1948 Love’s Stirring

1948 Love’s Stirring

Love’s Stirring

The opening line of my mother’s diary for January 1 made clear her devout, single-focused faith in God, as well as her longing to be fully surrendered to Him, His Word, and His Spirit. Home from her senior year in college for the holidays, having just turned twenty-one a few days before Christmas, she [Elisabeth Howard] marked this first day of the year by opening the plain, navy cover of her five-year diary, where she wrote:

Thursday—the beginning of another year in which “to walk humbly with my God.” Oh that I might learn to love Him supremely and have no other desire but Him alone. “Teach me Thy way, O Lord . . .”

The words that had already begun to flow into this private little notebook of hers—though punctuated, of course, with the typical cares and crises of any young woman’s life—would never shift from this due-north orientation. God was first; God was supreme; God was all. Indeed, her entry in this same little diary from the year prior, January 1, 1947, reflected the same unwavering commitment.

What a wonderful year is behind, and I know that a more wonderful year is ahead. Truly I can raise my Ebenezer and anticipate great things from the Lord, Counsellor, Prince of Peace, Mighty God.

Yet on this crisp New Year’s Day of 1948, writing at home in the Philadelphia suburb of Moorestown, New Jersey, her last lines of entry gave the first glimpse of an approaching figure that would truly make 1948 a year like no other—a development that, over time, would contribute to making her whole life like no other.

Jim and I had another long talk tonight—oh, if only I were as sincere and genuine as he is.

Jim.

The first time “Jim” appeared in my mother’s diary was an entry from nine months earlier, March 23, 1947, late in her junior year at Wheaton College, where she’d similarly noted having “a good talk with Jim Elliot—he is a wonderful guy.” A friend, roommate, and wrestling squad teammate of her one-year-younger brother Dave, Jim was someone she began to notice at school occasionally from afar. Then in the fall, when their course schedules as Greek majors nearly all overlapped, the “afar” between them became much nearer. She began to become more familiar with this ardent underclassman who lived with such fiery devotion to Christ, who could write such things as:

God, I pray, light these idle sticks of my life and may I burn up for Thee. Consume my life, my God, for it is Thine. I seek not a long life but a full one like Yours, Lord Jesus. . . . To that soul which has tasted of Christ, the jaunty laugh, the taunting music of mingled voices, and the haunting appeal of smiling eyes—all these lack flavor. I would drink deeply of Him. Fill me, O Spirit of Christ, with all the fullness of God.

Still, it was quite the surprise when Dave invited him home for Christmas break. That’s how “Jim” ended up being at my mother’s house, and in her diary, on New Year’s Day 1948.

Jim Elliot.

My father.

My mother’s family at home, Christmas 1947. Back: Dave and Phil (as well as Phyllis Gibson, my Uncle Dave’s future wife). Middle row: Elisabeth, Tom, Grandma and Grandpa Howard, Margaret and Kay Howard (Phil’s wife and daughter). Front: Ginny and Jimmy. (My father is off-camera, but attracting attention!)

The Howard household, though already filled with six children of its own (my mother being the second oldest), was like many others of its day, quick to welcome and make room for company. Still, she might have been less than pleased initially to hear they’d be sharing their home and holiday with this “big man on campus” from the Pacific Northwest. Less than a month earlier—in one of the only other mentions of him from her 1947 diary—she recalled going to a party in the nearby Chicago suburb of Glen Ellyn with Dave and a few others. “Jim” was among them, and as forthright as ever, she recalled.

On the way home Jim Elliott [notice the misspelling—two t’s instead of one] told me some of the reasons why I have such a bad reputation among the fellows. I am terribly sarcastic, for one.

It wouldn’t be the last time she’d hear this kind of critique and advice from him. (He was never one to beat around the bush or withhold sharing his opinions.) Her only recorded reaction to such revelations were mild sighs. But from what she later told me about the insecurity she felt during this season of her young womanhood, I can only imagine how it must have stung her, having her social demeanor challenged so directly by a mere acquaintance.

Some of her insecurity may have stemmed from her height—she stood a full 5'10-3/4". (If you wonder why she was so precise about the measurement: my father was 5'11", and she chose to accentuate this negligible difference as a deliberate means of expressing wifely deference.)

Another potential source of insecurity came from the fact that she’d rarely if ever received a compliment from her parents about her looks. The most flattering description she recalled her dad ever giving to both her and her sister as teenagers was about their being “two fine husky daughters.” (I guess that’s a compliment.)

No wonder, then, that her natural inclination was to be fairly withdrawn and critical of herself. She told me many times that she was a wallflower growing up. Yet even with that said, I’m sure this Jim-character’s offhand mention of certain flaws in her appearance—such as later comments about her “banana nose and angular figure”—only added to her sense of insecurity.

But sometimes the teasing playfulness of criticism is a smokescreen that masks quite different, more affectionate feelings. The awkward interactions of young men and women, when unsure exactly how to express their hearts, can often result in conflicting messages. Perhaps his unlikely appearance at her home during Christmas break of 1947–48 was simply another way of his trying to send a message to her, a way of grappling with what his own heart was feeling.

The one thing both of my parents certainly shared was an equally intense devotion to the Lord. His zeal differed from hers only in volume, not in passion. He was loud; she was quiet. He was ultra-popular; she was more likely to retreat from the spotlight. He was occasionally confrontational, boisterous, exhortative; she, although decidedly tough at the core (and admittedly hotheaded and argumentative), was tender in comparison to his outgoing tenacity. But during the family meals, family worship, sledding, and skating that took place throughout these few days at her home, my dad later admitted to having feelings for her—Betty, Betts—at this Christmastime in New Jersey. Love was stirring.

Christmas sledding. Left to right: my father, Uncle Dave, Aunt Ginny, Aunt Margaret and Uncle Phil. Little Jimmy in front.

Still, neither spoke of it yet. Nor did either write of it in their individual journals and diaries. Both had their minds on far more significant things than pairing off in a romantic relationship or competing against their peers, some of whom almost seemed to be racing each other to the altar!

In spring of the previous year, after spending time with a pair of couples who were engaged, my mother wrote of the relief she felt from any sense of distraction:

How thankful I am that the Lord has kept me from any feeling of covetousness. There are times when I long for love, but lately I’ve not felt that way. It’s a wonderful thing.

There had been boys before. Only recently a young man and college friend named George had asked her out. They had dated years earlier while students at Hampden DuBose Academy, the private Christian boarding school she’d attended in Zellwood, Florida, before each had moved on to Wheaton. But after accepting this latest invitation for going out, she broke it the next day, consenting only to going on a walk with him . . . to break the whole thing off entirely.

She announced they needed to stop dating. Then she was surprised to see his eyes begin to pool with tears, to hear his voice break as he tried telling her how much she meant to him. “Now I feel terrible,” she wrote afterward—“hadn’t realized it would hurt him. I’m beginning to wonder if perhaps I acted rather hastily yesterday.”

Over the course of nearly a week, her diary swims with the changing emotions that resulted in the aftermath. She confessed to being “positively miserable about George,” working at “getting over George,” then trying to find George, only to hear he was “afraid to come and talk to me, for fear I wouldn’t speak to him.” Finally, after several days of this disquiet, she forced the opportunity to meet with him again, where she “gave back his medals, explained a few things to him, thanked him for all he’d done for me.” It was hard to do, she said, but she hoped he understood. And she admitted in her heart that she missed him “quite a bit.”

What she didn’t miss, though, when reading back over those 1947 entries in her diary, was the unnecessary drama of it all. Several times in 1948 she spoke of being embarrassed at what she now deemed “immaturity” on her part. In March, for instance, after attending the wedding of two friends the previous night, she said:

It used to be that when I went to a wedding I pictured myself in such a role. But thoughts of this nature seldom enter my head anymore. I have a calm assurance that I am not to be married. I am grateful to my Lord for winning the victory in that realm. Truly it is miraculous. I wept for joy during the ceremony, and the hymn kept running through my mind, “I Am Thine, O Lord,” and “Loved with Everlasting Love.”

I smile now in seeing this young, earnest woman go to a wedding, impressed with the thoroughly Christian center of it, yet in her own mind be assured that she was supposed to remain single. She was much more intrigued by the prospect of finding “blessed happiness in Christ alone,” she said . . . although I wonder how many times she wished throughout the next five years that she could recapture the same calm assurance on this subject.

My father, too, in his personal journal, which he began in mid-January 1948 and continued to keep with consistent regularity almost till his death, related similar convictions when thinking ahead to his future. Meditating on Genesis 31, he commented:

Rachel and Leah manifest an attitude toward their family which I would have toward all earthly ties. There is now no longer an inheritance for me down here. I’ve been bought by the labors of that great Shepherd who came from afar to gain me as His bride. Lead on, Lord, whatever God’s command is or wherever He may lead, I am now ready to go.

His father undoubtedly influenced some of his convictions on love and marriage. My grandfather was an itinerant preacher knit from the same cloth as the ultra-conservative tradition of Plymouth Brethren. He’d expressly said in a letter to his son, “Jim, I am jealous of any thing or person who could retard your progressive course to everlasting riches and a life completely devoted to that supreme and glorious Man at God’s right hand.” My father was also well-versed in Paul’s writings from 1 Corinthians 7, which speak of the benefits of remaining single and the cumbersome load of responsibility a wife can bring.

Simply put, my parents—at similar times in college—each felt called to being not only missionaries, but unmarried missionaries, singularly devoted. And they maintained this near-certain conviction despite many pangs of desire, impatience, and questioning that would later war against the spiritual caution in their relationship.

What was it about being single and going to far-off lands that seemed more appropriate and godly for them? Suffice to say, each of them bore within themselves a burden for taking God’s Word to peoples of the world who’d never heard of Jesus Christ. And they were determined that absolutely nothing would come between themselves and this honor-bound pursuit and purpose.

My mother’s first poem of 1948 (each of my parents was incredibly skilled in writing poetry) reiterated her intention for keeping her heart attuned solely to Christ.

There is no other source of joy, Lord.In Thee alone I find deep, sweet, pure content.Forgive me for testing the waters of earth.They are not springs.They are stagnant pools.There is there no undefiled pleasure.It is all transient and frustrating. Oh, the blessedness of drinking long and fully from Thy springs that are in Thee, Lord Jesus!Thou knowest no limits—I take from Thee all I can contain.Increase my capacity, Father!

My mother as a teenager (on bicycle), outside with her sister Ginny and her brother Jimmy.

In another poem, written January 8, she echoed the same single-minded resolve.

“The Lord Jehovah is my . . . song” Is. 12:2 No other song have I but Thee, O Lord my God—The purest music of my soul Bursts forth from Thee!Be Thou my only joy-note; I, the instrument Incapable of any song But Thine.O let me praise Thee, Lord! O touch, and let me sing!

When not setting such devoted thoughts to poetry, she could write with equally devoted prose.

February 18: My life is on Thy Altar, Lord—for Thee to consume. Set the fire, Father. Now I begin to know that song! Oh, how can I call it sacrifice, when Thou dost so richly repay—with song, with joy, with love. Bind me with cords of love to the Altar. Hold me there. Let me remember the Cross.

She could also state her case for singleness rather matter-of-factly.

March 7: Translation work is a full-time job. I cannot see how it would be possible from a purely human standpoint to do that and raise a family. Of course if God should one day reveal His will for me to be married, He would supply the needed strength and grace to do both. But as I see it now, He would have me for Himself alone, that I might “care for the things of the Lord” (1 Cor. 7:34). I look ahead with joy at the possibility of a life wholly set apart unto God and the winning of His bride. . . .

I do not mean to say that I see the whole plan of my life. God may change it all. I only thank Him for the joy of resting in Him, and trusting Him for every step. He has given me direction and purpose. I shall not turn aside, even if it be for marriage, unless that is a part of His perfect will. God forbid that I should be satisfied with anything short of His highest.

My father, champion wrestler that he was, prophetically saw his situation in more violent, sacrificial terms.

April 18: All other persons, places, and principles are false resting points for faith. . . . Father, take my life, yea, my blood, if Thou wilt, and consume it with Thine enveloping fire. I would not save it, for it is not mine to save. Have it, Lord, have it all. Pour out my life as an oblation for the world. Blood is only of value as it flows before Thine altars.

Therefore, everything was setting up inside them for lives spent alone, at least as far as marriage was concerned. To put it in my mother’s words, “Lord, I have said the eternal yes . . .”

Let me never, having put my hand to the plough, look back. Make straight the way of the cross before me, guide Thou my feet therein. Hold me, Blessed Master, ever in Thy presence. Grant to me a steadfast singleness of purpose. O give me love, that there be no room for a wayward thought or step.

And yet . . . what if, as part of God’s plan, human love came calling anyway?

Spring

My mother’s earnest prayer-poem before her senior exams.

At some point in the spring of 1948, my parents began studying Greek together. I’m sure a stirring of attraction had been building, revealing itself in little ways, little overtures, little recognitions of noticing and being noticed—but again, not enough for them to entrust it to their journals yet. It was only enough to make them want to gravitate toward places where the other was located.

But should they? Was it wrong? they wondered. Were they allowing this stirring of affection to drive a harmful, distracting wedge between themselves and God? Even by entertaining the mere thought of romance, by giving unspoken consent to its emotions, were they compromising precious moments of Godward devotion that were critical to their callings?

As usual—reflective of a trait that I’m sure would surprise no one familiar with my mother’s life and teaching—her sensitivity to sins of the heart was keen and acute. As the oldest daughter of strict parents in a large family, she became quite naturally hard on herself. (Too hard, perhaps.) Subtle offenses that most people would never stop to notice or contemplate in themselves could convict her to the core. She admitted, for example, that she was a bit overly devoted to excelling at every school subject. By early April in this final semester of her senior year, nearly two months before graduation, she was already working on her term papers “so that I might get all A’s in them, and hence have more time in which to work for a distinctive rating on comps [comprehensive exams],” to which she added, “I have an intense and unholy desire to graduate with high honor.” Most might see this as healthy ambition. She saw it as misguided ambition, interfering with the greatest ambition of knowing Christ.

My father, too, wrote often of how he feared “offending the heavenly Dove” by some thought or impetuous act. He would remark of being “wholly dissatisfied with my present powerlessness”—this young firebrand who was probably the most spiritually fervent person most people had ever known. “My love is faint; my warmth practically nil,” he sometimes confessed in his journal. “I don’t love; I don’t feel; I don’t understand; I can only believe.” Neither of my parents could bear the idea of allowing a rival interest to divert their attention from the Almighty.

This new struggle, however—this love attraction—created something else altogether with which to torment their tender consciences. And neither of them knew exactly how to handle it.

“The Lord knows I have had a struggle today,” Mama dared confess in her diary during this time. “I cannot write it even here,” she added, although I suspect her “struggle” was related to something that involved my father. In whatever subtle ways she’d perceived herself having given in to her flesh, however innocent it might have been by less stringent standards, she nonetheless felt the waves of conviction. Yes, with a fervent heat—to the point of not wanting to go anywhere near its root causes again. “O God, purge me, take away all desire! I have been severely tried on two accounts, and have not rung true. Forgive me, Lord!”

Yet her inner turmoil continued . . .

April 2: I am seized with fear that my own will is to be given place, and I will thus ruin my usableness for God. It would be easy to follow my feelings, to interfere with the voice of the Lord when He says, “This is the way, walk ye in it.”

April 13: I feel the tremendous importance of this particular time in my life. I am twenty-one—only six weeks left of seventeen years in school! I face an uncertain tomorrow, with the certainty of Christ. Perhaps I face a life of complete separation from all I have loved. But blessed will that be with the Lord, who is my sun and shield. How I pray that He will hold absolute sway.

April 24: How subtle is the flesh! I think that my whole life is utterly lost in the Father’s, and then comes a suggestion that perhaps He would lead this way, and immediately I rise up, almost unconsciously, in objection! I know not my own heart—He alone sees all the reservation, all my wishes, all the mistrust. When I think that I am longing to know His will, I find that my own heart is choked with human desires, and He cannot speak.

My father, too, though expressing himself with a bit more objectivity, as if dealing with a more general principle, still revealed a glimpse into his own personal dilemma.

April 16: Lord, Thou must put an end to my fleshly issue. Stop it, Lord. Staunch the flow of this defilement which springs from rotten flesh. Instead, flow Thou through me, today, yea, for seven days, until Thou dost see me to be clean.

April 18: The pattern of my behavior is not set in the activities of those about me. Don’t follow the example of those left in the world or those found in the church. Rather, the law of God, found in His Word, shall be my standard, and, as I see it, there are few examples of this sort of living anywhere. God gives commands to abstain from all enormities and confusion.

One of the “confusions” my father had long chosen to abstain from—and had exhorted others of his Wheaton classmates to avoid as well—was dating. Yet at the end of April . . .

Tonight Jim Elliot took me in to the W.E.C. conference at Moody.

It amounted to their first “date”—a term my mother intentionally placed in quotation marks when she inserted this item of note within her edited version of The Journals of Jim Elliot. This gathering of the Worldwide Evangelization for Christ organization at Moody Church in downtown Chicago was “a blessed, encouraging meeting,” she said, where her heart was stirred afresh for “those 100,000 souls who perished in ‘blackness of darkness forever’ today! What am I doing about it?”

Notable too, however, from this diary posting of April 30—in addition to its genuine reflection of her missionary heart—was the strength of character she had grown to admire in my father. “Jim is without exception the finest fellow I have ever met.” And how nice it would’ve been to know him better, perhaps, if she wasn’t due to graduate in a few short weeks and presumably never again see him in her whole life.

Wheaton Student Council 1948. My father, middle row, third from left. My mother, front row, second from right. (Uncle Dave is next to my father, second from left.)

She did, in fact, excitedly tell her mother about a little trip she and some other students had recently taken as a gospel team to Taylor University in northern Indiana, on which my father had invited her. The following is from a letter sent home around Memorial Day:

The usual procedure has been to take just men, but after some persuasion from various sources, Jim [Elliot], who is in charge of the teams, consented to take girls. The thing is, the fellows always do the preaching, but girls are needed for personal work, in dealing with other girls. So Jan and I went along.

It was a wonderful trip down. The fellowship was truly in the heavenlies. We sang “Sunrise Tomorrow,” etc., as the sun came up. Then there was a great deal of prayer and hymn singing on the way. The Lord opened my eyes to what true Christian love can mean. I saw it exhibited in the four fellows as I have never before seen it. Just to be a witness of such fellowship was blessed, let alone to partake. In a wonderful way God undertook to keep our minds and conversation stayed upon Him. We earnestly sought to keep our motives pure and holy, and to go forth in the power of the Spirit. Praise be to God!

When we arrived, one minute before time, we had the morning chapel service. It was a time of heart-searching for us, as well as for the students there. Jim gave the message—a powerful challenge to the mission field. Some told me afterward they had never heard such a message in all their years at Taylor. . . .

The evening meeting was one of the finest things I’ve ever been to. Hatch had charge, and Jim, Bill, and Art spoke. Their messages dovetailed perfectly, though they had not been previously outlined. There was power there which one rarely sees. . . . The trip home was a similar time of real communion. It was practically a brand new experience for me. I’ve never spent a day like it in my life.

Saturday afternoon we spent in a special meeting of the judiciary committee. Officially, this consists of the deans, the president of the Council, and two members of the student body. These latter are Jim Elliot and I this year.

But despite whatever flutter of affection she may have felt from these up-close encounters with my dad, she focused her attentions on other things, as this journal entry from late May suggests:

May 24: I have just finished reading Frank Lawes’ The Sanctity of Sex. A fine presentation of one of youth’s gravest problems. But instead of firing my desire for such a channel of fulfillment, I am brought to my knees in worship and adoration of Christ, for whom my whole love-life shall by His grace alone be poured out.

I am thankful for the power and beauty of love, but I only pray that it might be directed wholly to God, and as an offering acceptable unto Him. All the love poems which I have heretofore written—let them be claimed by Christ. All the desires of my heart are toward Him. All the dreams of my younger days—let them be fulfilled in a life lost in the love of Jesus. In the power of the Cross be my dynamic, in the glory of God my sole motivation. Accept all this, dear Father, in Thy holy name.

She then closed with this original poem.

Let me burn out for Thee, dear Lord,Burn, and wear out for Thee,Let me not rust or my life be a failure, my God, to Thee.Use me, and all I have, for Thee—And draw me so close to Thee that I feel the throb of the great heart of God until I burn out for Thee.

The short burst of weeks she’d spent dealing with “this new thing” had now seemed to fade behind more pressing plans for her immediate future.

April 20: I have just spent an hour with the Lord in His Word, seeking to know His will about my life—teaching at PBI [Prairie Bible Institute] next year, or PSOB? [Philadelphia School of the Bible] Or neither? AIM [Adventures in Mission] or SIM [Sudan Interior Mission] or neither? How abundantly He has answered, and promised to show me. He tells me to wait, fear not, for He is the Lord. My mind is so clouded, my eyes so dim, my understanding so human—and He says, “I know the things that come into your mind, every one of them” (Ezek. 11:5). “In the shadow of His hand hath He hid me” (Is. 49:2).

Yet my father decided a scant week before graduation to go ahead and make his feelings more visibly plain. On June 3 between classes, he handed my mother a leather-bound copy of the Little Flock hymnbook, on which he had inscribed the flyleaf, directing her inside to a G. W. Frazer hymn which opened with the following lyric: “Have I an object, Lord, below / Which would divide my heart with Thee?” The clear implication, now discreetly yet intentionally addressed, was that they somehow (before it was too late) needed to talk this thing out.

What we see next is a very flustered Betty.

“It is terribly difficult to study,” she captured in her diary the next day. “I could not get to sleep last night, and then I woke at 2:30 a.m. and stayed awake! Could not eat much breakfast.” And as to her history final, which kept her up studying all night the next night, “I shall not be at all surprised if I flunk it.”

My father, waxing poetic, was faring no better, struggling through final exam preparations himself with a mind made “muddy about Betty H. lately,” causing him “trouble in concentration.” He composed the following on June 5:

O Lord, against this bosom blast of coiled and seething feelings,Battering passions, ebbing yearnings, oozing aches of inner man,Raise Thou the flinty walls of stuff of which Thy Son was made.Yea, build in me the buttressed bastions of faith.That shall resist the undersucking flow of selfish tide,And make me to endure this late attack, I pray, in Jesus’ name.

This was all setting up for a dramatic showdown.

The vivid events that followed in the next week my mother has already told more capably than I could ever relate them, captured in her classic work Passion and Purity as well as in her fuller account of my father’s life, Shadow of the Almighty. I’d rather step back and let her tell you the story herself in her own original words, taken directly from her diaries, just as it happened.

On June 7—a Monday—they took a long walk “from 9:00 to 11:00 p.m. The evening was cool and beautiful, the heavens spangled. Talked of many things, very seriously.” Writing the next day in her longer journal, she expanded on the events:

June 8: It was a time of serious heart-searching and an overwhelming sense of responsibility, to each other and to God. I honestly believe that both of us are yielded on this point—or we at least were. Now what? Have we gone back? Have we turned our eyes from Him who alone can satisfy? O Lord, let it never be!

Strange that two should have their whole patterns of thinking so intermingled. Strange, too, that we should have seemingly been led in opposite directions as regards the mission field. Each of us has built up a sort of code, his on Matt. 19:12, mine on 1 Cor. 7 and Is. 54. Now what about these? Have we failed? Have we lost our vision?

Often, we are startled that our ideas so perfectly coincide—things which neither of us has discussed with anyone before. But are we taken by this “coincidence”? Is it only a case of proximity? Has God allowed this as a test of our stand with Him for a single life, and we, in the crisis, have not rung true? If we have fallen in failure and loss, forgetting the glorious gain of the Cross, it is nothing short of tragedy. How will we know this? Yes, how little we know our own hearts! Neither has felt any conviction, except wherein we have allowed our love to become selfish—when Christ has been dimmed by our own sinful “earth-born clouds.”

We can only pray earnestly, and wait patiently, asleep, as was Adam, in the will of God. We need to heed the solemn warning of Song of Sol. 2:7, and live in the power of Romans 8.

She spoke in words far wiser than her young years, words that young people would do well to ponder when their emotions vie for rule and want to get ahead of God’s best for them. She thought of words that many other faithful, hopelessly-in-love souls would wish they had stopped to say at such a moment.

God has shown me very clearly that this is all to be left—untouched—in His hand alone. We cannot go further. We have not, I think, done wrong so far, but now we wait.

Two days later, they took another evening walk, realizing more sharply than ever how brief was their remaining time together.

June 9: Tonight we walked out to the cemetery and by chance (!) sat beneath a great cross. How symbolic it seemed! . . . There was a great struggle of heart for both. Long spaces of silence—but communion. “What is to be done with the ashes?” It has cut very deep—therefore we dare not touch it. O, inexorable Love!

Without doubt they sensed the sparks of young passion in that place. Yet they had long allowed God’s Spirit to lead their hearts and they did not react to sheer emotion. Their many hours of humble surrender before the Lord and His Word caused them to recognize this moment as something extremely sacred. And in case they didn’t, the holiness of it certainly came into view when the moon’s glow upon the headstone where they sat caused the shadow of a cross to align itself strikingly between them.

I went to find that cross this past July at the Wheaton cemetery, and I think I found it. I imagined them sitting in front of it in silence. It still makes me shiver with awe at their emotional, intellectual, and spiritual unity. Whatever goose bumps of excitement might have enchanted them both throughout the past several weeks now calmed to a settled, sobering hush. They knew better than to move.

To wait on the Lord is to stand perfectly still. It is not to make even a tentative step. Because we are not led to continue, we stop. We cannot take any of this thing into our own hands. . . . Surely this torrent would sweep down the walls, if it not be founded upon a rock. So, Lord, until it is firmly grounded in the will of God, let us not build.

My father recounted the evening this way:

June 10: Came to an understanding at the Cross with Betty last night. Seemed the Lord made me think of it as laying a sacrifice on the altar. She has put her life there, and I almost felt as if I would lay a hand on it, to retrieve it for myself, but it is not mine—wholly God’s. He paid for it and is worthy to do with it what He will. Take it and burn it for Thy pleasure, Lord, and may Thy fire fall on me as well.

They arrived, then, at a decision. The cross of Christ would be their point of surrender. They would die to their desires and live for Him alone. They would give up their own human attraction in order to follow Christ singly. The cross which demanded their whole hearts gave them the “liberty of obedience” (interestingly, the title of a book Mama wrote). So rather than press forward and make plans to keep in touch, they would allow silence and distance to be God’s winnowing tools to sift out what should stay and what should go.

They loved each other, yes—undeniably so. But even more, they could not deny that God had been setting them on a path that hardly seemed to include each other (or anyone, for that matter). And despite this unexpected wildflower that had appeared in the carefully tended garden of their souls this spring, it was difficult not to discern it as a flirtation with temptation compared to what God had been growing there all along.

I will say, though, if my father had not taken the active step of making his feelings known, the likelihood of their maintaining a close relationship from that point forward was quite low. And because of his openly professed doubtfulness that God’s will would ever be for him to marry, I’ve often wondered if he was right in expressing his fondness for her, especially at such a late hour of their time together. Yet both seemed prepared, despite the anguish (and we will see what their waiting would cost them!) to walk on at this level of trust and understanding. “It is on the altar,” my mother wrote. “God will set the fire or stay the hand.”

Her diary went on to say . . .

June 12: Tonight we walked out to the lagoon. Perhaps we will not be together again—ever. We don’t know about tomorrow night—should we be together? He will decide. “It is going to be hard . . . harder than we’d like to think.”

June 13: Our last night together. The “dust of words.” There were very few. Only quietness—and peace of spirit.

In the end, my mother captured it well—with a measure of hope, contentment, and gratitude that seemed to silence her trepidation for the time being, even if not always enough to hold back the flood of perceived loss and the pangs of loneliness that ensued.

June 17: These have not been days of barrenness. But they are utterly inexpressible. God has taken me apart, wholly unto Himself. He has let me see His face. No word can be written of it. I stand silent, and wondering. O blessed Lord “that will not let me go, I rest my weary soul in Thee.”

And with the kiss of a distant prayer she closed, “Keep him thus, too, Lord Jesus.”

Summer

There was hardly time to dwell on the gravity of what they’d just experienced, amid the hubbub of my mother’s graduation festivities, the influx of family, the snapping of photographs, and the many sidewalk farewells with dear friends made over four indelible years. But how quickly, almost within hours, did the sudden shock of silence cause all other goodbyes to melt into a single goodbye—the fixed gaze from only one pair of eyes, left behind in memory, both to ponder and perplex. “What passed between us cannot be spoken or written,” she said, recalling that final moment together at the train station. Could it really be over so soon?

My father took their parting equally as hard.

June 15: Wept myself to sleep last night after seeing Betty off at the depot. Wistful all day today in spite of outdoor exercise. Feel a concentrated pressure in my throat even now. Homesickness partly—but I never felt it until after I left her.

Yet indeed, she was gone—off to the Summer Institute of Linguistics, a partnership with Wycliffe Bible Translators—ten weeks of intensive training held on the campus of the University of Oklahoma. But the real intensity of those weeks and months would be what happened outside the classroom, where daily she would wrestle with the whys, what-ifs, and what-nexts. How was it all supposed to fit together properly with everything else she knew about life: her single-minded faith in God and the unswerving certainty that she would doubtless follow Him wherever He led?

On most days throughout the summer, particularly in the evenings and on Saturday mornings, she would ascend the steps in the football stadium, where she could be alone with the Lord amid its echoes and emptiness—the vacant bleachers below, the vastness of the heavens above. With every prayer and Scripture reading uttered at that height, her heart continued to come down consistently on total surrender to God, His will, and His plan. Yet the flight on the way to that landing spot could often be turbulent.

June 16: Climbed to the top of the University Stadium this morning and had my devotions. God met me there—wonderfully. And He has been with me. He keeps my heart at peace, but when I pray for J. the tears must come.

June 17: It is impossible for me to dismiss all thought of ever seeing him again. I find myself thinking of how I will talk with him. Each time the future comes to mind, he is there.

On nights when “memories would sweep over me with a strange forcefulness,” she would sometimes bemoan “how easy it is to give place to myself, my own moods and feelings. The Lord save me from belonging to the Order of the self-pitying. No man hath a velvet cross.”

June 19: I cannot even pray any specific prayer for either of us, except that he be not hindered in his purposes to wholly follow the Lord. I can say “Thy will be done,” or “Do Thou for us,” and He restrains from my mind any speculation as to how this will be accomplished. There are many things which I see not.

Have I the proper perspective on the past three weeks, or have I been blinded somewhere? Do I see the lessons God has for me now? Surely I do not at all see what He will reveal. O, that Christ might “be the object bright and fair to fill and satisfy the heart.”

Perhaps she felt at times as my father did, who wondered to himself if “the Lord gave me this affair with B.H. to try me, to see if I were really in earnest about the life of loneliness He taught me.” Just as God tested the ancient Israelites “to see if they would walk in the ways of their fathers or not, perhaps this is His plan with me,” he wrote. “The Lord wants to see if I will follow Him regardless.” And without question, that’s what he would do. Against the pulsating tide of missing and wishing for my mother, he sensed God must be telling him to “lose the fondling touch. Rather, open my hand to receive the nail of Calvary—as Christ’s was opened—that I, releasing all, might be released, unleashed from all that binds me here.”

Yet as soon as either of them steeled their souls against physical longing, forsaking even each other for the clarion call of a life spent wholly in God’s service, the pendulum might swing back the other direction.

There was the day, for instance, when my mother received what she called “a very perplexing letter”—from her father—presumably advising her not to consider it tantamount to disobedience if she were to consider a future with Jim Elliot. Was it possible, she wondered to herself in response, “that by my own determination not to make one un-commanded step, I might be allowed to miss God’s best?”

This was obviously no easy path to navigate.

Truly, in her undivided mind, “God forbid that His highest purpose should be checked, in any degree, by the fleshly determination of my own will. Not mine, but His, is all I want.” But if she could only receive some kind of specific answer from Him on where He was leading—some way of coming to a settled conclusion on what to do, one way or the other. “Give me grace to follow, for my heart and flesh are weak.”

July 10: Spent several hours in prayer and study up in the stadium this morning. I am distressed that it is so difficult for me to direct my whole mind and heart fully to God. I find it very easy to spend much time thinking of J. Why should this be? Oh, to know more of the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus! Oh, for that burning passion whose sole object is Christ!

One thing she knew for certain, however, having spent this time so fiercely seeking to ascertain the will of God concerning their relationship: she was ruined for anyone else. When a fellow classmate asked if she’d like to go out one Friday night, “of course I refused. Odd to think that I should probably never date anyone again. How could I?” She was far too taken with my father by now. For if the Lord in His sovereign plan had determined she should keep her romantic distance even from him—from Jim Elliot—she certainly wasn’t about to consider another in his place.

Interestingly, though, in God’s curious providence, one of the mercies He extended toward her during the summer was that my father’s older brother Bert was involved in this same linguistics program as well. The two of them would often talk, sing hymns around the piano, and compare notes on their spiritual insights. It was like getting a peek into the family home where my dad, like his brother and other siblings, obtained such an intense love and grasp of the Scriptures.

The Elliot family, Portland. Front: Jane, Jim, Bob, with Bert behind them. Back: Clara and Fred, their parents (my grandparents).

In some ways, seeing him there made things hard for her. The physical similarities (the cut of his profile, the sound of his laughter) almost hurt when she’d catch sight of him. “He reminds me so much of J.”

July 12: Bert sits by me in nearly every lecture. Strange. How I wish he knew. I doubt if he has any idea whatever about us. I have to catch myself now and then about the way I refer to Jim.

July 13: There has been some talk about Bert and I being together so much. Oh—people—how they love to talk! If they only knew the circumstances!

And yet being near him made her feel nearer to my father too. He was to her a source of unexpected, unsolicited info on the real object of her interest. “Bert had a card from Jim today which he let me read.” How cagey she must have felt, not wanting to be the one to divulge that this kid brother of his was frankly a bit more than just a college acquaintance.

However, being around Bert so much—despite the wonderful guy he was—only served to bring into sharper focus just how exceptional a man she’d found my father to be. “He [Bert] has not the strength of character nor force of personality which Jim has . . . or nearly the self-discipline. In J., I see all that I think of as true, pure manhood.”

And to my mother, “true, pure manhood” was hardly a nebulous concept.

In May of the previous year, long before developing any sense of affection for my dad, she had written down eleven qualities of what she termed “My Ideal Man.” Perhaps these would interest you. She never published them, to my knowledge. I give them to you in their entirety.

No one who didn’t possess these qualities (or wasn’t growing in them) would ever be of interest to her. My father’s heart was much the same. They understood early that if God were ever to draw them romantically toward each other or toward any other person, part of the proof behind the relationship’s legitimacy would be a recognizable pattern of spiritual fruit in bloom. And throughout their long odyssey of waiting on Him to confirm and permit their own love for one another to lead toward marriage, each of them remained doggedly more concerned about the other’s conformity to God’s will. In fact, this priority was visible already, this first summer, in my mother’s prayers.

O, may the Lord set His love upon him, and lead him up higher. I only want to know that he is daily learning more of the Lord Jesus.

Almost every time he comes to mind, I pray that his thoughts may be directed wholly to God.

I would rather be blotted from his thoughts forever than for one moment to stand between him and his Lord, or weaken his power with one soul.

This final line—praying for the effectiveness of his ministry to others—referred to a month-long preaching circuit that my father embarked upon between mid-July and mid-August. After completing a summer school session at Wheaton, he and three other team members (including Dave, my mother’s brother) volunteered for a four-week itinerary with Foreign Missions Fellowship that took them to several states throughout the Midwest. They spoke at camps and Bible conferences and college campuses in Michigan, Minnesota, even as far west as Montana, seeking to energize the church’s passion for unreached people in other lands. “Often the Lord brings to mind the F.M.F. team with which Dave & J. are traveling,” my mother wrote in her diary, more than once. “I pray that God would keep them low at His feet, open, and usable.”

Ministry team at a church in Detroit. My father is second from left. Dave Howard at far right.

From all accounts it was a most fruitful time. It inspired many young people to commit to missions. Still, my father confessed privately a couple of times in his journal of being “frail in contending with myself,” saying that “unchecked inordinate desire will make even a king’s son sickly.” My mother, of course, busy with her own work, was similarly struck in quieter moments with an ache of bewilderment. “Six weeks ago tonight that we made our decision. Never a day passes without my remembering with mingled pain and pleasure those two unbelievable weeks.” Her Scripture reading and journal writing from an August day said it like this:

August 4: Psalm 106—“He led them through the depths . . . They sang His praise . . . They soon forgat His works; they waited not for His counsel: but lusted exceedingly in the wilderness, and tempted God in the desert. And He gave them their request but sent leanness into their soul.”

Solemn warning indeed. He has led us through the depths, and we have sung His praise. God forbid that we should ever forget His works, and haste ahead of Him. God keep us from making any request which springs from the lust of self. O Lord our Father—stay our wills in Thine. Keep us ever trusting, resting—as Thou hast so wondrously done.

Yet among my favorite images of them that summer, cobbled together from their various writings, is picturing them sitting alone at nightfall somewhere—my mother high above the football field in Oklahoma, my father perhaps overlooking a still lake at a Minnesota campground—perhaps observing the same sunset from four states away.

EH (June 30): Went to the stadium again to view the sunset. How wonderfully the clouds reflect the glory of the sun! This, my cloud of uncertainty, flashes His glory even now. I wonder if I could go on in peace if I know that all hope was gone of seeing him again? Although it is all committed to Him, that hope cannot be dispelled. Scatter it, Lord, if it hinders. Prepare me even for that.

EH (July 4): A golden evening at the top of the stadium—great reaches of golden paths sweeping up to Him who is the giver of all light.

EH (July 26): The sunset tonight, viewed from the stadium, was unspeakable. The most brilliant red I’ve ever seen, I think. At times I wonder how it would be if we were to meet again. Would it be possible to pick up where we left off? Is it possible that he could feel the same? But I don’t feel the same—it is different now. Deeper and more pure, even than before. Have Thine own way, Lord.

JE (August 15): Oh, the sunset last night! It was as if the dying sun sprawled gory riot in the western sky, wallowing in its own bloody throes, warming the folds of the clutching darkness with the heat of its passion, and moving even mute cloud forms to flush crimson with the huge horror of its passing. But clouds are fickle. For it was only an hour or so before they had turned their faces to reflect the grim glory of a ghastly grinning moon.

Looking up from his reverie, he added as if in apology, “Enough—that sounds overworked, but it’s fun writing.” Little could he have known how much his daughter wishes he would’ve just kept on writing.

After the completion of his summer tasks, he headed home to Oregon. His stay there with family could only be brief; he was due back soon in Wheaton for the beginning of his senior year. Yet he faced an unclear future. Not surprisingly, however, he bravely held his chief ideals and ambitions intact while continuing to battle this new inner conflict.

August 23: Was sensitively touched at reading [Hudson] Taylor’s love victory. I cannot understand man, even godly man. Having been conquered by a power unseen and willingly owning the sway of the Absolute, thus “finding himself” and satiating the ultimate longings of his breast, he can ache with a perfect fury to be subjected still further to the rule of woman’s love. Or perhaps it his desire to possess, having been strangely dispossessed by owning Christ as Lord. And within I feel the very same.

Oh, that Christ were all and enough for me. He is supposed to be, and I dare not say, “Why hast Thou made me thus?” Oh, to be swept away in a flood of consuming passion for Jesus that all desire might be sublimated to Him.

My mother’s ten weeks of summer translation study concluded in mid-August as well, and she caught a train going the opposite direction, to New Jersey, including a two-hour layover in Chicago—“Union and Dearborn Stations, sites of such memories. God forgive me the weakness of ‘nostalgia.’” She also made a scheduled stop in Wexford, Pennsylvania, just north of Pittsburgh, to spend a few days with Eleanor Vandevort, one of their favorite missions-minded friends from college. (Van later lived with us when we came back from Ecuador.) While there, Van showed three letters she’d received from my father over the summer. “This gave me a strange feeling,” my mother wrote, to be reading his correspondence again over the shoulder of someone else.

As lovely as it was to spend time with Van—(“She asked me a lot about J.”)—she was thrilled to finally reach home, making blessed reunions with family and friends. And yet she arrived feeling troubled concerning her future.

August 30: It is the first time in my life when plans have not been laid out for me far in advance. I am cast only upon my Lord. Oh, that “Christ, the wisdom of God” might have full charge. Never have I felt so completely helpless and ignorant of the way I should turn. I turn, O God, in faith and love, to Thee.

One opportunity that immediately presented itself was with the Sudan Interior Mission, which she seriously considered. She approached it with arms wide open, wanting only God’s will, confident that He would providentially lead. “I can think of two times just last year,” she wrote, “when I did everything in my own power to go a certain way, but God withstood me—and as I look back I praise Him for His way. How much better it was.” But in the end, she chose to enroll for a year of further training at Prairie Bible Institute (PBI)—a common feeder program for those who, like herself, attended Wheaton for undergrad. Located in western Canada, it meant another extended season away from home—likely not even back for Christmas. But it meant useful study while waiting for clearer direction on the specific part of the world in which God was calling her to serve Him.

And it furthermore meant, on the long train ride from New Jersey to Alberta, she would pass right through Chicago again.

September 19: Should I stop in Wheaton on my way to P.B.I.? I would love to—in fact, today my need seemed more acute than ever. O, what it would mean! But is it God’s way? Could things be the same? Should they be?

My father, hearing word of her coming, was an equal mix of hopeful anticipation and frustration.

September 20: I cannot explain the yearnings of my heart this morning. Cannot bring myself to study or to pray for any length of time. Oh, what a jumble of crosscurrented passions I am—a heart so deceitful it deceives itself. . . .

Possibility of seeing Betty again brings back wistful thoughts. How I hate myself for such weakness! Is not Christ enough, Jim? What need you more—a woman—in His place? Nay, God forbid. I shall have Thee, Lord Jesus. Thou didst buy me; now I must buy Thee.

But those five or six days proved liberating and refreshing to both of them. How good to be together! As often as he could tear himself away from the classroom and other responsibilities, they revisited all the sites of their most significant encounters. They walked and talked “of divine things, and things of home and family. Precious time.” Going out to the “same stone cross of fifteen weeks ago” was “beyond words,” she added.

September 22: But oh, how acutely aware I was of all that he needs that I could never offer. O to be holy! God, give me a heart like his.

September 23: I long to enter in more fully to the things which Jim seems to understand so well.

Maybe that’s why she dared to make a rather bold request. “Betty asked me last night if she could see this thing”—his now remarkably well-known journal—at the time simply an old notebook containing its first nine months of material. “I guess it’s all right,” he said.

Turns out, this entry of September 25 would be his last in that particular volume. But to my mother, it was like experiencing a brand-new beginning to their relationship. It opened a window into his being, making her spirit soar at his resemblance to the “Ideal Man” she’d envisioned in her prayers. “Today I have been admitted into some of the inner sanctum of his soul,” she wrote. And what she saw therein were “the yearnings of a man for God—the heart-cry of a naked soul.” She would be leaving soon—much too soon—but this stirring revelation of his heart she would never forget. When they said their second painful goodbye of the year, only two days hence, it would now contain a knowing that was almost as heavy as the unknown—a knowing made even more plain when on the following night he just came out and said . . .

“I love you.”

I should probably interpret for you the import of this statement, particularly as it related to my mother. In many cases (in most cases), the words “I love you” that pass between a smitten boy and girl can mean anything from an intense, excitable emotion to almost nothing at all. But she knew from her parents to expect to hear those special three words only when he was ready to follow it up with a proposal for marriage.

My father, though not flighty at all in the seriousness of his speech, did not feel the same restraint. Understandably, I’d say. He just said it impulsively, though not without believing it to his core. Still, the openness of his expression would have entered her ear with a more intense sensitivity than might have been received by most. She needed to be able to overlook what, to her thinking, those words should have meant, and simply be able to accept them for how he truly intended them. He was in love with her. And, oh, how ecstatically she must have felt it. But she understood full well that “neither of us can reconcile ourselves with the thought of marriage.” Too many noble, spiritual, kingdom-of-God-sized obstacles stood between their love for each other and their freedom to act on it.

They could agree they’d been wise to let the summer’s distance do its winnowing work. They could even agree, at this point, to begin writing letters to one another—“yes, God led us both separately to that decision,” she recorded. This alone would make their separate lives more bearable. It wasn’t much, but it was something—a thread of future communication, strung like a thin lifeline between them, even as she “caught a glimpse of him just as my taxi pulled out,” leaving her feeling “so incomplete now—my very soul seems torn in two. Why should it be thus? Why must I miss J. so?”

The hope and encouragement he’d penned into his journal earlier in the week were still there the morning he knew she’d be reading later in the day. That’s why he cast the following excerpt as if he was writing it as a letter to her.

September 25: Betty, we shall behold Him face-to-face, much the same as you and I have looked with longing on one another these last two nights—eye to eye—and He will tell us of His love in those looks as we have never known it here. . . .

He knows our love and is touched from a sympathy within, and I feel He holds us from each other that He might draw us to Himself. Let us pray individually, “Draw me.” It may be that then we will be allowed to say together, “We will run after Thee.”

Autumn

She hadn’t traveled more than a few hundred miles from Chicago by train before she dropped a postcard in the mail from a stop in St. Paul, Minnesota. Its inscription contained only two words:

“Miss you.”

Her next, another postcard from farther up the line in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, continued the thought with only one word:

“More.”

I think my father was a bit shocked by the effect of these messages on him. The thrill of her unexpected visit, as well as the unavoidable certainty that they would be parted from each other for the near future—these competing feelings that bombarded him appeared to mystify him.

He tried untangling them in his first letter to her, dated Saturday, October 2. Since it’s the first we have of his, I quote it in its entirety so you’ll get a clearer sense of his heart at the time.

Beloved,

It’s hard to pull out of the nebulae that has collected in thinking about this letter some clever point with which to impress you right off, so I won’t attempt it but proceed as if I had been writing in my present capacity for a good long time. Got your card Wednesday afternoon; clever . . . devastatingly so. I wish I had here a “feel-o-meter” to transcribe what has been going on inside for the last few days. It began with that word I think I spoke to you when we were together in chapel the last morning—“trembling.”

And what should a tuffy like me be trembling about? Three things: You, Me and God.

You: Remember, Betty, I have already upset one girl’s life to the extent that I know that if she ever misfires in her life for the Lord, her biggest excuse for doing so will be Jim Elliot. I tremble to think that my forwardness in declaring my feelings to you is actually affecting your entire life. I have an idea that it will be almost impossible to discern the Lord’s mind for you without your struggling through a maze of thought and feeling about me. You must know a bit of this already in putting in your application to SIM. And what if, in a real test, your feeling should overcome your faith? Whose then the responsibility? Not entirely yours. For this I fear, that I, stepping out of the path of the Lord for just a moment, should draw you with me and thus be accountable for the “loss” of two lives.

Me: I cannot for the life of me understand my heart. Somewhere down deep in the murky pools of consciousness, there is a great monster whom I will name “Want” for just now. This is the only constant thing about me—Desire. Much to Freud’s consternation, I cannot name it “Sex Urge,” for I have found that such will not glut the maw of the brute. He demands more of a varied diet, and one not so easily obtained as that either. I am very thankful that the Buddhist Nirvana is not the apex of the spiritual life or I should be the least spiritual of all men, if absolute satiation were the ideal. The brute is not the spirit nor the soul, least of all is he the body; rather, he is the ME that talks about these other things, argues about them, laughs and asks for more. He is Life. He is submerged down there a-lusting after something he can’t name. The nearest He can get to it is with the word God. And God feeds him when I allow it. Silly, isn’t it? For who, then, am “I”?

Well, I didn’t intend that this should run into metaphysics, but what I want to say is that there is within a hunger after God, given of God, filled by God. I can only be happy when I am conscious that He is doing what He wills to do within. What makes me tremble is that I might allow something else (Betty Howard, for instance) to take the place that my God should have. Now something tells me that I can maybe have them both, as both you and Billy have ministered to me lately. [Bill Cathers was a mutual friend of my parents.] I am not averse to this, understand, I only tremble that I should think wrongly in supposing that you are one of the ways in which God intends to come in.

God: or, better, the Lord Jesus. I tremble lest I should in any way offend my Eternal Lover. And whatever passes between us let us take note of this: all shall be revoked at His command. I am such a great, cumbersome boor to be “Dove-driven.” Oh, how delicate are the tuggings of my Beloved, and how calloused my responses. Above all else, I will that He might find in me the travail of His soul and be satisfied. But this is a hard thing when I speak to you, for somehow the pleasing Him and the getting you are in conflict. I don’t pretend to explain it; I can only describe what I feel, and that not very adequately.

Since you left, it has been as if a film has been over my soul. My genuine fervor in prayer was gone for two days—too much rubble so that I couldn’t get to building the wall. (See Neh. 4:10 for this.) Notice, it was not the outward opposers that hindered the work so much as the inward clutter. Not ”destruction” from outside forces so much as “decay” within. But the proof of God’s hand comes in the affirmative answer to Sanballat’s mocking in verse 2: “Will they revive the stones out of the heaps of rubbish which are burned?” The zealous Jews did. Apply this to us and imagine a little while. Are we willing to build with a trowel in one hand while our other hand grasps the sword? The building (God’s work) must go on, and if there is to be battle as we build, very well, let us strengthen the “lower places” (v. 13). And I say to you the words of Nehemiah to the nobles: “The work is great . . . we are separated . . . God shall fight for us.”

I must confess to you, Betty, that I have had regrets about going even as far as we did in our physical contact, and that was very little as most judge. We must guard against this if we are ever together again, for it gave me a whetted appetite for your body that I have found to be “rubble” in getting to the work. You must be hard on me in this. I know we do not have the same mind or makeup, and I feel that I need more of yours than you need of mine. Nietzsche has a word for us here: “One must discontinue being feasted upon when one tasteth best; that is known by all who want to be long loved.” Do you get what he means by this: “For too long hath there been a slave and a tyrant concealed in woman. On that account woman is not capable of friendship: she knoweth only love.” This is what I found in Billy, neither a worshipper (though he loved me) nor an overlord (though he was most esteemed). We met as equal dogs at the feet of the Omnipotent. I would have it this way with you and me. Fear not to hurt me with the Living Sword; yea, strike to this purpose. Be more than a lover; be a friend. We spoke of this at the moon-rising tryst. “As I have loved you . . .” Remember?

But how shall I praise the Lord for removing the film this very morning? Confession is good for the soul; it was imperative for mine this morning. I cast it all upon him, and John’s truth about “cleansing from all sin” was very precious. Oh, how He sweetly “preached peace” to one that was far off (Eph. 2:13, 17). And Heb. 10:16–22 lived afresh. What a power is in that word! Nearness was the theme of my song, and the thoughts seem well expressed in 136, Little Flock (LF from now on). And LF 10, as well. Oh, Bets, let us “undistracted be” in our following.

Just to show you what a poor journalist I am, I will quote my time in composition of this letter: two hours. Part of it is due to typing, I’m sure!

Have you been delivered after the fashion of Ps. 116:8?

Tenderly, Jim

It was in this spirit that their letter writing commenced at a rapid pace. Soon after his first one arrived, she spent two hours the next evening composing her own. In some of these early letters, you can tell they were sort of feeling each other out, trying to navigate what to them was untried territory. Both were accustomed to writing frequent letters as a common practice—home to parents and family, away to grown siblings, relatives, and friends. But this kind of writing was new and different, drawing on a heart muscle that wasn’t yet as well exercised or fully developed.

Part of the adjustment they were experiencing was the amount of time each letter required to write. My mother, noting the hours it took to collect her thoughts to him on paper, realized the two of them couldn’t sustain this pace interminably (“We cannot write often at that rate!”) and keep up their studies and other responsibilities. Writing, she said, was “a difficult task, in many ways, though joyous.”

Example of my mother’s five-year diary. Greek writing in the 1948 entry translates to the text of Philippians 1:21—“For me, to live is Christ.”

Another contributing struggle was the acute effort needed to read between the lines, to interpret nuance and intention, a skill that other letters from other people didn’t as often elicit. “I sense somehow a little depression in your last,” my father once commented, “as I suppose you have felt in one or two of my previous ones.” In another instance, he apologized for captions he’d inscribed on photos he’d enclosed to her, saying, “I think you misunderstood a couple. . . . I used those in utter simplicity and with not the least intention of low connotation—you must believe me.”

Some of it, too, as they got further along, came from learning how to incorporate this new, added facet of their lives into the whole of what God was daily working to accomplish in their individual hearts. “Often I have a desire to write,” my mother said in her diary, “but limit myself to once every eight or nine days,” believing that in exercising measured restraint, “we will be glad of every discipline we learned, though it is not at all easy now.” She was discovering, she said, in lieu of constant writing, that “intercession is the highest expression of love—it is pure giving. Teach me such love, dear Lord.”

As his October 2 letter had said, they saw reason to begin their budding correspondence on a “trembling” note, which I think is a wise word for young men and women in love to heed. The typical alternative, both then as now—the silly, superficial, even irreverent flippancy in a couple’s speech and communication—only reveals how little of lasting worth they are investing or expecting.

From the beginning, my parents treated their relationship seriously. They viewed each other as a special friend to encourage, counsel, and pray for, as well as to challenge, both lovingly and directly, to seek ever harder after Christ. They didn’t see the point of squandering the attraction they felt for each other if it wasn’t helping them bring out each of their absolute bests. “Otherwise, it is nothing short of a waste of time,” my mother wrote. There was “no future in it,” she said, “except eternally.” Or as my father wrote to one of his friends, “We prayed that God would give me tenderness, and He replied by giving me Betty.”

Again, her letters are missing from this period. All I have are her personal journal and diary. They speak of the joys she was experiencing in fellowship with Christ and in the fine teaching she was receiving. I hear in them as her daughter the gracious, grateful, submissive hope she ruggedly maintained in God’s faithfulness and goodness. But she tended to be harder on herself in private writing than reality would probably have revealed. For this reason, my father’s letters provide the more accurate window on the gems they were likely sharing with one another during this time.

October 19

You are His particular treasure, Betty—something He paid for at a terrific cost to His own person. . . . He is bound to display you to principalities and powers as a trophy of His searching. For that eternal display-day, He is making sure you are the best possible piece He can make of you—and, glory to His name, He will perform it!

Meanwhile, He keeps you for Himself, hidden away, forming you in secret ways that you don’t understand. Much the same as I keep your letters, laid flat and secret in my drawer at hand to scan when I want to feel loved, so He keeps the pious for Himself. . . . Christ loves, even though seeing, hating, and condemning our sin. He shows us how much He hates it by an enormous sacrifice, and then continues to love when we are smitten with guilt.

This is not how we love ourselves. Oh, we say we don’t like us very well, but we put up with ourselves. This is the old economy—getting along with “covering up” the sin (animal sacrifice only covered) until the sacrifice of Christ does away with it.

I have asked you to be a friend of this sort—mercilessly wrenching out my pet darlings which I cannot see as idols, and then, seeing me sad at bereavement, still love the heart that can cherish the memory of such things. This is love of another sort than we humans experience.

October 24

Betty, my dearest sister, stop struggling and believe! The confidence of Phil. 1:6 assuages all doubt for me just now—He cannot fail us. Oh, He may lead us oceans apart (and we can trust Him for that, too, can we not?), but are we so childish (I do not say child-like) as to think a God who would scheme a Jesus-plan would lead poor pilgrims into situations they could not bear? Dost thou believe that God doth answer prayers, my heart? Yea, I believe. Then will He not most assuredly answer that frequent cry of thine, “Lord, lead me.”. . .

Stop this nonsense of your “making it difficult” for me—you have made it scores of times more wonderful—all praise to His grace in you. God is answering your prayers for me, so thank Him in those early morning wakings as you think of me. He will accomplish His own purpose in all our ways. Believe, Bets? I know you do.

Many know my father’s now famous quote, paraphrasing Matthew 10:39: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.” However, my absolute favorite entry from his journal comes from a year earlier, back here in 1948. It’s one that most people have never heard, but to me it exemplifies his sincere prayer to be obedient, no matter the cost.

October 28: Prayed a strange prayer today. I covenanted with my Father that He would do either of two things—either glorify Himself to the utmost in me, or slay me. By His grace I shall not have His second best. He heard me, I believe, so that now I have nothing to look forward to but a life of sacrificial sonship (that’s how my Savior was glorified, my soul) or heaven soon. Perhaps tomorrow. What a prospect!

Didn’t God answer that prayer in both ways? Did He not bring much glory to Himself by my father’s life as well as in his tragic death? My dad lived out his own code: “Wherever you are, be all there. Live to the hilt every situation you believe to be the will of God.” And at this point in each of my parents’ journeys, the will of God and His divine directives for their next step were precisely what they were seeking to discern. To which part of the globe was He leading them?

My mother, having felt adequate assurance to make application in early October to SIM, one of the missionary sending agencies, was sensing a calling toward Africa. My father, in one of his October letters, mentioned spending “three hours today with a missionary to the jungle Indians of Peru,” a man who was “doing the type of work I would like to think of doing. . . . I would pray that I might be in S. America a year from today.” For now, though, they each labored faithfully at their respective locations, prayerfully navigating the future, regardless of whether it might be alone or together. “It is as if two pilgrims see the fork in the road ahead,” my mother said, “and walk.”

My mother’s situation in Canada was obviously the more unfamiliar to manage than my dad’s at Wheaton. Yes, she was blessed to be rooming with a college friend, Phyl Gibson (who would eventually become engaged and married to her brother Dave). But the strict schedule the school leadership imposed on students during that era left it “very difficult to find proper time to meet the Lord alone. We are given only a half hour before breakfast, and of course Phyl is in the room then.” It was her “eighth year of dormitory life,” she calculated, and perhaps the hunger for being more in control of her time and priorities was wearing on her. It had reached the point of becoming exasperating. “The ‘social’ set-up” at PBI, for example, “seems to me somewhat overdone,” she wrote in her diary.

November 5: It is perhaps good to have a certain amount of segregation, but it becomes an unnecessary strain at times to have to avoid walking past a man, etc.! So much here is judged by outward appearance. I wonder if God is “annoyed” at trivialities.

November 15: One of the things that makes it difficult here is that the schedule is positively adamant. Not one minute of the day can be called one’s own. We have to do everything exactly at the appointed moment, and there is no possibility whatsoever of readjusting one’s day to fit the time. This is a situation most trying for me.

Or to use another of her words from this diary posting—“tribulation.”

In addition, the regular correspondence she was keeping with my father was just barely above the line of what the school considered appropriate behavior. A female classmate, who apparently had been called to account for the letters she too was sending and receiving from a young man at Wheaton, tried explaining to a woman in the administration that the two of them had met over the summer and had recently started writing. According to all accounts, my mother’s friend was told “this is forbidden, even during summer, for those who meet after they come to P.B.I.—I do not understand it.”

But for my parents, the letter-writing continued between them throughout this most interesting, enlightening autumn—back and forth, happily and with difficulty. As my father summarized the process:

November 20

Letter writing is such a heartless method of communicating. First, one has difficulty putting into words what he really feels—then he must worry for fear what is written is misunderstood—and that for a good long time, since he cannot erase once the post-box has banged shut, and then he must wait—and that is worst of all.

Being so far off the beaten path up there in Alberta muted my mother’s expectations of an arriving letter somewhat. The train that delivered the mail to PBI only ran on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. My dad, however, spoke of “unreasonableness in my waiting—going to the box three or four times extra a day—even on days when I have no right to expect it.” The anticipation was almost maddening. “Waiting word Thursday would surely bring something. No? Then Friday afternoon for certain. Well, Saturday cannot help bear fruit. (Monday is miles away . . .)”

Then when it does come—the first hurried reading (in which you get practically nothing) and then the utter woe of finding it so short, then the slow, careful going over it, reading everything possible into every syllable—yes, I know, the gentle rebukes, the hard little things sometimes—but “to the hungry soul even the bitter is sweet.”

My father, reading letters at the college post office.

You would have laughed to see me read yours yesterday. I save your letters till last (though not till evening by a long shot), skim the Record [the campus newspaper], race through the more commonplace mail, then with a mind free to soar, I huddle somewhere to exercise anxious eyes over your fine hand—wishing I could answer that sentence right now as the thoughts pour fresh over me, or add a verse to this idea here. But half a continent and fountain pen ban the aspirations, so things aren’t as real now as they were twenty-four hours ago.

After the second reading, I sprawled in the bed to editorialize and felt all the feelings rush to my throat, leaving the pit of my stomach empty and weak, with little convulsive sobs pushing at my belt-line in jerky, irrational tempo. No tears—just a quiet, sinking agony, as if crushed by a vacuum. I cannot tell you how I felt, but this in no way reduces the feeling.

Oh, Betty, what is it makes me experience such tenderness toward you? And if your words affected me so, what would your presence have done?

In truth, her presence could be almost too real sometimes—a tangible result provided by another of those unique advantages of written correspondence, as opposed to phone and email messages. Scented letters!

Your letter exudes nostalgia with every breath of thought—perfume, I guess it is—which seems so familiar just now. It nearly embarrassed me in Fisher Library when I was reading it this morning—and I am not easily embarrassed!

While there was indeed a hint of Tweed on the letters (Tweed was the name of a perfume she wore for years!), the true aroma came from the sincerity of their faith, the fullness of their surrender to Christ, the free sharing of deep truths unearthed in their study and meditations, and—to me—the added perspectives it provides on their legacies and personas. I see her vulnerability and questioning, along with her depth of knowledge, character, and conviction. I see his gentler, softer side, along with his brash, ever-onward exuberance and candor. Amid their own distinct yet corresponding challenges, they provided for each other an inspiring interchange of genuine friendship, empathetic understanding, and biblical perspective.

Not all of it was quite so reassuring. There was the time, for instance, when he wondered “if you were telling the truth in speaking of the thirst God gave for Himself while you were with me. I didn’t feel aware of much piety those nights—far more aware of something else.” Then this stinger of a statement: “If He actually made you hungry for Himself those times, I must say—He is indeed a miracle working God.”

I can just see the expression on her face when she was reading that!

Still, for the most part, she found it refreshing to be dealing with someone who was so “transparently honest,” as further evidenced in this next letter from my dad:

December 9

If Betty Howard is a block of ice, Jim Elliot is a hunk of marble. Ice melts ultimately; dissolution in stone is a bit more slow. I know a little something of this yearning for gentle tenderness, dear sister. Still the yearning is more real than the tenderness.

At the midnight-noon of Calvary, the final cry of the Man nobody knows split solid stones. But I have heard that cry—yea, preached it, awed others with it, but my own heart remains in one piece—my eyelids, iron. Not to be moved at the realization of Calvary love is to have a heart more obdurate than those stones—but still I am not moved.

What lovely writing.

Those are what I call real love letters.

As the hard frosts and snowfalls of December arrived, so did the memories and recollections of what had happened only a year before: Christmas together at Birdsong, the affectionate name given to the Howard home in western New Jersey.

“Yes, I have recalled several times this week last Xmas time,” he wrote, specifically mentioning a night of sledding in nearby Philadelphia.

December 22

We called each other brother and sister every time we’d cross paths—and I recall aching to get you alone, though I’m sure I don’t know what I would have done or said had such an occasion arisen. It doesn’t take vacation to recall late sessions in the kitchen and front room of Birdsong.

This Christmas, however, would be markedly different. Neither would be going home at all—to their own or the other’s. “It will seem somewhat new to spend Christmas alone,” my mother wrote. “At H.D.A. there was much fellowship and celebration, and of course I went home during all four Wheaton years. Wonder where Jim will be spending his vacation?”

If he’d wanted, he could have spent it at Birdsong again. My grandfather, Philip E. Howard, on campus for trustee meetings at Wheaton in late October, had met Dave and my father for breakfast a couple of times and extended the repeat invitation. He might have taken him up on it, too, had it not required travel money he didn’t have, and had it not been for the InterVarsity convention (the first of what’s become a once-every-three-years gathering, now called Urbana), scheduled to begin Monday, December 27. It was a rich opportunity for high school and college young adults to hear missionary speakers and possibly hear God’s call to the mission field.

My other grandparents in Oregon invited my mother to spend Christmas at their home too, had it been feasible. When she first heard of it in my father’s letter of November 1—“Something else: Mom wonders if you could go to Portland for Xmas”—he was also planning on being there himself for his brother Bert’s wedding, an event which ended up being postponed into January. Two weeks later, even her own mother wrote asking why she hadn’t accepted the invitation. “That would surely seem strange if I should, for he was at our house last Christmas. Little did I know then of his feeling.”

She did, however, receive a letter from Mrs. Elliot on December 1. “I was really surprised—five pages, telling me about the family, her interest in me, and inviting me to come to Portland for Christmas vacation, which of course I cannot do for lack of time, money, etc.” My father understood but was disappointed. “I had pictured you in all sorts of places at home—and even yet wonder if you might not be able to route home that way in April.” Maybe so.

In the end, though, she spent a quiet Christmas on the prairies, “alone with God. Yet not alone at all, in comparison with the loneliness I may be called upon to face in some little missionary hut far afield.”

She expanded on these sober thoughts in her larger journal:

December 25: I am alone, in the evening of a strange Christmas Day. My heart seems to be full of unnamed yearnings mingled with praise and at the same time an aching void. How to describe it? Someone in the opposite dormitory is playing “Jesus, Keep Me Near the Cross.” [She and I would later sing this song often when I went to bed.] It strikes home. For shadowing that joy to the world which the incarnation brought was the inexorable, eternal purpose of Bethlehem—Calvary. Yea, Love is strong as death, His Love led to nothing else.

The world goes on. Nearly 2000 years of hollow gladness, pitiable shells of joy, for those who at this season know nothing of its Christ. And we who know Him—how much do we understand? How much do we live our thanks for God’s unspeakable gift? O, if we could know His price! The world is weary—they look and long for some “sunrise,” some faint ray of truth. Even all creation groans for His appearing. What will it be when He returns?

O, to see Thee, Beloved—make haste and be Thou like to a roe or a young hart upon the mountains of spices. . . . Accept my grateful thanksgiving, blessed Lord, for meeting me on this, so especially Thy day. Far on the barren prairies I have spoken with Thee, so near, so dear to me. Be Thou ever more so. Amen.

And so ends 1948, with my mother at PBI and my father in Wheaton. Her quiet Christmas, characterized by an “aching void” both for family and for him, made her cry out to God for understanding and peace on “the last day of a very wonderful crisis year in my life.” Meanwhile, my dad’s continual longing for the pleased look of his Master, as well as his longing to hear and see more of my mother, kept a thread of conflict running through his thoughts on the future. Yet his thirst to remain staunchly at the Lord’s business overcame all.

December 27

What a year, eh? Remember last New Year’s Eve? I can’t say I recall all the details—maybe you can help me in your next. Seems like last month, though, instead of last year.

If what happens in ’49 is as momentous and unexpected as what ’48 held for us, we shall look back with ogle-eyed wonder a year from now—half-scared, half-eager to see what ’50 will hold. Whatever it is, the confidence of knowing the will of the Most High brings great rest of heart.

And, as they would come to know well, more waiting. More questioning.

I sought song inside

But found a heart of brick unused to singing,

And the words came very slow.

It seemed as if the gentle

Pressure of the Father’s finger

Had caused a slight crevasse midst all the hardness,

And there, down deep, there bubbled up a quiet spring.

But still no song,

Just risings which never reached above the surface.

And though there was no singing, somehow there was a

Harmony not often heard among clattering temporalities.

Love was the keynote of the deep spring’s song.

A major key that lent fullness to the pool.

Peace and joy chimed softly,

And other little recesses opened in the hardness,

And gentleness, born of the fractures of sorrow,

Flowed unhindered to fill the rising pool.

And as the music played, the brick dissolved,

And my soul was happy,

Though there were still no words.

Jim Elliot

Wheels carried her into silence

Out of my reach.

I feared lest darkness, closing round us

Might gain our souls,

And we lose sight

Of real things.

But nay, the sun that ruled our days

Has lit the moon to rule our night.

Jim Elliot

Perhaps some future day, Lord, Thy strong hand

Will lead me to the place where I must stand

Utterly alone.

Alone, O gracious Lover, but for Thee!

I shall be satisfied if I can see

Jesus only.

I do not know Thy plan for years to come;

My spirit finds in Thee its perfect home,

Sufficiency.

Lord, all my desire is before Thee now.

Lead on, no matter where, no matter how—

I trust in Thee.

Elisabeth Howard

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