Preface
Preface
Neither of my parents could have possibly foreseen their names becoming internationally known and beloved. Their hearts motivated them to higher ground. God desired to exhibit two lives melded into one, whose wholehearted commitment to Him would influence the lives of countless souls.
They’d been born into quite ordinary, hardly well-to-do families on opposite edges of the United States. They didn’t enter each other’s lives until their paths crossed in the Midwest at college during the years following World War II. Yet even as adolescents and young adults, far more than most others their age, they held a singular devotion to Christ. They gave up any petty human desires for the sake of His kingdom, no matter the cost or implication—that He alone might receive all glory.
The Bible tells us, “In Your light we see light” (Ps. 36:9 nkjv). Because my parents walked in the light of God’s Word, He gave them the clarity of their callings, directing each of them individually to the jungles of South America. They fully expected to serve Him the rest of their days in locations as obscure to the outside world as any other places on Earth, bringing the words of Scripture to unreached people who’d never heard the gospel spoken in their own language.
The last thing they wanted was to make a name for themselves.
But God ripped the curtain of anonymity from around them on Sunday, January 8, 1956. A primitive tribe of Ecuadorian Indians speared my father, Jim Elliot, and four other young missionaries to death while the men were attempting to communicate with them. His death left his wife of little more than two years, Elisabeth, alone. Widowed. At twenty-nine. With me.
I was only ten months old, so I never really knew my father, except through what I learned of him while growing up. Initially I watched my mother fearlessly minister to the very people who’d slain her husband in the same jungle. Later, after we returned to the States, I heard more of the story while I completed my education, grew into a woman, and became a wife and mother myself. By this time, of course, I became aware of just how extraordinary my parents’ “ordinary” lives were.
My mother went on to give an account of her husband’s life in monumental books like Shadow of the Almighty and Through Gates of Splendor. The Christian world came to know them as Jim Elliot, heroic missionary martyr, and Elisabeth Elliot, beloved author, speaker, mentor, and Bible teacher.
Through the years, the stories of their lives, along with some of their now-famous quotes, have inspired numerous books, articles, blog posts, and sermon illustrations, even feature-length films and documentaries. Their influence continues to reverberate throughout Christendom. To this day numerous men and women, sharing Christ within humble and difficult settings, point back to my parents’ legacies of faithfulness as the spark that ignited their quest for serving in global missions.
In this book I want to share the untold part of this story. Even if you’ve read my mother’s book Passion and Purity, you don’t yet know the many colors and layers of my parents’ love story.
In fact, I didn’t either. Not all of it, at least. Obviously, some of it simply came out in conversation or in offhand comments through the years. My mother would often tell me with joy about my dad’s personality, how he made everyone laugh, how his class-clown antics in college were, to her (the paragon of quiet, restrained, and studious devotion), horrifyingly intriguing. She would get a gleam in her eye whenever I asked about him, remarking how his masculinity thrilled her, his complete devotion to God inspired her, and his passion for the gospel, as well as for her, moved her. She hoped that one day the Lord would bless me with a husband who bore the same qualities she loved so dearly in my father. And He did!
I read my dad’s journals (The Journals of Jim Elliot, which my mother compiled, edited, and published in 1978), so I also knew other details of their relationship that occasionally surfaced amid his otherwise daily notes of personal Bible study and insight. Theirs was a deep and delighted love, something they handled with extraordinary sacredness, even as it stretched and surprised them in ways they never saw coming—spiritually and beyond.
And for most of my life, such general knowledge of their romance and marriage always seemed enough for me.
But in recent years my curiosity reemerged, sending me on a mission to locate a special treasure my mother had once given me—a trove of all my dad’s letters written to her from 1948 to 1953, the year they were married.
At the time she gave them to me, our houseful of eight children occupied my full capacity for both major and mundane undertakings. She realized this fact, too, and had told me—just as she’d done when bestowing her own private journals on me earlier—that I might find interest in them someday, “when you have more time.”
In the passing years, as the house began slowly clearing out one by one, my mind returned to those letters again and to the love story I knew they contained, although sadly my memory of where I’d put them did not accompany the thought! But God knew. And He had plans which first began with my discovery of the trunk where I had stored them “for later.” The time had come.
I began to pore over each word, which would reveal great and mysterious depths of that genuine and indestructible love born of God. The real-life interactions of two young adults would stir others. Jim and Betty modeled—not perfectly, but persistently—the way God intends us to handle love, steward it, and keep it continually under His guidance.
And, how they grew to love each other! What you’ll see as you follow the progression of their relationship and the decisions they made along the way are the hallmarks of what I believe is still God’s plan (and is even now just as possible) for young people in love. If they commit themselves and surrender to Him, they will be genuinely satisfied in their Savior.
Indeed, my parents’ story is not unique to them. We read in 1 Corinthians 2:9, “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him” (nkjv). God loves those who trust His care, provision, and presence as devotedly as they did. He is still able to bless those who walk the all-too-uncommon path of purity and honor that He desires for His children. He plans for them a more profound joy when they are willing to prayerfully wait, work, and trust Him.
I recently came across a newspaper article that described the current dating trends among Millennials—a general label for those who have reached young adulthood in the twenty-first century. And while I know that our culture is far afield from the sheltered way I met and was courted by my future husband, I still was shocked by what was reported as customary practice. Nearly half of today’s young singles say they typically have sex before the first date. What they now consider the intimate part of their relationship is what happens after they’ve been to bed together and are finally getting around to knowing each other in conversation and in meeting each other’s family and friends. Worse, these poll numbers seem surprising to experts only because they contradicted the previous “rule of thumb” that people would save sex for the third date!
In sharp contrast, the story you’re about to experience is much more than a testimony of how two people in love preserved their virginity for marriage and how people still do so today. Because as important as chastity is, the nature of my parents’ words and actions reveal a couple defined not only by what they didn’t do, but by what they did. The Lord permeated their thoughts with His love. They struggled mainly to ascertain His will for their lives with clarity and predetermined obedience. They kept each other focused on His never-ending promises, despite circumstances that could easily have spun them off into doubt, disillusionment, or despair. The Lord demanded of them extraordinary, inexplicable patience, which seemed daunting when watching others in their circle steadily become engaged and married. They could easily have chosen to justify their own timing, not the Lord’s.
Instead, they gave up their own love for each other. They surrendered it totally to the One whose hand they trusted to lead them toward whatever future He’d created for them. And after valiantly and consistently returning it to His care so that they could more fully obey and follow Christ, they found their love given back to them in ways that—well, I won’t spoil the story for you.
To grasp the scope of their adventure together, I should tell you that their words in this book come from several sources. One source is the letters from my father I mentioned, almost all of which have never been published, except sparingly in some of my mother’s books. I’ve also drawn from her letters to him. Mysteriously, he chose not to keep her letters of 1948 and the first half of 1949, so I can only infer what she wrote to him by the comments he made within his return correspondence.
My mother, like my father, kept a journal during those same years, in which she captured some of her heart feelings, many prayers, and choice reflections on her reading and Bible study. In addition, she kept a five-year diary that she completed in 1951, using it as a quick, disciplined summary of each day’s activities. Each calendar date (January 1, January 2, etc.) contains an entry for, first, 1947, then directly below it, 1948, and so on, allowing her to look back during each annual pass through the book at precisely what she was doing and thinking at that time a year ago, or the previous years.
As you can imagine, knowing my mother, even her most cryptic or humdrum reporting of details somehow seems weighty. We can even glean wisdom from the mundane details, which she knew were holy to the Lord.
Taken together, this combination of their letters to one another and their journals create several impressions. First, they capture the inquisitive, observant, highly thoughtful awareness of life that characterized the way they approached each day, and which kept them from rushing or reacting emotionally to things. They were sometimes impatient but rarely spiritually gullible.
Second, they frequently punctuated their writings with quotes from seasoned authors, stanzas of sacred hymns, memorized excerpts from creative poetry, as well as lines of their own original verse. They continually fed their minds with the insights of superior writers, both Christian and secular. They immersed themselves in the thoughts of spiritual giants, consuming a steady diet of classics that kept their thinking both broad and deep.
Only slightly less noticeable in their letters are, third, the unspoken realities of what long-distance communication required in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Like everyone in every generation, they knew only what was contemporary to their own time. But to understand the context of their story, some of us will need to suspend today’s assumptions of having instant, international access to any person at any moment. Jim and Betty hearken back to an era when one wrote letters, stamped, and put them in the mailbox, aware they wouldn’t arrive at the other’s address for several days. Once the recipient read it (and reread it), he or she crafted a handwritten response. The next letter received might not provide answers to any questions that had been asked until a week later, maybe a month later, depending on how long it took for the person to sit down with his or her stationery. When my parents wrote more frequently, their letters would cross in the mail and refer to comments made in perhaps a previously written letter.
The rhythm of this reality—the unavoidably delayed gratification—was simply an accepted part of the world in which they lived. It feels unbearable in comparison to the immediate response time we expect today, yet I can’t help but wonder if what we’ve gained by accelerating life hasn’t cost us the reflection that makes love stories like my parents’ so unique.
When I read their words—even from the rare perspective of being their only child—my heart desires to honor Christ more with my best offering to Him. Even as a woman in my sixties, I’m inspired to rekindle my devotion and be willing to suffer and sacrifice for the sake of the gospel, as my parents did. I’m stirred also to pray for my own children and grandchildren and their generations, that they would catch an eternal vision for their lives. I pray they would experience for themselves the unrivaled joy of trusting God with every moment, with every question, with every hurt and confusing delay, knowing His way is always best, always better.
Being the daughter of such remarkable parents exposed me to many indescribable life lessons. They lived for Him, loved for Him, and persevered through His grace. I don’t possess the same gifts or disciplines they shared and personified, at least not in the same manner. Yet I consider it my legacy to be faithful to Christ’s calling on my life. I express part of that calling and responsibility in this volume that I am so honored you’ve picked up and chosen to read.
It is my way of returning to my mother and dad some measure of gratitude. And more importantly, it is my thanks to God for what He has so generously done for me. I hope it encourages you through their undying testimony. More than anything, I pray it results in praise to the Lord for allowing us all, by His grace, to share in the beauty of His holiness.
Valerie Elliot Shepard
Note to reader: My parents’ letters and journals are generally presented throughout this book as indented text, in a different typeface. When I’ve included portions of their original writings within descriptive paragraphs of my own, their words appear as italics.