness to stay single. Lord, can it be that this must go on for hundreds more rainy mornings and hundreds more fitful nights? How shall I bear it apart from some inwrought miracle of grace?

Father, if it is possible that the work here in the Oriente not suffer, and that Your design for the Kingdom plan in the jungle be in no way thwarted or slowed, O merciful God, give me permission to marry her—soon!

Back in San Miguel, my mother understood, too, that their waiting would continue unabated for now.

March 28

I’ve just been making an inventory list of substantive-like sequences in Tsahfiki, but I’m hungry for a little time with you, Jim. I miss you so much, and want to sit down with you and just be together. But that is not possible, so I must try to be satisfied with this.

Barbara has just come home from town and informs me that Bill and Irene, who left here last Monday, are still in Santo Domingo, there being no gasoline to get the camioneta [van] to Quito. Reason: wash-out on the railroad between Quito and the coast. You’ve probably heard about it. So we are really stuck in here. Dorothy got out just in the nick of time. I wonder if it affects the plane at Shell Mera? Prices have gone up here terrifically, and there is no rice, salt, sugar, etc.

I hear they have to build a bridge for the railroad, which will take three to four weeks. I only hope they finish it by May, so the trucks will be running from here again! If not, I’ll just start walking around the first of May . . .

. . . because she was hoping the two of them could at least meet for a visit at that missions conference in Quito. To be clear, though—seeing each other as an engaged couple meant something different to them than it would, not only to the majority of people today, but even to those in the culture and time where they were currently living. My mother wrote in the same March 28 letter:

Last night I had quite a chat with Edelina, our girl. She is engaged, and is much interested to hear about our customs of engagement and marriage. She’s never heard of a wedding (except the civil formalities, of course) and asks me about them. But last night we discussed fornication (she’d always wondered what the word meant) and purity of body, etc. She had not known that extra-marital intercourse was sin, and simply couldn’t believe me when I told her that I have two aunts nearing fifty who are virgins!

She thought that you and I regarded ourselves as married (with all its implications) before God, even before the ceremony. The whole discussion was a revelation to her, as she herself was born out of marriage, and she says she doesn’t know any señoritas who have no children. And—remember—her family are evangelicals, her stepfather one of the leading brethren, and her mother in fellowship. No doubt everyone here thinks we really must have ourselves a time when we go up to Quito.

No, it wasn’t like that. But she could hardly wait for it.

April 5

It has been entirely too long, Jim dear, since I sat down to tell you how much I love you. I didn’t realize it had been such a time till I looked at the date on #9, which is still sitting here, waiting for some way to be mailed. There is still no gas in town, and Bill and Irene had to give up and go to Quito by truck yesterday, leaving the camioneta in S.D., so we hear. Dorothy and Doreen have not been heard from—in fact, nary a word from the outside world has reached us for two weeks. I am to be quite honest, lonely, darling, and feel that I need you more than ever. At least I need word from you, or even of you, to know that you are well. Yesterday was three weeks since I had a letter from you, and it was written a month ago!

And do you know what else I miss? Music! Doreen took her organ with her to Quito, and I miss it dreadfully. Quite often I used to go downstairs in the twilight and play from memory or the Keswick hymnal. This is the first time in my life I’ve been entirely without music even to hear, and it’s awful. How I wish I had the lovely organ you gave me—but Dr. T. said it was definitely leaking air, and was going to fix it for me. It wasn’t fixed by the time I came down here. But I appreciate now as never before what a lovely thing it was for you to give me, Jim, and I thank you again from my heart.

And then the ring—! The thrill certainly hasn’t worn off. I catch myself, sometimes in the presence of others, gazing at it, thinking of its loveliness in itself, and above all the wonderful significance of it. Will I ever actually grasp the fact that it is I who is engaged to Jim Elliot, the man of my very dreams? “What have I done to her?” you say. You have given me, in offering me what you are, the complete fulfillment of life, the balance, shall I say, that my personality lacked. You have called forth all the love of my heart, and it amounts to more than I thought I had saved up, these ten or twelve years since I’ve been capable of loving! You are everything to me, Jim, my darling, and I, too, want to live every hour of every day of my life with you. . . . Right now, for some reason, working on this Colorado business makes me feel so far from you, because you cannot in any way be a part of it, nor I a part of your work. It is a comfort, however, to know you’ve been here and are acquainted with the place and the Indians.

Yesterday was Sábado de Gloria, and you know what that means! Barbara says it was wilder this year. But what a sight! And I had no film in my camera! Dorothy was going to bring me some. She was to have been back on April 1. The Indians began coming around 10 a.m. and by noon the plaza was a mass of every color imaginable—red, of course, predominating. Abram, the chief, came and sat on my porch and talked with me and played his accordion for me. He is quite an intelligent fellow, and seemed to be running a little “Mr. Anthony” clinic all day, giving advice to various Colorados. Samuel, the one I’ve told you about, is his brother, and apparently next in line to be chief. He proudly brought his wife and two children to the house to meet me and stayed overnight downstairs. Manuel, son of Soledad, was as drunk as a sailor, and came panting into Doreen’s house where I was, hollering for protection saying they were going to fight with him: “Soy chiquito! No puedo pelear! Soy muy chiquito—muy díbil. Después de 3 años seré grande para pelear.” [I’m little! I can’t fight! I’m very weak! After three years I’ll be big enough to fight!”] If you know Manuel, he is one of the biggest, strongest brutes of the tribe! He was swinging his gun around in a most promiscuous manner, so I finally managed to usher him gently outside again. Another Indian proposed to me three or four times, but I convinced him I was too gigante for him. He claimed he was nine years old—he was at least twenty! The drinking and bulla [ruckus] went on all night. They gradually drifted (or stumbled, or were dragged) home just before Sunday School this morning. . . .

Barbara and I went to Patilé’s on Monday, and found ourselves in the midst of the denouement of Saturday’s feast! Dozens of drunken Indians lay around on benches and the ground. . . . I got another proposal, this time quite insistent, from a fellow who said he was tired of his woman and thought it time for a change! So, actually the trip was en balde [for naught] except for seven words I managed to elicit from Radolfo on the way.

Still no word of or from the outside. Don Miguel is going up to Quito tomorrow, so he’ll take this for me. I can’t imagine what’s become of Doreen and Dorothy.

“And then the ring—! The thrill certainly hasn’t worn off.”

Of course, being in Ecuador in the 1950s, and being missionaries in such obscure places, nothing was definite anyway, including the prospects of my dad and her making connections in Quito—of any sort. According to him:

April 10

I can give no definite word about just when I’ll be out. Pete came back from Quito with word that he has a great deal of dental work to have done. I am trying to persuade him to go out the week before conference so I can have leave to perhaps pay a visit to San Miguel with no time limits on the other end as there would be if I were to go out first. I still am dubious if we can persuade Eladio to stay more than a day or two alone. But Pete feels like he just got back from Quito and doesn’t want to head out too soon.

No sooner than a day later, however, he wasn’t feeling quite as accommodating.

April 11

These next two weeks will be long ones, I fear, as the rains have come and we must be inside most of the day. I cannot spend hour after hour studying phrases like Pete, and I get wild as a stalled stallion waiting in the radio room, studying the forest across the river and facing the gray empty sky. I will come out regardless of what Pete does or whether Eladio likes being left alone—I need you, darling, and need you soon!

By the end of April, barring an ever-possible weather delay, he was putting his plans in writing.

April 29

Please be patient if I’m not in Quito by Tuesday night, May 12. I finally had to tell Pete that I was going out then, (Monday, the 11th) if weather permitted, no matter what he decided to do. . . . So he is to go out Friday now, with dental appointments all next week and running over into the following week, with some idea of coming in Saturday (the 14th), so that one of us will be here for both Lord’s Days. I doubt, frankly, if he will make it back. . . . But that’s his business—I’m staying my Sunday.

Weather is very unpredictable now, Betts dear, and I have done everything possible to arrange to get out Monday morning and be in Quito by Tuesday, but we must wait the hand of God over any plan now. We had a siege of rain that lasted 36 hours constantly last week, and it was impossible to fly in the Oriente the whole week. So take courage, darling, I’m coming.

That week will be one of those unhappy ones for us—committee meeting mad. Rosales will have us up to our ears in appointments. . . . I suppose we will just be seeing each other. But, Lord willing, week number two will not be so. I am leaving it open. We will plan it together, and you will have the final say on what goes—and I have liberty for anything short of marriage! I have thought of a visit to Miguel together, if you would find that pleasure—you will know our restrictions there better than I. Or there is Quito, and with Bill and Irene gone—the bodega. So I must get me ready—a haircut and a face stiffened to shaving perhaps twice a day.

The day finally came.

May 11: Flew out of Shandia at about 10:30 a.m. with Luis Andi. Picked up Gerry Conn in Tena and flew to Shell Mera. Waited for a bus until about 2:00 p.m. and had difficulty getting out of Baños. Made Ambato about 8:00 p.m. and Quito after midnight. She had waited up for me at Tidmarsh’s until very late, but had gone to bed thinking I stayed in Ambato. Pete let me in, and Doc got up to welcome me. When things were quiet again, I tried to waken her by rattling at the door, leaving the bath water running as a decoy. After some trying, I went in and woke her with a kiss. She rose into my arms in one of the warmest embraces I can remember, and it was the beginning of two most intense weeks of embracing.

May 15: Late evenings alone with her by the fireplace were the best. If there was before anything tentative in our loving, it is since then destroyed. Our love is now and always and only the true love I can know, and if I should lose her, there could be nothing again in life like this.

May 19: Happy days, like none before I’ve known.

My mother didn’t take time to recount this delightful May visit in her journal, but in its afterglow, she thought back to a May several years ago.

May 28

When I think, Jim dearest, of the lovingkindness of the Lord in just simply giving us to one another, when we had each just come to the place of true surrender in the matter—five years ago on Sunday—May 31. By “giving,” I mean just bringing us together, or “revealing” us to one another in love, for of course we were not really given until January 31, 1953. But we had not sought one another. We were not out to get a mate. What might I have gotten had I sought? Surely not you. And I am, oh, so grateful and glad, dear, that you are what you are, and that your love is so full and pure. May God make me the woman you need and desire, and prepare me for you.

Sunday—our “fifth anniversary!” (Now you’ll say I’m sickly sentimental!) When I think of that day—of the leap my heart gave when you came to me so casually after the FMF breakfast, and said you’d like to talk to me sometime! Then as we sat at the Lagoon, after you had confessed your love for me, I remember your touching me slightly with your shoulder, and I thought you shamefully bold! (I still do, darling—and, oh, how I love you for it!) Oh, the Lord has been wonderfully gracious in preserving that love, through all our times of doubting, coldness, and separation, and bringing it to such fullness now. I feel that I have done nothing, could have done nothing, to “keep” you. God has kept you, and will continue to. . . .

Oh, darling—as I compare you with others—indeed, with all others that I know—I can only exclaim that thou art chiefest among ten thousand. Thou art my beloved, and I am thine.

In loneliness, your very own

Bett

And so they were parted. Again.

That the work may continue.

June 2

Have had some interesting chats with Pete. He wants Olive to take Wycliffe after Biola, and hopes that she will be here in eighteen months. He wants her to learn Spanish on her own, but not Quichua. And he is glad he is not in a frenzy over her like I am over you, because he thinks it would be rough having that drag on for years. But he is certain that the “madness” will be on him again when she gets within range, and thinks it’s a good thing that I feel the way I do. He also told me quite bluntly that he in no way stood in the way of our marriage, and I made it plain I felt the same way.

That leaves me the only wall in the way, and I get to thinking that is the craziest thing I ever did—to stand in my own way of marrying you, when I want it so badly. And believe me, darling, were it not that I am firmly persuaded of the will of God in this untried, unheard-of “itinerant evangelism,” we would be married, quite unceremoniously, like you promised we could be if I did it suddenly, tomorrow. I want so badly to be with you now—day and night, like it was last month, by fireplaces and in the warm tropic nights, across the table and in my arms, with your voice coming through the doors as I lie in bed.

June 10

I miss you these days, my darling, waking in the morning always with the desire for you strong, and often beginning the day with what few bars I know of “When the dawn flames in the sky, I love you.” It does, and I do. . . . And my prayers are full of you. . . .

Last weekend we took the school to Pano for a paseo [a walk]. Lost every game of soccer we played, but it was a good experience for the boys, just the seeing of an orderly directed school and something of discipline. Ours is quite hopeless, but schoolteachers are not easily found.

Lord’s Day morning (Pete came back to Shandia on the flip of a coin Saturday), I dedicated Miller’s new son, Carl, in Quichua, and preached on Luke 16 in the morning service. The Lord gave me unusual liberty, and coming home on the trail, two girls who live halfway between Pano and Shandia, and who had come to Pano for the meeting, accompanied me, and asked for baptism! They had come often to Shandia on previous Sundays and shown live interest in the Word, as it seemed to us. But if they are serious, and they seem dead serious, they are our firstfruits here. . . .

One of them (Carmela) was here today, and I spent an hour with her and her little sister, explaining to them memory verses in Quichua. She seemed very alert, and prayed more diligently than I have ever heard any Indian pray when we had finished. Pray for her.

But oh, Bett, how I wish I could give her to you to train and teach. It must be a woman who does it, and I covet these as your heritage in Christ. But it is now you are needed, not a year hence—right now, to take up the work and share with me in it all!

God grant that it may be soon.

Fondly, your Jim

Summer and . . .

As eager as my father had become to marry—“Love for her inside me says wait for nothing”—he’d actually placed one condition on my mother before he’d agree to a wedding. She must first learn Quichua.

That’s why, near the end of June, she wrapped up her linguistic work among the Colorado tribe and moved west to Dos Rios, roughly a six-hour walk from my dad in Shandia. As always, the trip itself was an adventure.

June 27

Now about my trip from San Miguel to Dos Rios—(I shall probably have to quit in the middle; lights out at 9:00 here!)—I left there on June 18, having more or less completed the alphabet on the 16th. The trip to Quito was not unusual, with only two delays of an hour each. Nothing stolen, thank the Lord. . . .

(My father’s bag had been stolen on his own recent trip from San Miguel, costing him not only clothes and equipment but also a box of irreplaceable color slides.)

I spent Monday and Tuesday unpacking and repacking in the bodega (and missing you just awfully) and got a bus out of Quito to Ambato on Wednesday afternoon, as they told me there would be a plane leaving Ambato at 5:00. I got to Ambato at 4:30, and raced madly to the airport, only to wait till 5:30 when the plane got back from Shell too late to make another flight!

So there I was, stuck out at the airport, having to wait till next day for a plane. I was sitting there in my cotton dress (having thought I’d get straight into Shell that night) freezing to death, when the wife of the commander at the airport came up and invited me in to her home to spend the night. They are lovely Christian folks, and gave me dinner and a nice bed. It was surely one of the Lord’s provisions.

The plane didn’t take off again till noon, so I was thinking all morning that every hour there meant one less with you! I’d hoped for something like you had suggested—flying in to Shandia in the morning and spending all day there!—

The letter breaks off here, saying (as predicted) she feared the lights being turned off mid-sentence. “Goodnight, my darling. The moon is there tonight, but clouds hide it. Oh, to be so near to you! It’s so much better this way. It’s the first time, you know, that we’ve been separated by a short distance! I love you ever so much, Jim.”

She picked up the narrative again next morning. “Well,”. . .

When we got in to Shell, after a wonderful trip, with all the big Nevados [snow-covered mountains] gleaming in the sunshine, Bob met me at the plane and discovered it was going right back that afternoon. This meant that he had to rush right in and get those women from Pano and bring them out. I had just time to swallow a bit of lunch before we took off.

My hopes were already shattered of spending any time with you, but it never occurred to me that we wouldn’t land at all. As we were nearing Shandia, Bob suddenly handed the earphones to me and said, “Do you want to hear a handsome voice?” You were just calling Shell Mera. What a thrill to hear you speak just as Shandia hove into view.

Then, after circling near you the first time, when Bob hollered at you out the window, he said to me, “Well, we might as well go in and see them.” Another leap of anticipation! But as he circled around, he said, no, he didn’t think he could make it. I was just about wild, seeing you there so plainly, and knowing full well you’d be waiting for us to come down.

As you vanished from sight, I couldn’t keep back the tears. (Don’t worry—Bob didn’t notice. He kept up his usual line.) I still haven’t seen Shandia—I was looking for you, and then at you, the whole time, darling.

Close, yet so far. But maybe soon . . .

You said in your letter you’d be glad to come in here “when I get settled.” I was settled an hour after I got here and, oh, so ready to see you! I am going to gradually lose my mind if you don’t come soon and tell me about everything. I think the house sounds fine—anything, darling, absolutely anything, so long as we’re together. . . .

The Bowles say they won’t be here next Sunday, so I wonder if you would feel you could come then. Just whenever you think is right, and I know Carol will be glad to have you anytime. Jerry was just saying, “Oh, there’s always room someplace.” You know I’ll be eagerly awaiting you. . . .

And if you surprise me when I’ve just washed my hair (or even when I’m in the river washing it) or when I’ve just come in soaked from a canoe trip, like Friday afternoon, I will be just as glad to see you. Come . . .

My father’s ideas on their first house in Shandia, though he ended up building it in Puyupungu.

Their bamboo house in Puyupungu, after five months in a leaky tent.

My father’s next letter (June 29) was basically a primer in Quichua, including charts and guides that went back to his days at Wycliffe, as well as field analysis they’d gathered since being on the ground. He wanted her to learn the language as quickly and completely as possible, even though he admitted he was still grappling with much of it himself. (“Please don’t judge me too harshly on this stuff.”) Apparently he was still in need of the work too.

June 29

The thing I am sorriest about is that we are not doing it together, this language analysis. I have dreamed of sitting down with you and going over things that I do not understand. Pete is so “know-all” on many points (he does know, usually) . . . but I know you and I would not bicker over some of the points that are bantered about here.

It’s true, they weren’t in close enough proximity to go over to each other’s houses for an evening study session. But the shortened distance at least allowed their mail to become a little more reliable, shuttled by courier from station to station. (“I am looking out for every Pano face that pops out of the forest,” my dad said.) But a time or two throughout this summer, when the need for supplies allowed him to justify a days’ hike through the forest or a few hours’ ride by canoe, they were able to be together—to talk housing plans, to talk wedding plans, to whisper the sweet truths they each loved saying and hearing. In his journal of July 5, after returning from his first trip to see her in Dos Rios, my father wrote:

July 5: They were our three most intimate days ever. House planning and Quichua study—with those silly, spasmodic embraces interspersed and making it all so worthwhile and fun. The evening was spent on the clinic porch. Forget not in age what tenderness you knew there, my soul.

As far as the current status of their housing plans, he’d written her a few details on June 29:

I hope the 12’ x 16’ two-story affair appeals to you. I have spoken to Pete of it, and he approves. I’ve built and lived in the thing in my mind night after night since the idea came to me. But if you want to be away from the others very strongly, I will get to thinking of something else. Because more than anything else I know, Betts dearest, what I want to do is make you happy.

And as far as wedding plans, he’d written and sent this note on July 4:

What would you think of having a civil wedding, go on our honeymoon, and return for a reception evening in Quito? The uncertainty of dates makes me wonder this.

But a looming pattern was emerging that threatened to put housing and wedding plans and even plans for the entire mission station in jeopardy.

July 5

The river is at one of those awesome stages where another day’s rain will bring it to dangerous proportions—and it is still raining. . . . I thought I would get a note back to you with the Dos Rios boys who are not going back until the weather lets up. They got stuck in the dark about twenty minutes’ walk away last night, so had to bring in the aluminum from where they left it on the trail in the rain early this morning.

Yet even as he kept a wary eye on the skies and the river, my father was learning new lessons in love. As seen from his writings of earlier years, he could be quick and occasionally insensitive with his judgments and advice. The same bold, aggressive temperament that served him well as a daring disciple of Christ could sometimes come across as harsh and abrupt, even meddling, especially in dealing with a woman. And here we see it again—the fix-it mentality that surfaced in conversation.

July 7

I have been wondering how you could best make use of your time in Dos Rios, and it came to me yesterday that you should help Carol plenty. I don’t want anyone saying, “Oh, yes, she learned Quichua, but she didn’t do anything else.”

That Indian baby came to mind. Why don’t you offer to assume full responsibility for him—clothing, bathing, and feeding? I want everybody to know all that you can do, Bett, and realizing the reticence that is in you, I would press you into it, could I do so. I know you will help in the school, but don’t wait to be asked, will you? I want that you should show yourself fruitful in every good work, and I believe there is plenty to do.

My mother’s response, in a letter from three days later, was gracious, with only a hint of defensiveness.

July 10

I appreciate your advice on how to spend my time. It is hard to know just how to help Carol. She never gives me anything to do; I just have to try to figure out what I can do, and with three Indians apparently doing everything obvious in the way of housework, I’m not always sure how to help. But I shall try. As you know, I have chapel twice a week, Sunday school this Sunday, recreation twice a week, and Bible class. Also play the organ for various meetings.

But his July 7 letter hadn’t stopped there. He also said:

Frankly, I was not satisfied with your attitude toward [Pete] in the few remarks you made in Dos Rios. It is not sufficient to say that “there is something about him that just gets you.” All the more reason why you should make an effort toward true compatibility and understanding. I threaten to make it hard for you, if you are going to be continually criticizing him—regardless of how he “gets” you. And I’m afraid I’ll be adamant on that point, darling, as I regard it a development of Christian grace in you, and will be happy with nothing less than a spirit of sweet reasonableness in such matters when you are my wife.

Until he’d begun pointing such things out to her, during my mother’s senior year at college, I don’t think she realized how blunt or cutting her words could be. There are people who would never say anything to hurt someone else’s feelings—even in honesty, even in love—and then there are those, like my mother, who call a spade a spade. But over time, she’d grown to recognize her need for being careful with this rather pointed tendency, not letting it become a weapon. And while pride can enter into any heart whenever exhortation or rebuke is given, I believe her response to his challenge shows real growth and humility at this time in her life.

I must say I was rather stunned at the way you put your rebuke to me about my criticism of Pete. It is the first time you have mentioned it, and I felt that I’d really been “chewed out,” as Ed would say. I’m truly sorry, for I do not dislike Pete, but what I said was “just between us two,” and I did not mean it to be “continual criticism.”

But immediately I realized that I must begin now to be subject to you, Jim, and take your correction with a true womanly spirit. It is a role I must learn, for my first impulse was to argue. I would beg you, though, to give me some warning first, and then if I do not obey, say you “will threaten to make it hard for me.” It almost made me feel like bawling, that idea.

But I ask your forgiveness for criticizing the one whom God has sent you to work with, for I know he has many fine qualities. I fear that the spirit of discernment is not in me.

Here I must recognize similar growth in my father’s humility as well. He received her response as a welcome light shed upon his own weakness.

July 12

I’m really sorry, Bett, that I cannot seem to temper things I feel strongly about with some modifying or softening strain. I didn’t really want to make it sound so stern as I see you have taken it, and it doesn’t seem to me to be a point where I must be obeyed over your own will. It’s simply an attitude that I have felt lurking and finally saw rising in our last visit, and wrote about as a thing I do not want to see grow.

I suppose I am more critical of [Pete] than you are, and should be “threatening” myself. Your attitude on receiving my letter was enough to humble me greatly on the subject, so that I don’t feel like writing of it now. We can’t talk it over now anyhow, so let’s save it until we are together again.

This was good. They were learning each other, valuing each other, growing more and more appreciative of what the other was bringing to their lives. My mother had said it this way in a recent letter:

July 7

Your letter written Sunday and received yesterday morning left me weak. The depth and completeness of your understanding of my love, your perception and perfect appreciation, are things utterly beyond the scope of my dreams. I could not ever have imagined those qualities in any man, darling, and you have opened doors for me that I did not know existed. You seem to take nothing for granted. You ignore nothing. You regard nothing casually. You read me, Jim, as though I were made just for you to read!

Even his muscular frame seemed to be made for her, meeting a need in her heart, answering one of her self-conscious insecurities.

You are the first man who ever made me feel small. When I was with George, I was always more conscious of my height, for some reason; thinking, I suppose, that people would remark on how tall we both were. But when I am in your arms, I feel very small and helpless! When looking at your back in the mirror, when you have me in your arms, you seem just tremendously powerful. For all this, I am glad, and know that the Lord in very truth made us for one another.

She loved simply hearing him talk, too. One of the everyday sounds in her new location was the intermittent chatter on an open line of radio contact with nearby mission stations. The reception could be spotty at times, not always clearly distinguishable. But her ears perked up each time she heard the radio crackle with activity, thinking it might be the voice of my father, checking in from Shandia.

I’ve just been straining my ears for forty minutes trying to hear your voice, as you haven’t come through once now since a week ago. Just at 2:00, I heard you and Henry talking and saying you guessed you were the only ones on the network. I felt like busting in and saying I was there, as always, for I do listen to the whole thing, hoping I’ll hear you. But I could not hear well. I heard Henry say Jerry was over there and had brought you no mail. I feel just terrible. Why didn’t I do what impulse told me yesterday, and answer your letter just the minute I finished reading it? . . .

One thing about the radio contact is that when I hear your voice, even though I cannot read you, I know just exactly where you are and what you are doing. It is one time when I do not have to speculate, as I do a hundred times a day.

It was maddening this afternoon. I heard you well each time you said, “Are you reading us now?” and then when you went ahead, I lost you. I never did hear the end or hear you say, “Over.” But I know you are alive and well, which is something.

What an unexpected joy and blessing this was, getting to hear his voice so often. She’d written to tell him of it, how the radio helped keep her informed about him, how her heart raced when hearing him.

July 9

I’ve just heard you on the contact, and since I don’t know yet if Bob is stopping in at Shandia this afternoon, I better have this ready just in case. I sent a letter this afternoon with some Pano men, but why shouldn’t I send off two letters a day to you, darling? I love you more than any number of letters could demonstrate.

It is so good to hear your voice, faint as it is. . . . I’d just like to shout it sometime, right over the contact, and shock everyone in Ecuador (and probably Peru)—“I love you, darling! I love you!” Because it’s true. I do. More than you can possibly know.

Their July letters really do read more like a conversation, now that the lag time in their mail traffic had been shortened to days, rather than weeks (and months). Here’s a little collage of them, from various dates:

EH: I love you just madly, and think there just isn’t anyone else to compare. Are you sure you’re not perfect? I think you must be mistaken, because I just love everything about you.

JE: I didn’t know I would get this way, Betty, but I am lost, utterly lost without you. I love you, my darling, and sometimes just have to stop where I am and heave a sigh.

EH: Every time I look toward the hills near Shandia, I involuntarily breathe out the word “darling”—and wonder just what you are doing.

JE: That long, low hill which I pointed out to you, and the knoll at the north end of it is a perfect sighting of Shandia. We lie directly in the gap between the two, if it helps you any to think of me “right out there.”

EH: Jerry and Edna have just left for Pano, and I am kicking myself because there was nothing ready to send to you, dear. I am determined it shall not happen again, even though I did not know they would be going, so I am writing this right now.

JE: The closer we get, the more advantage I see in having you near. Thanks so much for your letters—they all arrived with Ablando yesterday.

EH (July 10): The letter describing Ginny’s wedding made me want you all the more, Jim. How in the world do people live through such sublime events as a wedding? I don’t know how I shall, once a date is actually set. When you spoke of the possibility of being married here, and having a reception in Quito, where did you think of having the civil ceremony? In Quito, with a reception following? . . . I still don’t know what would be best. I cannot help thinking of the disappointment to our folks, Dave and Gibby, possibly Bert and Colleen. . . . What responsibility we have to the others, I’m not sure. I know the Lord will show us, and make us both happy whatever we do.

JE (July 12): The lush descriptions of the wedding didn’t do for me what they did for you. For me, darling, “heavy ivory satin”. . . “fitted bodice with designed off-shoulder effect”. . . “embroidered iridescent sequins”. . . “tiara of rhinestones”. . . do not amount to what you describe as a “sublime event.” Sorry, but as I say—to me, it is no more than an expensive tedium with little more than remembrance value, and although I shall do with all my heart whatever you desire in a wedding—whatever you want to remember—I must tell you that I dread the prospect of such a schedule, whatever the retrospect may be. I cannot tell you why, because I do not know, but there is something in me that resists the showy part of weddings with a passion I have against few other things in life.

EH: I wonder how the house is going. We’ve had some bad weather since you went back, which no doubt has slowed you considerably.

JE: We have been slowed considerably by the rains. All the post holes were full of water, and working the posts into line is almost impossible in such mud. . . . And to think we have to start a teacher’s house before we can go to work on ours!

EH: Jerry told me today that once you put aluminum on a house, you cannot use it over again on another house. It’s too thin, and it tears. The holes left by the nails, too, are unmendable. So maybe we should have thatch on our first house, huh? It would be a shame to waste hundreds of dollars on aluminum for a temporary house. Especially if it goes over the cliff! I saw several books advertised in Popular Science on how to build with cement blocks. Each was a dollar. Those magazines always strike me as being rather gauche. Would you be interested, or would it be better to wait and see if Better Homes and Gardens could give us the info?

JE: I agree about the Popular Mechanics mags generally and think Better Homes and Gardens more reliable. I’m still going to let you be the secretary on the cement house project. Hadn’t thought of reusing the aluminum we put on the first little house, but of turning it into a girls’ school or something when we moved out. But I think we will conserve the aluminum for a good house and use heavy tar paper instead—like on the Dos Rios store building. Find out if water caught from that roof would be suitable for drinking. Thatch-caught water is not good, they tell me.

EH (July 13): Have you been having cold weather there lately? Ever since I’ve been here, I’ve worn a sweater nearly half the time. Carol says it’s “most unusual,” but that’s the way it always is when you go to a new place: “The weather was never like this.” I’m wishing I’d brought some warmer clothes from Quito. And they say Shandia, being nearer the mountains, is colder still. So far we’ve not had one hot day. The afternoon you and I spent at the beach was the warmest. I’m more convinced than ever of the need for a fireplace.

JE (july 17): I am sorry you feel the cold so much! I have a standard remedy for that, and it is not a fireplace.

EH: Did you see the sky last night? “O Beauty, are you not enough? / Why am I crying after love?” But I am, dearest. I am crying after love, night after night, and day after day. How long, how long, how long? I long to wake with you in the morning, to dress with you, to cook breakfast for you (and it won’t be banana soup), to sit across from you at our table, with our cloth and dishes and silver. To see you working outside, and to know you are mine. To sit and study, knowing that it is not beyond the realm of possibility that you should suddenly appear from behind and kiss me. To prepare lunch for you, and know you’ll be in to eat it. To lie with you at siesta time, and to swim with you in the Talac—in the sunshine—and then to dress and eat supper together. And—oh, thought beyond words—to go to bed with you at night. To lie down together with no clocks or clothes or creaking stairways to worry about! Jim, I shall be your wife, but you shall be my life. (I wrote the enclosed while at Arias’s, but had no thought of ever showing it to you until (if) we were married. But there are no barriers now. I am yours, and the thought, though far from poetry, is intensified now. So I let you read it.)

JE: Last night I was dreaming (awake) about our first overnight mountain climb together, and wondering how it would be to have someone really free to cuddle with for warmth. I have spent some cold nights in sleeping bags—do you have one, or will we fit into mine? I still am not through with Pichincha, and hope that next time we do it, it will be as old married folks doing something only silly unmarried folks would attempt. Oh, I love to be with you, Bett, wherever. And I want it to be everywhere—canoe trips and mountain climbs. That trip to Galápagos is for you and me, not me and Pete.

EH: In yesterday’s Daily Light portion, I came across some interesting verses. [Daily Light is a classic, yearlong book of collected Scriptures for morning and evening.] I had been sitting here at my desk, trying desperately to concentrate, but overcome with longing for you, and with the ever-increasing hunger to be married. Involuntarily the cry goes up, “O Lord, how long? Speed the day!” I reached for my Daily Light and read, “If two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven.”. . . “The Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone.”. . . “Two are better than one.” The verses were in just that order, and it startled me. Across the page, in the morning portion, I had marked “PJE, 1948,” but the verses were of a very different theme. The Lord has led us by a way that we knew not, but by a wonderful way, for each phase of which I am thankful.

Such memories caused her to think back again on their circuitous paths.

EH: I’ve been thinking of those days when you were just “Dave’s buddy,” that “Elliot guy—you ought to get to know him—you two’d make a good pair.” The days when you were just a wrestler out there on the mat, fun to watch, and of some slight interest because Dave was so interested in you. The days when you were the fellow who sat across the aisle in Ancient History with a high instep crossed over your left knee, and an interesting profile—a fellow in sharp contrast to that Oliver Somebody who sat in the next row in front of you, wore rubber overshoes, carried a briefcase, and always listened raptly to the lecture. How can that Jim Elliot be the same one who loves me now, and demonstrates it in the ways you do? The development of our relationship is one of the mysteries of life, and a most intriguing one. Oh, Jim, I am grateful for the way you have led me into love—gently, skillfully, and inexorably, with the most delicate touch, in a sense, and yet with the strongest compulsion! It is a great wonder to me, dear, and I am rather breathless in the contemplation of it.

As was he. In fact, by mid-July, he was making plans to return to Dos Rios for a visit, “but the doubts pile up as my expectancy heightens.”

JE: News came yesterday with Bob that Marilou has jaundice or malaria, and that we will probably not be down this month, as he is chief tender in the affair. And then Pete got sick yesterday, one of those attacks (fever, chills, and weakness) that could develop into anything. So, my longed-for darling, we are cast upon the mercy of the Lord again for being together next weekend. Wish I could make it definite, but cannot do so now.

Not until later in the month was he able to get there to see her, spending an entire weekend “speaking mostly of when we should be married: September, November, January, or March.”

A few days after his return to Shandia, after processing the things they’d discussed about marriage, and after talking through the ramifications with Pete, he felt good about where he’d landed. And as the now-frequent rain poured down on the rooftop, roiling the already surging waters of the Napo, preventing him from doing any outside work for the day, he sat down to write a summary of his conclusions to my mother.

July 30

As I see the wedding, it involves three issues: (1) your really getting Quichua, (2) my traveling at least a little as a single man, (3) the matter of housing. My feeling this morning after prayer, and chatting with Pete, is that we would do well to postpone the hoped-for November wedding two months until January. That will give you more time to clinch the language. (Where you will live seems to me a useless issue. God will declare that plainly, if we are discovering the Will.) It will also give a couple of months for traveling, and give us time to collect boards for building, a thing we need even for Ed’s house. That is my suggestion—a January wedding—you pick the date.

Little did he know, however, the “catastrophic” thing he’d almost wished for in April as a way of speeding their wedding was currently cascading right at him, right at that moment, as the rains turned into torrents. And all my mother could do, hearing word of this flood, was write to him and pray he had survived it.

Letter from my mother, praying and waiting for news from him.

July 31

“Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.” So I write you this morning, darling, loving you as never before, and not knowing in what circumstances you find yourself.

Ed McCully came out to the radio at 2:30 yesterday afternoon, and stood anxiously by until 3:00, but none of us heard from you. Marge and I stood by every hour on the hour until 6:00, hoping you might get your radio set up again. But if it was anything like it was here, I’m wondering if there is a building left in which to put your radio, let alone yourselves.

The crest was not reached until around 5:00 yesterday. Oh, darling—if only I could help. I’ve been standing by at the radio this morning, as Ed and Dr. T. said they’d be doing, but read no one, not even Shell. I’m going to ask Nate to fly in to Shandia as soon as he possibly can if I can reach Shell at 1:30 this afternoon.

I’m sending this letter with an Indian, also a little food, in case you’ve lost everything, including means to cook. I’m going to tell him if by any chance he should meet one of your Indians coming this way (I’m hoping you’ll send word soon), he can send him back with this letter, and return here with any message your Indian may have.

I did not sleep well at all last night, wondering if you even had a roof over your heads. Wondering how much, if anything, you’d managed to save—even wondering about the possibility of your going over the cliff with the house! Oh, darling, I love you with all of my soul, and cannot imagine what life would be without you.

I wondered, too, at God’s purpose in this. Will all your work be undone? I trust Him for it, Jim, after a fashion. (I had to add that, in honesty.) I really do believe He has a purpose which will “ripen fast,” but I cannot help wondering and speculating. That’s what I mean by “after a fashion.”

I prayed this morning that you would be stablished, strengthened, and settled, after all these testings. That God will, in very truth, let you learn obedience by the things you have suffered. I long to be with you in this, and to share in whatever comes to you. Know that I am praying for you, as I’m sure they are in Quito and Shell Mera, too. I shall be eagerly waiting some word from you—if not before tomorrow, then with the return of the Indian. Let me know if there’s anything we can do.

There really wasn’t.

He wrote the next day, addressing it from what he called, simply, “an Indian home.”

August 1

Shandia is no more. This is being written beside a fire outside with a dozen Indians looking on and telling me what to write. The first house went about 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, and we have spent the rest of the time moving our stuff away from the river—except for last night, when we slept the whole night with about thirty Indians in one house.

Most of the stuff is here now under temporary shelter, though the heavier items, barrels, motor, refrigerator, etc. are at various points in the forest—we hope out of reach of the flood. Most of our stuff was saved, thanks to the invaluable help of all the Indians, though we have lost a little through thievery, and the boards we tore from the houses, through simply being too weary to pack them away from the river. School went about midnight, and school kitchen in early hours yesterday morning. Clinics and our Indian kitchen went late in the afternoon. . . .

We will try to get our tent up today and get housekeeping underway again soon. It was so thoughtful of you to send bread. We found some butter and honey and had chicken soup for supper—the first good meal in thirty-six hours last night. Sorry I could not inform you sooner, but we were busy carrying stuff the very moment your carrier arrived, and I had no idea where pen and paper were until last night.

The new house is near the brink, and we lost about one-eighth of the airstrip. I don’t know if they will dare land or not. If they do, we need aerial wire for the radio. Both our pens are out of ink, so will continue this in haste.

The flood.

And as he did, though the situation could hardly be any more dire, he immediately began drawing upon that well of faith he’d allowed the Lord to build in him his whole life long. In the days that followed, my dad’s invincible spirit would show him to be the Jim Elliot who’s still held in such high esteem today, a man who could stare death and destruction in the face and never flinch, knowing his God would never fail.

“Breakfast is on the fire,” he wrote, “and a beautiful dawn is breaking through the forest. We are both well and happy, waiting on God to show us His will for this station.”

And the same God, he knew, would also show him His will for marriage.

No, my darling, the waters have not quenched love. I do not know what this will mean for us—do not have even a hint as to how it will affect wedding plans. I wrote, but did not send (will send when I find it) a letter telling of Pete’s reaction to a wedding, and suggesting that we plan for January, but I have no idea now what to do.

He just knew God would make a way. And my mother knew something else: she was going down to Shandia—to see it, and to see him, for herself.

She wrote to him, after having just been there.

August 7

Darling, I doubt if I can express just what my visit to Shandia did for me. I want to thank you, at least. It was, in very truth, a benediction! I would like to apologize all over for my many tears, but you will not want that. (I see I was not the only one affected by the sight—Ed couldn’t keep himself when he first got out of the plane.)

But, oh, Jim—if I’ve ever felt unworthy of you, it has been since that visit. Instead of my being a true “helpmeet” to you, and standing by at such a time as that, it was you who were a tower of strength. It makes me wonder if I can ever be to you what a man’s wife should be. And it makes me know, more surely than ever, that you will be all I could ever have asked for.

It was such a joy to see you at work, cheerful and trusting, laughing with the Indians, exhorting them, binding up their sores, directing the workmen, doing your own share—in short, I was impressed with the fact that you seemed my ideal man and missionary. Not the “typical missionary,” I saw my ideal. . . .

For all these things, for what I am discovering you are, I love you, Jim, with all my capacity to love. Knowing you only gives me more reasons to love you.

I try to imagine all the times my father had dreamed of being on mission, deep in the jungle, unattached to any woman in marriage, hazarding all things to carry the gospel to people who’d never heard the name of Jesus. Now he was actually looking forward to having a wife—having my mother. God had given Him more than he’d imagined.

I try to imagine all the times my mother saw herself doing pioneer work, putting the gospel in understandable language for a primitive people, but not in Shandia, which didn’t really hold much interest for her. Now she was actually looking forward to being there, she said, with my father. God had given her more than she’d imagined too.

Don’t think of my parents as perfect. They’re weren’t. Don’t think of their relationship as perfect. It wasn’t. See them as two people—a man and a woman—who willingly invited God to direct their lives His own way. God is the One doing things perfectly here in their story, even amid disaster, even after many years of testing and waiting, of separation and struggle.

Their struggles were far from over, of course. We know that. But for now—finally—He had brought them together in this place, for this season.

They were home.

August 10

I’m looking forward to being in Shandia, but, oh, darling, how I hope it will be the last place either of us has to live “in someone else’s house.” I am so tired of knocking around, living on other people’s stuff. It’s not the knocking around so much that gets me—I don’t expect we’ll ever really settle anyplace—but I do want to be independent of others’ goods and services. And I want to make some sort of home for you, Jim.

For the short run, she would stay in temporary quarters in Shandia while my dad and his missionary partners scouted the uncharted areas of the Oriente, seeking to make connections wherever God led them, seeking their next doors of opportunity. He apologized that she would be “dependent again on others’ goods and services” while he was out on the trail, but . . .

Next time I build, I feel sure it will be for and with you. And who knows when that will be? You know what I hope? I hope it will be before we have a chance to plan a wedding.

“Yes,” she answered him from Dos Rios, before coming down to Shandia, “I hope we won’t have time to plan a wedding, too,” that it would simply need to happen too soon for much planning.

Not November. Not January. Not March.

They chose my father’s birthday.

October 7: Quito

“They shall not be ashamed that wait for Thee.”“There hath not failed one good thing . . .”“. . . to give you an expected end.”

Tomorrow, Jim and I are to be married. Praise, praise to Thee, my Lord and my God! Thy leadings have been wonderful these five and a half years. Thou hast shown the way, always lovingly, always surely, and hast kept us for one another.

From days of studying Thucydides together, through the time of renunciation and silence (“How can I give silence, my whole life long?”), the correspondence and despondence of PBI days, the days of Mt. Hood and Short Sand, the night of Dave’s wedding, the uncertainty about the field, the night at the golf course in Moorestown and its subsequent heartache and healing, Shelton College, Franconia, and 3 West Maple . . .

Quito, Arias’s home, the field above it, Pichincha, the bodega, separation to Oriente and Occidente, together again, January ’53 engagement—T.B. scare, and Jim’s unwavering trust in God and love for me, relief . . .

May, and Quito again, then San Miguel; Oriente in June, flood in July, Bobonaza trip in August, return in September, and a week of closeness in Shandia; this past week in Quito—and tomorrow . . .

O Lord—Thy lovingkindness is better than life.

My mother had dreamed of the traditional church wedding, wearing the white wedding dress, proceeding down the aisle with friends and family gathered. But in the end, the ease of simply going to the Quito courthouse won out, having a justice of the peace marry them.

Partly I think she made the decision because she saw the sense of my father’s thinking. She knew he couldn’t stand all the fuss and finery of church weddings. To him it smacked of the superficiality of all worldly attractions. He wanted their wedding kept as free of nonessentials and elaboration as possible. But probably their main desire for marrying at an earlier date was motivated by their almost five and a half years of waiting. They needed each other, more than they needed ceremony.

She wore a lovely sky blue suit that someone had made for her, adorned by a tasteful corsage. He wore the only dark suit he owned, a navy blue one. They invited Dr. and Mrs. Tidmarsh as witnesses, along with Ed and Marilou McCully. The affair was that small, that speedy, and that simple.

Wedding kiss.

Outside the courthouse. The boy with his pants down had no idea of the solemn and joyous occasion.

October 21: San Jose, Costa Rica

We were married as planned, October 8, 9:30 a.m., and went afterwards to the Colon Hotel with Tidmarshes (our official witnesses at the ceremony) and McCullys. Had coffee and cakes, Dr. T. led in prayer, and then they took us to the airport.

Plane to Panama, where we went to El Panama, “Latin America’s most luxurious hotel.” Six days there, in pure luxury, then a flight here, where we surprised Dave and Phyllis almost to the point of collapse. We’ve been here nearly a week now. Lovely little city, lots of fun, good fellowship.

With eager, longing, and often breaking hearts, they’d anticipated this October 8 day, and the jubilation they felt afterward was a gift from God, the fruit of living for His glory and their realization of His perfect will. How could their honeymoon not be filled with happiness, thanksgiving, and absolute restfulness after all the waiting and praying and hungering that led up to it? For nearly three beautiful weeks, they were free from concern over the work in the field and able to celebrate what God had accomplished in them, what He’d given them. It was joy, joy, praise, and more joy!

Leaving for their honeymoon.

With Uncle Dave and Aunt Phyllis—joy-filled days spent in Costa Rica.

November 5, 1953: Shell Mera

Finished up a marvelous two-week honeymoon with three days more in El Panama. Flight to Quito on October 24, then ten days there, buying and packing for the Oriente. Today we flew down from Quito, but half of our stuff is in Ambato still. Lord, protect it from thievery and bring it down safely.

And now finally their life as married missionaries could begin, in keeping with the verse from Isaiah they’d chosen for their wedding day: “Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him.” They had persevered in waiting on His timing, and the One who in His sovereignty plans our days and our years had brought them into this new phase ever confident in His ongoing calling.

Their story never stops capturing my heart. The Lord took my father’s personality, so brash and bold—a young man who told his fellow students on campus they needed a kick in the pants to get to the mission field—who admonished them for not swearing off dating, for not realizing they were in college to “study to show themselves approved unto God”—and somehow married his gospel zeal with a woman’s love, without decreasing his passion for souls. The Lord also took my mother’s personality and intellect, gave her love for such a man, challenged her to restrain it to the level of true Christian love between friends, yet crowned her willingness to absolutely trust Him by giving her not only more of Himself but also giving her my father, the other great desire of her heart.

God has taught me through their example, and through His visible outworking in their lives, that I can trust His holy will, even when nothing around me looks hopeful or good. And He can use even my failures and pain and worries as part of what He transforms into a life that brings Him full honor and glory.

November 11, 1953: El Oriente

“The Lord, He it is that doth go with thee. He will not fail thee.” He has brought us to this place at last, in safety and with no loss of goods. Our first home!

“Home.” Together at home.

God had brought them all the way home.

And it shall be said in that day,

Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him.

Isaiah 25:9

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