1949 Love’s Questioning

1949 Love’s Questioning

Love’s Questioning

A year that would lead to more questions, concerning both their future missionary work as well as the future of their relationship, at least began with some settled answers—each of which would ultimately come to pass.

“The Lord has done what I asked Him to do for me this week,” said my father’s note of December 27. It was hand-delivered to my mother in January by way of a female classmate who’d attended the same missions conference in Champaign where my father had been.

I wanted primarily a peace about going to Peru—or at least into pioneer Indian work—and as I analyze my feelings now, I feel quite at ease about saying that tribes work in South American jungles is the general direction of my missionary purpose. Also, I feel quite certain about Wycliffe—though I don’t know yet whether it will be next summer or not.

It would actually be the next. Summer 1950. (Wycliffe, of course, meant the Summer Institute of Linguistics program in Norman, Oklahoma, the same ten-week intensive language study that my mother attended the summer of ’48.)

But there was yet another answer he wanted to share—“one more,” he said, “and this paragraph will end”—though he would soon admit he wrote of it far too carelessly. You might even say heartlessly. Simply this:

I am quite confident that God wants me to begin jungle work, single. Those are some good-sized issues to get settled finally in a week, but just now I feel quite happy about all three.

Happy?

She entrusted an immediate response to her daily diary. “How I praise God for this. We both prayed much for this conference, and God met him!” I have no doubt in my mind, knowing my mother, that she meant every word of that praise. And I’m struck by the contrast between her heart and mine. Perhaps you are too. Whenever I have a hard time understanding a decision made by someone I love, I often demand logic and justifications. How different her response from those of us who would likely have cried out for an immediate and lengthy explanation! She kept her mouth closed for a long while, not giving any kind of written reaction to him during what my father termed “nearly a three-week siege of silence.”

But underneath, the conflicting heart continued. A day after hearing of how definite he now considered his plans, her inevitable feelings (and questions) began leaking out.

January 5: A letter came yesterday which forces me to face the Cross anew. I stand now in darkness—the only glimmer of vision into the future is the faint apprehension of a road I do not care to tread. But what have I to which I would cling? Nothing, Lord, nothing. . . .

I guess I should be unaffected by the news received yesterday. After all, was it a surprise? Surely not. Surely it is the way we expected God to lead. Somehow I feel strangely more cast wholly upon Him. Was I not fully trusting before? . . . I had asked earnestly for faith. How else could I have expected to learn it? “I’d rather walk in the dark with God than go alone in the light.”

In her intellect she wholly believed in God’s sovereign control. She was also not surprised by the likelihood of God’s leading my dad this direction. He had never shied away from speaking quite consistently along these lines, even when my mother’s parents expressed worry that he was somewhat leading her on, knowing full well his conviction about remaining both single-minded and single-status.

But her heart did vacillate. She knew of her love for him; she knew of his love for her. Even in an intervening letter that came from my dad, he spoke of her love as “a thing so undeserved.”

January 3

Oh, Betty, you cannot know me and still desire me. None of us knows each other as we ought, as we are, but I suppose it is well or I would be very lonely. Gripped today with a sense of my unworthiness—of grace, of my family, and of you. How can I call you such things as I do in my prayers and guilty thoughts—how dare I presume?

In his next letter, he sought to define their relationship and declare his feelings even further.

January 8

Let me tell you a story. When I returned from Birdsong last January, I had fallen—or grown very much in attachment to the girl you know better than anyone else. Because of heart-searching I had had regarding God’s use of those who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom’s sake, I determined that none should know of my affinities with that girl—even though it was evident we should be much together. I can remember confessing to the Lord what I called “my love for her” and striving daily to forget and swallow hard, though I was aware that I allowed myself liberties one who is earnest about “forgetting” should not enjoy.

In those days of decision to keep silence, it seemed as if I had sealed the course for my whole life—and I must confess, I felt as if I were somewhat of a martyr. There came to me this song:

Why should I droop in sorrow? Thou art ever by my side!Why, trembling, dread the morrow? What ill can e’er betide?If I my cross have taken, ’tis but to follow Thee.If I scorned, despised, forsaken, naught severs me from Thee! (Little Flock hymnbook #16)

And in my hymnbook, there is a blue line drawn with the date as I have indicated. Dearest Betty, I charge you in the name of our Unfailing Friend, do away once and for all with your waverings, bewilderment, and wonder! You have bargained for a cross. Overcome anything in the confidence of your union with Him, so that contemplating trials, enduring persecution, and past all these you may know the blessings of the “joy set before.”

“We are the sheep of His pasture. Enter into His gates with thanksgiving and into His courts with praise.” And what are sheep doing going into the gate? What is their purpose inside those courts—to bleat melodies and enjoy the company of the flock? No—those sheep were destined for the altar. Their pasture feeding had been for one purpose—to test them and fatten them for bloody sacrifice. Give Him thanks, then, that you have been counted worthy of His altars, and enter into the work with praise.

She found these admissions from him “a new cause for wondering—he expressed things he had not said before.” Still, in light of the recent pronouncements about his future plans, “I cannot help but wonder,” she said, “what right we have to write at all. Yet I feel no compunction to cease, though I am willing.” Her only certainty in the matter was the assurance to ask, “Lord, rule my will and affections.” As long as she devotedly maintained this point of surrender, she knew everything was sure of working toward God’s desired ends.

When she finally did write back, expressing her reaction to the decisions he said he’d made, my father appeared dumbfounded—if not by what he had said, surely by the way he had said it.

January 17: Stung with a regret that almost brings me to sobbing as I received Betty’s letter of the twelfth. I wrote carelessly that I felt God was leading me singly to the field, and it has touched her far more deeply than I supposed.

O God, how can she desire me? Have I played the part so well that she actually thinks me worthy of woman’s love? I tremble, Lord, at what surprises she shall know when all secret thoughts of men shall be manifest. Perhaps then she will believe that I am not worth her while.

I’d love to have the actual letter she sent him, the one from January 12 to which he referred. I can only assume it spoke openly of her trust in God’s good purposes, but also (based on a line of hers he repeated back) of what she termed “vague bewilderment.”

January 18

Had I known how my casual statement of going singly to the field would affect you, I seriously doubt I would have been so casual. And even now I wonder if I should put it more softly. My decision was based on seeing a man from central Brazilian jungles who has done a work comparable to the sort I feel exercised for and hearing him tell of the impossibility of marriage in this particular context. That was all—no voices, no scripture, just the settled peace of decision which often comes to the exercised soul.

I will not say God is leading me to a life of celibacy. I only know what I need to know for now—and that is that the Lord does not want me seeking a wife until I have His definite sign. In reality, Bets, that was our understanding when we talked in front of the North Hall after the Lagoon episode.

Oh, I wish you were here sitting on my bed so that I could talk sensibly to you—this sounds so harsh. Betty, if you only knew. I cannot say it as I want to.

Perhaps that’s why he couldn’t keep himself from continuing to try. As early as the next day, he was already writing her again.

January 19

Had a talk with Dave about you today. . . . He said he had wondered how you would take my “decision” to go to the field unmarried, and when I told him I felt it had upset you, he replied, “I doubt if she will think it worthwhile to keep up a casual, pointless correspondence. Betty loves you.”

I don’t think I’ve ever doubted that last, but you never had told me in so many words, and it startled me coming so bluntly from him. Betty, if last night’s letter connoted anything different than what I said in this regard about my feeling for you that night at the Lagoon, please discount the letter.

I came home today earnest about finding out my own soul in this matter. Do I really love her, or is this to be a “casual, pointless correspondence”? As honestly as I could, I faced it, and it is answered. I do, and it can never be casual. As to the “point” or end of our corresponding, I have no revelation from God, but this I am settled on: He has led us together in writing, and I have no sign that His will is anything else than that we continue. If such a course leads ultimately to a more bitter renunciation than withdrawal just now should mean, the more bitter way is to be God’s way. Remember Marah.

What they shared together, even knowing the strong possibility they would spend their lifetimes apart, was more than worth it, he said.

I would have it no other way, were I to choose again, as I did last May 30, whether or not to tell you my feelings, seeing all the future months of loneliness and struggle. I say I would not have it otherwise even if I never saw you again.

So there you have it—the depth of his love, the depth of his trust. Perhaps he still wasn’t sure if he’d succeeded in being able to “say it as I want to,” but his heart had come shining through, and my mother received it as bright encouragement. It landed on her heart with refreshing peace and confidence. She said in a series of diary entries:

January 22: Two letters from Jim tonight, to my great surprise, for he has finals at this time, and I had not expected to hear, though it had been over two weeks. They were beautiful letters. He has been led the very same way I have. God has given me much peace about our correspondence, as well as confidence in His lovingkindness to do what is better for us than we can know.

January 23: I have never heretofore had such peace about my relationship with Jim—somehow those letters of yesterday left me inexplicably calm and glad, when they should have made things the more difficult perhaps. O, how I thank the Lord for such a one—He only knows how undeserving I am of him.

January 25: Though my manifold questions are not answered, they have ceased, and when I remember him, there is greater thanksgiving than ever before for what he has done for me and all he means to me now. If our renunciation must come and must therefore be the more bitter because of the continual growth of our friendship, that is God’s way. Remember Marah.

My father (in center, on table) with the Foreign Mission Fellowship group at Wheaton.

We can almost feel the sigh of relief from them. God led them both so similarly, one step at a time, each of them convinced they loved each other, wanting to do only what He would want from them. Their correspondence was not just casual; they believed He had a purpose for the true fellowship they shared with each other.

The average person in this situation would find it tempting to talk more specifically of marriage. Young people, my mother told me, often think they need to discuss every issue thoroughly. But it simply isn’t necessary, and it wasn’t necessary for my parents. The most important thing is to know Who’s in charge. This was their foremost desire, to be obedient to the Captain of their salvation.

Two important things are worth mentioning at this point concerning their deep hunger for knowing the will of God, both in specific matters as well as in general principles for life.

First, his comment about waiting for a “definite sign” was indicative of their attitude in prayer and their sensitivity in all things spiritual. They expected God’s Spirit to show them what to do and when to do it. In everything.

Here in January 1949, for example, my mother found herself wrestling with another substantial decision. Having not been able to make an introductory trip to meet my father’s family in Portland during the Christmas holiday, he’d encouraged her to consider routing her return trip home through Oregon later in the year. As usual, she sought God’s will only.

January 27: Yesterday as I prayed about going to Portland, I almost asked that a little money be sent tomorrow to be for a sign. Knowing that I had not yet fully come to the place of “crucified desire” and not feeling sure it might be God’s will for me to go, I refrained from asking.

But A.C. [one of my parents’ favorite writers, Amy Carmichael] speaks of our Lord’s hearing our wishes, sometimes, and lovingly giving the thing wished for. Tonight $1 came from Aunt Anne—first time in my life.

What a blessed encouragement! For if going to visit the Elliots was truly the will of God, He would surely provide the funds for it, right?—just as He would provide answers for all the other questions she faced. So on Sunday, January 30, she asked God for another sign: “Asked that He would send money for trip home before folks do.”

Imagine what arrived on Monday:

January 31: This evening word came from Mother that she will finance a trip home via Portland and California.

Admittedly, the fact that the money came from her mother “perplexed” her a bit, she said, since she’d asked God that it would arrive from someone else besides her parents. Yet here again, He answers according to His good pleasure and was merciful in His provision, no matter the source.

I think His kindness toward her childlike prayer is so tender. “Lord, I am but a little child,” she wrote at the time, “and know not how to go out or come in.” She was somewhat hesitant to ask something so temporal of Him because she was afraid her own fleshly desire to be with my dad might outweigh her overriding prayer about constantly dying to self. But nothing outweighed being in moment-by-moment alignment with God and His purposes.

This reminds me of a principle that both Brother Lawrence and Fénelon taught which comforted her many years later—how having the intent alone to know and do God’s will is pleasing to the Father, and He honors those who come to Him as a little child wanting to follow His bidding. He knows how much we fail, just as He knows our forgetfulness, but He’s given us His promised Holy Spirit to empower us to seek and do His will.

This call to be still and wait on Him for guidance was very real in my parents’ hearts, and I’m thankful for their example of spending at least an hour each day (often more) doing nothing else. Every letter and journal entry of theirs reveals this longing to be serious about prayer and sincerely seek God’s face. Therefore, I’m not surprised at all to read of my father’s continual watching for some kind of confirmation or direction before feeling free to pursue marriage.

In fact, this observation leads to my second point, more general in nature: their devotion to Scripture. They focused on Scripture always, of course, but the opportunity for my father to travel home at the end of January for his brother Bert’s wedding reinvigorated his sense of dependence on and confidence in the Word.

Much of this rededication came from spending some rich, significant time with his father (my grandfather, Fred Elliot) during those brief days, focusing on the subject of yielding to God’s will. His dad inspired and led him in all knowledge of Scripture, and it was certainly the case in this instance. Here’s how he related these parental lessons in a letter sent to my mother from Portland.

February 1

Had a discussion with Dad last night on the fullness of the Spirit. He says mere “yielding” is insufficient. Plenty of those who have presented themselves are not filled, because both filling and consecration are lifelong processes which involve knowledge. I must know what God’s will is before I can submit to it.

Thus, progressively as the soul is enlightened in the Word (Dad’s stress is here), he comes to know what is demanded of him and can choose. Submission without a clear definition of what one submits to is empty mockery and accounts for so many dissatisfied, yielded souls. All filling is conditioned by the Word.

“By the Word.” If I could express my one hope for compiling this book, my prayer is that these entries of theirs would call us to search faithfully for God in His Word. And upon discovering His unchanging, faithful, merciful, and loving character, I pray we would be more fully moved in obedience to Him that we too might leave a lasting legacy of faith as my parents did.

But such a life of faith is not without its struggles, as my mother wrote in her diary one day in February: “Today I found severe temptation (and I yielded) to laxity in prayer and Bible study. Oh, I am conscious more than ever of my desperate need to know the Word—my only offensive weapon—but how very difficult it is for me to concentrate upon that only and wait upon God.”

Yet it was their mutual love for God and for each other as expressed in their letters that kept them challenged in their devotion to the Word. In the following letter from my dad we see a mingling of his love for the Bible, as well as his love for “a girl” who drank from it often!

February 7

My day has been one of genuine joy. Woke this morning to Jeremiah 33 and this promise, “The days come when I shall perform that good word which I have spoken.”. . . And tonight from Psalm 87, “All my springs are in thee.” (You used that verse in Ancient History devotions last year. Remember? I do, for I was watching for a girl who had found such a Source.)

Not long afterward she remarked in her diary:

February 21: Seven pages from J. tonight. It never ceases to amaze—he spoke of how he was impressed with the phrase “Quicken me according to Thy word” in Psalm 119. That is the very phrase which has run in my mind for several days! We both have been studying the psalms, unknown to the other.

Here is his response to her letter, in which she must have shared her delight that they were both thinking along the same lines spiritually:

February 22

Yes, we were both studying Psalm 119 last week. . . . “Quicken me according to Thy word” occurs several times and seems to be about what Dad said of powerful life in the Spirit. “Quickening” can only come from the Spirit (Jn. 6:63; 1 Cor. 15:45) and that according to the Word.

Now I’ve known in my own experience a quickening that is as the false fire of Nadab and Abihu—that which does not come as a direct commandment from the Lord (Lev. 10:1). . . . Often I’ve been possessed of a fiery idea which I’ve preached with impassioned force but which did not profit because it was sparked by fire other than the Word gives. It is all well and good to tell others to abide in Christ—but remember Christ did not leave it in that flowery generality. “Abide in Me, and My words abide in you . . . if you keep My commandments ye shall abide.”

So then, Bets, be not discouraged if you do not feel full power—that comes when the entire counsel of God’s will has dominated us for a lifetime. “Those that be planted . . . shall still bring forth fruit in old age” (Ps. 92:13–14).

How differently young men and women’s relationships would grow if the Word of God, rather than changing emotion, were their source for guidance and godliness in an ever-shifting culture. My parents saw God’s Word as the North Star, fixed and always pointing the way to freedom and joy.

Sometime during this period of late winter, my mother received a letter from home, in which her mother shared “some of her thoughts re: Jim and I. She feels strongly that I should confess my love for him, and that we should see more of one another.” I can imagine for most college-age singles, such a timely and desirable word coming unsolicited from an authority source, as from a parent, would have rung with unquestioned confirmation. It would have seemed like God’s outright endorsement and permission to act on it. And yet she laid it immediately before the searchlight of the Word, particularly before some passages from Philippians 3, which had been the focus of her previous day’s reading from Amy Carmichael’s Though the Mountains Shake.

February 28: I besought the Lord to know whither my friendship with Jim was really “conformable unto His death” [verse 10] . . . My prayer was that at any cost God would teach us how the Cross applies here. He teaches through His Word, so I read on in the passage quoted (Phil. 3).

The principle of death and resurrection is brought out. This gave new light. And then, to my question, “Lord, have we so much as begun to know the Cross? How long must it be, if not, that we go on in an uncrucified relationship? Was last summer’s experience of any profit?” came the gentle answer: “Not as though I had already attained . . . the one thing I do . . .” [from verses 12–13].

“Lord, have I missed Thy signs anywhere? Has my imagination deceived me? I do most surely long to do Thy will.” [Her answer, from verse 15]—“Let us therefore, as many as be perfect, be thus minded, and if in anything ye be otherwise minded, God shall reveal even this unto you.”

“I thank Thee, Lord, for this strong assurance. Now how shall I walk? How ‘follow after’?” [verse 12, answered by verse 16]—“Nevertheless, whereto we have already attained, let us walk by the same rule, let us mind the same thing.”

After this word, the peace of God which passeth all understanding kept my mind and heart through Christ Jesus.

Always going to the Word, letting God guide her thinking and responses. This was her model and pattern. His too.

Basically then, the way for her to love my father best and most appropriately—most biblically, she determined—was by more and more loving the Lord Jesus. “It is to love Him just for Himself, yes, but it is to love when we are in total darkness and He has turned His back upon us. It is to love transcendently, in total detachment, abandoned, drowned, as it were, in that vast sea of the love of God.”

Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, as she began to speak to greater numbers of people, she frequently meditated on this biblical principle of love for God and total trust in Him. Many times when I would ask to go hear her speak, she would tell me she spoke on the same thing everywhere she went, that her message of the cross being the gateway to joy never changed. God was always saying to her in every experience, Will you trust Me in this too? Whether unwitting or not, she was heeding those final words my father spoke to her before he was killed by the Aucas—“Teach the believers, Darling, teach the believers.” And this she did to countless numbers of those who have read her books and heard her speak with that redoubtable conviction that we are to trust God even when He seems the most silent.

As far back as the winter of 1949—far beyond, in fact—I see her doing it already. Led by the Spirit. Led by the Word.

After I got into bed last night, I simply confessed to the Lord all my desires and hopes of seeing Jim this spring, all my despicable hesitation in obeying Him for this summer. But He was tender and understanding, reassuring me that since I had asked Him to lead me, He would do just that and I could trust Him, for His “wisdom is unerring and we are fools and blind.” Lord, Thou knowest all things. Thou knowest that I love Thee.

Surprisingly, her “hopes of seeing Jim in the spring” revolved around, of all places, Florida. The family was planning an Easter reunion of sorts at Hampden DuBose Academy, the boarding school near Orlando where my mother’s younger sister Ginny was currently enrolled. And on a thirty-five-below-zero Thursday at PBI in mid-January, the prospect of visiting Florida in the spring couldn’t have sounded better. Or could it?

Letter from Dave tells of his desire to take Jim to H.D.A. this Easter vacation. Immediately my thoughts fly to those scenes, picturing us there together, and I wonder if anything so perfect (it seems) could come true.

But in the end, neither Uncle Dave nor my dad went to Florida, pressed by the need to study for exams. Nor did my mother—for reasons that would deeply trouble her heart throughout the first two weeks of March and which colored the direction of her entire summer.

She was determined to spend the upcoming summer doing something in preparation for her life’s calling in missions. Though she continued to be prayerfully leaning toward a future in Africa, experiences over the past several months had opened her eyes to the needs in South America. “Brazil is the largest unevangelized field in the world. There are Indian tribes far up near the headwaters of the Amazon who have never seen a white face or heard the name of Jesus.” Besides, PBI graduates working in Africa already numbered a hundred or more. “How I would love to do some truly pioneer work. . . . In Africa (S.I.M.’s field) no mission station is a day’s journey from the next.” Still, for the time being, her application remained in force with SIM, though no word had yet been forthcoming on the immediate opportunities awaiting her.

On a single day in March, however, she felt her decision abruptly made.

March 3: Talked with Miss Phillips this p.m. about Jim, the S.I.M., etc., and she advised me strongly to withdraw my application and go out in Canadian S.S. Mission this summer.

Miss Phillips was like a spiritual guide/director, who counseled students according to PBI’s expectations. Her word was well nigh a command. True, the idea of remaining in Canada on this kind of assignment (visiting families and inviting children to Sunday school) was not pleasant to my mother, yet she felt she should comply in order to grow and become more acclimated to missions work.

But the personal cost was great indeed.

The next morning she “woke at five and could not refrain from a few tears at the thought of having to tell Mother that I will not see her for at least six months.” She worried how to break the news, especially after receiving a letter from home a few days later, “with all kinds of plans for my going to Florida—she is so sweet, joyfully anticipating all the happiness I would have there!” Imagine the dreaded waiting for her disappointing letter to reach New Jersey, then for her mother’s response to be written and make it all the way back up to Alberta. It wouldn’t arrive for nearly ten days more, though thankfully with the sweet relief that “she understood and rejoiced!”

But, of course, there was the added sadness of being kept longer from my dad, whom she likewise wouldn’t be able to see for at least six months. He, too, however, answered back with encouraging words:

March 19

Think of the privilege, Bets, to be made ministers of this message of reconciliation! What should be our wonder and praise that we be known as those “approved of God to be entrusted with the gospel” (1 Thess. 2:4). Throw all you have into it for the Lord’s sake, and I will pray that His hand shall yield abundant increase. Faithfulness in that which is least brings:

Your faith is on trial! He comes quickly, His reward with Himself. Indeed, what need we beside Himself?

And so she went from grappling with levels of sadness and trepidation about the upcoming summer to being able to say with surrendered confidence, “The Lord has granted wonderful joy in the contemplation of Canadian S.S. Mission.”

Something else that my father said, however, further down in his letter, “left me cold.”

Spring

A day before this March 19 letter had arrived from Wheaton, my mother had written in her diary, “I have been praying earnestly that the Lord will guide Jim as to what he is to do for the summer. Wycliffe or British Guiana?” The “British Guiana” option (the South American country now known simply as Guyana, situated along the northern coast) had entered the equation while he was home to attend my Uncle Bert’s wedding. In his letter of February 1, he had said,

[My father] is seriously considering a trip to British Guiana where some local brethren from here are establishing a lumbering business. There are about thirty small, English-speaking assemblies and a British missionary who needs a furlough but has no teacher to take his place. Dad may fit in, as he is both millwright and teacher.

If he goes this summer, he wants me to go with him, and if God so allows it, I would drop Wycliffe plans in a minute. We’ve had some happy times together, and I cannot estimate what enrichment a few months working with him might do for me, practically and spiritually.

The possibility remained viable throughout the spring.

I sometimes think that three months of real, practical experiences would be better for me just now than three more in the books. . . . As you are praying for me, do think of this, Bets, as I feel much constrained to go.

So, on March 22 she was praying for my dad, saying, “Oh, how I long to see him—if I could just talk with him for ten minutes! Have not had a letter since March 5.” Then on March 23, his letter arrived. And it struck her as though a whole other person had written it. Here’s a little of what it said:

The Record will inform you of the high old time we had on Reverse Day this year. Arlene Swanson—onetime moll of the great Dubbins Norbeck . . . invited me as evening guest. Charming time, I must say. I dated her for a wrestling banquet the first year here—mostly for her appearance, I think.

He went on to add other names of guys she knew (including her brother Dave), listed alongside the girls who’d asked them out on “Reverse Day,” a Wheaton tradition from a simpler time when gender roles were reversed for a single day.

Crazy antics at “Senior Sneak.”

Reverse Day.

The whole outfit looked like a gang of fugitives from New England attics. Lace, bustles, hoop skirts, sun bonnets, top hats, spats, cases, pipes, complete with three-week beards—wow. (Yes, I had three weeks’ growth—it was red, believe it or not, and I still maintain a moustache, but public opinion is getting unbearable.) . . .

Seniors had a party following with pie throwing and water dunking in the baptistery of lower chapel . . . the wildest, most raucous, absurd set of loveable hoodlums I have ever known.

And rather than signing off with his more customary “Lovingly” or “Tenderly,” he closed with the relatively generic, impersonal “Sincerely.”

Scenes like the ones he described in this letter were the beginning of what my father dubbed his “Renaissance”—a time at the end of his senior year when he threw off all the shackles he’d placed upon himself in order to prove to the class that he was freed from legalism. He’d seen how Paul in his New Testament letters had taught of our need to be conformed to Christ and not to rules. As a result, my dad set out to create a “disruption of my previously pious ‘code of don’ts’ that used to motivate much of my action.”

He’d concluded that some of the rigorous standards he held over the course of three college years had essentially turned into “a legal bondage that was developing into critical prayers” and “a general attitude of spiritual superiority. Missionary candidacy became my standard for spirituality, and my fellowship was limited to those of that sphere.” He felt as if his “good, consecrated attitudes” and “priggish little laws” had alienated him from many of the students, and he therefore decided to start acting a little more “normal”—normal to his natural self, and normal to those in the rest of the student body who perhaps thought he was just a tad too spiritual. Before the spring was out, his Renaissance would contribute to a Senior Sneak unlike any other in Wheaton’s history—the weekend when seniors “sneak” away for a time of fun without letting the juniors know. The antics were crazy and different enough that even he would later admit, “My pendulum swung too far.”

But my mother, upon hearing the first waves of these shenanigans shared with such glee in letters from both my dad and her brother Dave, became very upset—confounded at him as well as worried for him.

March 23: The foolishness and clowning left me cold. Jim actually led FMF dressed up in an outrageous ’49er outfit. I had been faced with eternity today, reading Revelation 15 and 16 and A.C. Things As They Are—and could not but weep my heart out at the disappointment all this has been. His letter was strangely empty. O, has he kept his promise to be honest? Have I been a drain on him?

The next day brought no relief. In fact, she sat down and wrote a letter not only to him—a brief, curt one apparently—but also to their friend Bill Cathers, “asking him to pray and, if he deems wise, to exhort the brother along the line of Titus 2:6.”

Not J., not Jim, but “the brother.”

This notable change in tone reveals how hard she’d taken the news of my dad’s Renaissance, feeling a greater distance from him spiritually than the 1,500 miles that separated them physically. “Have no idea how he will receive it,” she said, “or if he will understand at all.”

She waited to see.

Less than a week later, March 28, she presumed that “Bill and Jim probably received my letters today.” It obviously had its effect. My dad’s lengthy, seven-page return letter was dated, not surprisingly, the same day.

March 28

I think it very difficult to explain why I wrote as I did last week—but remember, the fact that I change my tone does not indicate another “Jim” who signs his name “Jim,” prefixed by “Sincerely” rather than by “Tenderly” or something other. The “Jim” is the same, and if you are to love him, you must love him, whether he be sincere, tender, or sarcastic. I live with him all the time and can assure you (as I’ve tried to maintain from the beginning, but am only now getting convincing), you do not know all of him yet—and he has far more deplorable aspects than signing “Sincerely.”

What I wrote was from my heart—I was sincere. You must accept me that way, or leave me alone. I cannot give you anything but what I am, and if now you see for the first time what I really am, and you choose to defer, you do only as I feared you might do when you found out, and will incidentally fulfill prophecies I voiced to you from the beginning.

Continuing on, he broached a theme that would reappear in several letters throughout the year—a struggle within his own heart, not knowing if he was even capable of love.

To explain psychologically what I was thinking when I wrote, which so changed my tone, is impossible. I can only attempt an apology.

I don’t remember whether I ever said this to you or not, but I have been very conscious of it since breaking up with Wilma [a childhood sweetheart]. The very fact that I began going with her at fourteen and wouldn’t look at another girl for four years warned me that my affections go out very easily and are jealously tenacious.

Recognizing this fact, that I would lose my heart at every turn if I didn’t discipline myself carefully, I withdrew from dating and even close association with girls whom I knew attracted me, or to whom I was somehow attractive.

Love, like his own heart, remained mysterious to him. In later letters he would mention how he “loved too easily and not deeply enough,” noticing how his love tended to fluctuate through “cycles of warmth and cold,” how he was “impetuous in nature,” how he could “swing to extremes which make me either too nice or too brutal.” If my mother felt him untrue and unsteady, it’s because he felt untrue and unsteady himself.

I’m surprised at how bold, brash, and uninhibited he could be, especially after knowing the constancy of my mother’s love. Yet he wanted to be real with her, admitting his love was capable of waning and waxing. I love him for it, because I also am often too bold with my words, but the Holy Spirit tempers everything.

He then ended with a dismissive flourish:

If you don’t like the tone of this letter, send it back, and I’ll re-edit another time. Just now, I feel as if this little rift is tremendously inconsequential, and I can sincerely sign my letters . . .

Lovingly, Jim

“Should all be revoked?” my mother was already wondering, even before this letter arrived and as her school term was wrapping up. “Just now there is a great longing to be home. . . . Still much exercised about the matter spoken of Tuesday.” Yet gathering herself in the Word and in prayer, she summarized the following thoughts in her journal, spiritually bracing herself for whatever was coming next.

March 30: Lord, this night I do earnestly ask of Thee:

Therefore, when his letter came, she was eager to hear his heart but was also secure in wanting God’s will alone. She thought he was being ridiculously obtuse, the way he was excusing his behavior and his lack of reticence, but she rested in the clear truth of Scripture, that God would never leave her and would always be her refuge.

April 1: I have thought of several ways of replying to Jim’s letter. I could quite successfully answer some of his arguments and include some choice retorts. But, oh, how petty and foolish! . . . What wonderful rest there is, I remind myself, that this whole business is not mine to hold or secure, but His all.

April 2: I have asked a definite thing of the Lord—that He will either give perfect place re: J., or make it unmistakably clear that I am to forsake the whole affair. And as I leave this in His hands, I ask for power to center all my thoughts on Christ, uninstructed by a concern which is not mine at all.

What’s interesting, as I hold his letters here in my hand—not just the one of March 28, but several others that follow (April 18, April 25)—are little comments my mother scribbled in the margin as she read. For example, where he mentions “one or two girls” he’d dated in the past, as well as one or two others in his current class who were wanting him to go to spring functions, she wrote things like, “Who are these? Did you accept? Why all this? Should I be interested? Or jealous?” Or where he says, “My recently acquired moustache brought a well-signed petition to have it removed from several ‘attentive’ girls,” she remarked, “You were duly flattered by this?”

Notice my mother’s penciled commentary in the margins of my father’s letter.

Here are a few others, with her commentary in brackets:

On re-reading, I see that I have made myself beautifully obscure. [no, only too clear] I can’t seem to put on paper in a few—or many—words what I really want to say. Incidentally, that was why I said “I wish you were near” in my last, for I sense that the constancy of my warmth of affection is determined by proximity. [so that’s all we have?]

This tendency to love quickly, combined with a natural desire for flattery and a yen for intimacy with anyone and all, will doubtless make me a “problem-husband.” [thought you weren’t getting married] Last week it made me a “difficult boyfriend.” [who calls you that?]

I cannot help but tell you—and for the last time, I hope—my love is not constant. The brute is too much with me. “Our loves as humans must be nourished by response”—quoted from your letter of February 13. [taken out of context—not referring to our particular love]

Are not your letters something like mine—at times vivid with a subtle passion, at other times not committal to the point of dullness? [this only because I turn off my heart at such times!]

Please—Betty, how am I to take this? One letter reads with a tone of marked surprise, “why, Jim, you write as if you assumed there were something between us—a shadow of a claim we have on one another.” Jim is so simple, he bites—hard—and responds in appreciation of your “ease and naiveté.” And the next letter returns with poet-talk of deep-seated, inevitable, powerful heart-passion—a passion of love which I interpret because of its dynamic nature to have a very real “claim” upon me. Does this go with a sentence written in one of your October letters: “Never have I felt any claim of any sort whatever on you”? No claims? Then why all this stir? What’s the difference if you have “no claims”? [No, we have no claim. If it is selfless, love has no “rights.” Had I a claim, I should have said, “all, or nothing at all.”]

I want you to take me up on anything I have written—condemn, criticize, question until you’re satisfied. Before God my heart is pure, [that to me is ALL that matters] and I will tell you all I can if it will help. Somehow I sense that your brevity has been far more loquacious than my ramblings.

I don’t wish to paint my father in too unfavorable a light for things we observe here in his tone and behavior. He was young, like all of us were young. He was flawed, like all of us are flawed. Nor was my mother innocent of displaying pride and immaturity in some of her reactions. But my dad was also aware enough to realize he didn’t like a lot of what he was seeing in himself during this time. One night, for instance, while at the campus snack bar . . .

April 6: Decided to follow Peg Rodgers and Arlene Swanson home . . . and decided to have a party at [one of the girls’ dormitories]. . . . We all went over for pop, ice cream, potato chips, stories, folk dancing, and cutting up generally. Wish my heart were more condemned. I am worse than a social animal; I’m a social fiend—I love to be with a gang.

Not long afterward:

April 23: Dorm party with Florence Kelsy tonight. Got to cutting up again. Oh, when will I ever mature? How I despise myself when I get home here in quiet and think of the noise I’ve made.

It led him to a prayerful, penitent place:

Fellowship with the gang is enticing fun. But I feel carried away tonight with soul enticement. Nothing bad, just nothing good. . . .

Son of God, purger of the inner parts, discerner of my sittings down, my risings, wilt Thou hallow this soul of mine? The choice is mine, You say? Ah, yes, the choice is mine.

Reflecting on one of these nights, in fact, he composed the following poem:

God of the strangest ways,Who silent watches Thy son While away rollicking days Playing ’til day is done,A son who, sobered at silence,Loves the sound of a joke And drowning the surging quiet Seeks consolation in noise,How can Thy love remain fervent,Father of this careless child?How be still in Thine ardor,A stillness which hankers me wild?Son of sound-ridden mind,Question no more of “How?”Silent or saucy, crowded or lone,My love rests on Thee now.

Meanwhile in Canada, my mother was seeking rest in the Lord as well, dealing with all this unexpected drama as she prepared for her summer mission work.

April 22: Last night, after receiving the first letter in three weeks from Jim, my soul was nearly torn apart. Oh, I cannot write of all it meant, but my heart was desperately wrung. My soul cried out, “Why? How can it be?”

Then I remembered. I had prayed, “No matter how”—it is only for my Lord to choose my cross. Can He not give grace and enable me to go in peace? I have asked to be broken, to be dealt with in any way, only that I might be like Jesus, fit to be His witness. “Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him.”

And the Lord Himself stood by me. He spoke peace. He held me in His everlasting arms and loved me with His everlasting love. He reminded me of the “weight of glory” ahead and gently rebuked me for looking at myself and my own selfish interest.

Apparently, this sense of surrendered peace was evident in the next letter she wrote. Perhaps her words were still pointed enough to sting him a little, but they must also have hinted at a softening. His response didn’t carry now the same fiery, defensive flavor that had dominated his most recent letters of the spring.

May 3

All right, all right, put up the buckler and I’ll lay down the sword. Yours of this morning with what I’ve been getting from above the last week has sufficiently beaten my spears into pruning hooks and left me with a plow handle cuddled into my fist rather than a sword held.

Her letter must also have included a refusal to send him any more of her poems, since he’d been hard on the last one. “Never did I dream the only man I ever sent this poem to,” she’d written in one of those personal sidebars, “would tear it to pieces, laugh, mock! But somehow I love this reaction, thrive on it!” He playfully answered:

If you refuse to send me poems, I’ll get mad again and then you’ll be sorry. The one of March 23 lies quite intact in my drawer—a thing of beauty and a joy forever—in spite of itself! I haven’t got time to write anything, as I hope to finish a seminar term paper on Thucydides tonight—more with you later, young lady.

He wasn’t yet in full agreement with everything she might have been challenging him about, nor with all she’d interpreted from what he’d been saying. But even in disagreeing, he now said he did it “smilingly so.” He was “quite game” to restore peace between them. So as she left PBI on Monday, May 9, traveling 125 miles north to the tiny community of Patience, Alberta, at least she was warmed to some degree by this thaw in relations.

Patience, a rustic village near Jasper National Park, home of the Athabasca Glacier, was the site of her summer work with the Canadian Sunday School Mission (CSSM). Her job, as I’ve mentioned, primarily involved going out visiting families and inviting their children to Sunday school. She lived in a drafty, cheaply built trailer on a local farm, traveling many miles by bicycle each day, both to find meeting locations as well as entice people to come. “It is a new and strange experience for me,” she wrote, “and I feel keenly my tremendous need of a mighty Fortress.”

First day:

May 10: Awoke at 4:30 with the farm fowl. Made a small breakfast and cleaned up my little home. In the hot stillness of the afternoon, felt desolate, helpless, lonely, discouraged. Was helped by Deut. 1, especially verses 8, 17, 29, 30. And this from Hudson Taylor: “It is not what we set ourselves to do that really tells in blessing, so much as what He is doing through us when we least expect it, if only we are in abiding fellowship with Him.” Walked with children in the woods.

And so she worked and witnessed. Here are a few more of her struggles through that spring:

May 12: Visited two homes this p.m.—one Christian, not sure of the other. Both consented to send children to S.S. Wept as I rode along the road on my bike.

May 13: Letters from Phyl, home, and Jim last night. I do not think I have ever been so overwhelmed with my own helplessness as today.

May 16: Rode my bike 15-1/2 miles today, up to Conjuring Lake. Had to see three men about using the school for S.S. on Saturday afternoons, since that is a more convenient time. Finally got permission. The wind was terrific, coming from NW, so that I could scarcely pedal. Had to walk part of the way—came home to my dark little house, cold and very tired. “No reward save that of knowing that I do Thy will.”

The families she saw were mostly very poor and extremely uneducated, having had no Christian influence. The men gambled and drank; the women gossiped and used foul language, tending to the farms without many of the men taking their responsibility seriously. There were bright spots, like the Brinks family who would often invite her to their home for Sunday dinner. But most of her days were purely hard work, trying to serve people who couldn’t have cared less for the gospel.

Thankfully, letters arrived from home and elsewhere with comforting regularity. The bundle she received on Saturday, May 21, came with exciting but homesick news: “Letters from Mother, Mrs. Elliot. The Elliots are going to Jim’s graduation—Mother is hoping to go, too [my Uncle Dave was graduating as well] so perhaps they will have a chance to meet. I do hope so.”

Her next letter from my dad was quite newsy as well.

Bill Cathers, one of my dad’s closest friends, coming to talk about the letter my mother had sent, asking him to “exhort the brother.” Bob Weeber, another good friend and roommate, joined them.

May 26

You must be experiencing some close companionship with the Savior being so very much alone these days. I had read [the letter you sent] to the family, which your mother typed and sent around. Dave gave it to me last week, and so I was prepared for the note coming from “Patience.” I confess fears for you at times, but then I know I’m not supposed to act like an old hen, so I manage to find rest in commending you to His keeping—in the very real sense of that word. . . .

It’s Saturday night now. Just as I got to this spot in the letter, I heard what I thought sounded like my roommate coming down the street. He always wheezes on that harp when walking—as do I and Billy occasionally too. Well, it turned out to be Bill. He said he felt constrained of the Spirit to come here and talk to me. You guessed it—it was about your letter. . . . He read your letter to me, and we exercised our hearts generally about the “Renaissance.”. . .

Others have come to me with such reports, and I have been tremendously helped by their frank tolerance and love. I have had to make several apologies about my overdoing this freedom on the Sneak, and kids have been most forgiving. I cannot tell you what this all means, but it is no small cause for praise on my part to our God who so works in the strangest circumstances to accomplish His will. Your prayers have done more than you now imagine. Continue for me these next two weeks—He who hears in secret will reward thee openly, my sister.

That must have felt good to hear.

The Renaissance was officially over.

I got my draft classification today—1A. They give you ten days to appeal, so I wrote asking for reconsideration. They try to sift as many COs [conscientious objectors] through as they can, because it’s quite an ordeal to go through all the investigation. . . .

I think I told you that Mother and Dad and Jane [his little sister] are coming for graduation. Bert and Colleen got away about two weeks ago [to Peru], and Mom and Dad went to California to see them off. Mother is on crutches but is slowly losing weight and quitting work, so I feel she is on the road to recovery. . . .

You would have enjoyed the Sneak Communion. We had a huge glass flagon and an oversized loaf of bread. After a few opening remarks, we began to pray and sing familiar hymns. McCully [Ed McCully, one of the five men later killed by the Aucas] broke the bread and gave thanks for the cup. It took a long time for the single cup and plate to get around, so we sang as it was passed. . . . Hardly a soul that wasn’t moved to worship. Oh, why cannot the Spirit lead us more often thus? How long shall we trust in man and programming to accomplish His work in men’s souls? Lord, let me learn quickly.

Love, Jim

I feel sure this letter brought a smile to her face, especially because it came at a time when she was expecting another dose of welcome relief, as she’d mentioned in her diary:

May 27: It will surely be nice when Fay comes—supposedly on Monday.

Fay Frederickson was a friend from PBI whom she’d anticipated coming to join her. “She rolled up here in a huge truck, in which she had begged a ride,” my mother wrote on May 30. “It is surely good to have someone to talk with and share the wonderful things God has been doing for me. Oh, how I pray that this trailer will be a foretaste of heaven in unity with Christ.”

Actually, she knew any “unity in Christ” would take a lot of prayer to make happen. As she’d written earlier to her mother, she expected this pairing with Fay to “be a good test and trial of our faith, and grace! Well, we leave it in the Lord’s hands. . . . Fay is a lot like me in many ways”—primarily meaning strong-minded—“and I can see that it would take all the grace the Lord would supply to keep us ‘knit together in love.’”

And how.

By the next day, things were already going south.

May 31: This a.m. Fay burst into a tirade, saying no one had ever treated her this way before and she didn’t intend to allow me to. “If you can’t be nice to me, Betty, well that’s just all.” Oh, my heart was broken. I was stunned. Lord, take over completely.

Two days later:

June 2: Command from Fay this a.m., “Betty, don’t talk to me like that.” I honestly have no idea when she will take what I say as an affront. Oh, Lord—I beseech Thee to make me loving and lovable.

Next day:

June 3: This afternoon as we rode along, Fay began questioning whether or not the heathen were lost. I gave her a few scriptures to show that they were, and said I thought that such questions were dangerous. “Oh, fiddle!” she said, “Betty Howard, you act like I didn’t have a brain in my head!” With this she went into a tirade about my attitude. We stopped and talked and prayed. O God! Give me love and grace to meet this new and very hard thing.

Part of God’s answer to her prayer for “love” came by way of the mail. “Letter from J. tonight in answer to mine of this past Tuesday. . . . J’s letter such a help in light of what I have been experiencing re: Fay. He spoke of loving not to ‘be a help’ or ‘do’ anything.” More broadly, it said:

June 9

One of my Renaissance experiences was to get among kids who were on a different spiritual level than my own and to enjoy fellowship. I found a very subtle snare in doing so. I sought their fellowship in order that I might minister to them—be a help, you know, to these weaker ones. What a rebuke came when I sensed my real motive—that I might minister.

Love hacks right at this, for love refuses to parade itself. I learned to recognize no “spiritual plains,” but simply to love, purely, in every group. Trying to “be a help” even has a smell of good works in it, for it is not pure. Our motive is only to be—do nothing, know nothing, act nothing—just to be a sinful bit of flesh, born of a Father’s love.

Then you see, Beloved, there can be no defeat. . . . Where knowledge tends to swell me up, or the despair of the flesh would make me shrivel up, the love of Christ “holds me together.” Any little occasion then has meaning, if only I can love while it passes. Nothing—even this three-day wait till graduation—is lost.

Oh, yes—graduation. His next letter included some apt descriptions from this event, largely in family terms.

June 16

Good to see your folks again last weekend and get in a little fellowship—particularly with your dad on Sunday afternoon. . . . I feel like your mother is disappointed in me—not that she said anything or even overtly gave sign of offense, but I sense she is not too happy that our relationship has not been more clearly defined.

She and Dave and Phil and Marg were on Willeston porch as a gang of us came in from swimming last Saturday. I was with Lyla Teasdale and (I don’t know whether I read this from my own psychological set or whether it actually occurred), but I felt your mother looked hurt. She and Mother had a good talk Sunday too, but I haven’t been subtle enough to worm out of Mom just what was under fire. . . .

Your mother told me a little about Fay and something of what you had written home. May God Himself be both “strength” and “song” to you, Bets. Be not afraid, and I shall pray.

Summer

EH (June 24): Today I am faced with three of the most formidable problems that have ever come to me. All circumstances look black, all appearances seem impossible, my heart is cast down with my own sinfulness, my soul is disquieted. I fear the future, I fear what God will require of me, I wonder how He can ever begin to work through me when I am such a useless person.

I don’t know specifically the “three problems” to which my mother was referring. Did they involve her future? My father? Surely the ongoing issue with Fay was one. She wrote this journal entry in Patience, having just come back from a few days at PBI where she’d gone seeking help on how to handle things—“not to lay blame on Fay,” of course, but to ask prayer and counsel in how to be “better fitted” for working through it. Returning to the trailer again, to the conflict, was certainly difficult.

One thing I do know, however. This overwhelming, all-at-once combination of problems had left her with a deep sense of loneliness: “desperately lonely and terribly discouraged.” Loneliness was something she suffered often in life—not only here in the summer of ’49 and in upcoming seasons, but certainly after my dad was killed, then later after my stepfather died. Even in her public life, when so many admired her, I remember how she could feel so very alone. She wrote in another journal, “Loneliness is a kind of death.” To read the following entry from late June, we can tell she was deep in its throes.

June 24: Satan is sifting me. Oh, that my faith fail not! The task at hand is a great one—I must bring the message on Sunday night—and these other three things crowd in upon my mind, as well as the consciousness of my own powerlessness in prayer and my own faithlessness. O wretched man that I am!

Lord, there it all is. I spread it before Thee, for to whom else can I go? Thou art my Father, tender, loving, ever-faithful, and all-wise. Take me just where I am, dear Lord, and lift me up. O Thou art the same; Thou art not affected by my changefulness!

I thank Thee for this from George Müller: “Therefore we should confide in Him, the unchanging one, and in our darkest moments never lose sight of the fact that He is still and ever will be the ‘living’ God! Be assured, if you walk with Him, and look to Him, and expect from Him, He will never fail you. One who has known the Lord for a long life write this to you for your encouragement, that He has never failed.”

If discouragement ever grasps you, compelling you to think of the future as black with sadness, loneliness, and uncertainty, these are the prayers that you (and I) must lift to Almighty God—depending on His presence, His ever-loving mercy, and His promises.

My father prayed for her as she went through this tough time and as she wondered about God’s plan for her. I’m sure many times she wished she could operate with the same self-assurance and courage he seemed to have . . . though it often did get him into trouble, when he spoke and acted before thinking.

Witness his letter of June 25. He was on his way west with his parents by then. They’d stopped for a week or so in Billings, Montana, where leaders from one of the local Brethren assemblies had asked his father to help calm a disturbance. The break in action gave my dad time to sit back and catch my mother up on things, since “I cannot recall just when I last gave account of my doings,” he said. Here is one such “doing” . . .

June 25

The night before commencement we had a mock banquet at the Lighthouse—must have been thirty or so of us. I gave a 29-cent “diamond” to [a girl she knew] and started the rumor that we were engaged. The whole thing seemed so improbable that we had a time making anyone believe it—though some were fooled, and they sang “congratulations” as we were lining up to march Monday morning.

Oh, how my mother’s heart must have quaked! And no sooner had she absorbed this charade than he reported on another.

In Sioux City, I saw Priscilla Hoy—remember her? She told me that one of my FMF friends had told her that you and I were engaged. That bothers me, Betty, for I fear lest some should be stumbled at our rather (should I say careless?) companionship.

Pretending to be engaged to another girl, then being upset that a story was circulating saying he was engaged to my mother? No wonder she wrote in her diary:

June 28: Letters from Mother, Mrs. Cunningham, Van, and Jim. All three of the first were blessed. I don’t know what to think of the last. O God! Show me what to do.

Sounds like having “three problems” was just a starter.

My parents didn’t write much that summer; my mother not at all. Following his letters of June 9, 16, and 25, my dad’s next was from July 19—“fourth since I wrote him,” she said—which began with these words:

Been some time since I heard from you and got to wondering if maybe a letter had gotten lost or something. Maybe, too, thought you figured it was my turn to write. I forgot what my last postscript was. Anyhow, I want you to know that you haven’t slipped from my thoughts and prayers.

There hadn’t been time for her to write, or for that matter, time to be lonely. She spent her first week of July as a CSSM camp counselor, overseeing a cabin of “eleven lively girls, ages 10–15.” She led devotions and lifeguarded by day, led special music in worship service each night. Vacation Bible School followed the next week, spilling into several weeks of heavy rains and thick mud that kept her and her bicycle mired closer to home.

But those downpours forced her to spend more time on the farm where their trailer was located, giving her a chance to see God really at work. Mr. Keller, father of the family, was an abusive, hard-drinking man, negligent toward his wife and children, when not being actively upsetting. Lots of arguing and fighting. But one night, after Mrs. Keller had threatened again to leave him, my mother and Mr. Keller talked “for three hours.”

July 12: He said he is not saved. I pleaded with him to trust the Lord. Said he was too far gone to be saved. He lay down in the pasture and sobbed and sobbed. O God! O my God!

The next day she wrote:

July 13: Never have I been through anything like last night. I, too, cried and cried. O, the misery of this world! O that he might be saved. I have never seen a man in such agony. I just longed to put my arm around him—would that I had been a man then!

Before the summer was out, she saw him attend a closing Friday night VBS service, where his children were among those recognized. “Mr. and Mrs. Keller both came—praise the Lord. He had tears in his eyes. The children did very well. O, may there be treasure in heaven!” She said he stopped drinking and was “reading his Bible incessantly. How can he help but be saved? O God! For Jesus’ sake, save that man! . . . Oh, shall I meet him at Jesus’ feet?”

This encourages me, how God knows what we need. Reading back through her diary of that summer, I know how frequently she grappled with concern about her future, even to the point of doubting her readiness for the mission field.

June 30: It has been on my mind so often lately concerning what I should do next year. Last year I feared that I should miss God’s way. This year I fear what He may ask me to do, in a sense.

July 19: What to do next year is a problem which weighs considerably on my mind these days. As I wake up, it is my first thought. “Commit thy way . . .”

I recall, too, a sobering experience she related from late in the spring, when still at PBI:

Tonight Mr. Maxwell asked all to stand who had never won a soul. I was among them. Oh, the shame of it! Twelve years since I was saved, not one soul, to my knowledge. The Lord is coming. What shall I have to offer? Shall I empty-handed be? Yes, I think I shall. Oh God, give grace to win them—how, by prayer; this summer, by contact. It was a most shameful exposure for me before my friends.

And yet here, amid all the “problems” she was facing, God was working everywhere around her and through her, saving young children through her Sunday school efforts. He even used her mere presence on this farm, where He had providentially placed her, to show what He can do through available, surrendered hearts like hers, and like yours and mine, I pray. When you hear my mother at twenty-two saying she feels “useless” and “fearful” and “ashamed,” recall what she went on to become in life by God’s grace and power. Think what our Father is capable of doing, encouraging you to press into Him, as she did, for His glory.

Truly, “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” (1 Cor. 2:9 nkjv).

The friction between Fay and herself never really cooled, only for a day or two here and there. Yet my mother didn’t hold any resentment. Not only did she forgive her but quickly repented of her own sharp words as well, asking God to help her be less judgmental and not as easily provoked. I love that she taught me this principle: once we’ve confessed, He cleanses us immediately and we can go on in faith, knowing our Redeemer lives for us and through us.

She heard from my dad again on August 1. He had spent the majority of his summer doing odd jobs with his father. The mission trip to British Guiana never materialized, and he’d told her “I have had to reconcile myself to staying in the U.S. until I’ve proved myself in the work here. The brethren would have it no other way.” It was a waiting time for him, accentuated by his waiting to hear from her.

August 1

This July 27 letter of yours is the first I’ve had from you in about thirty-nine days. Forty, they tell me, is the number of testing. I’m not exactly “griped,” but believe me, you sure had me wondering for a while. I have a sneaking suspicion this is another phase of your “war of nerves” to feel me out or something. You pulled a similar stunt in telling me you were beginning a correspondence with some PBI brother at the beginning of the year . . . recall? Most effective, I assure you.

Maybe, though, the waiting might soon be over.

When Mom heard you only had five weeks left in CSSM work, she renewed her vigor in pressing you an invitation to Portland when you are through. I echo an “amen” and shall pray again that the Lord will make it possible should it be found in His will.

I can only imagine the thrill she felt at even the remote possibility of seeing him soon, of visiting him in his home environment. It’s interesting also to note the status of his overall plans, spoken in the next paragraph:

We have just gotten word that the blueprints are finished on the house I’ve been waiting to begin with Dad. I suppose I could have gone to Wycliffe—but the Lord had it in His mind that I come home, and it has indeed been His way. I could not have asked for a more restful, recuperative season than this month at home has been.

She longed to be there too, as she wrote on August 13. “How wonderful it would be to go to Portland and visit him. In his last letter he pressed an invitation. But it is all in God’s hands,” she said, “and He would have to work a miracle to provide the way.”

Costs for my mother’s trip to Portland, written on the back of my dad’s envelope to her in Alberta.

The miracle needed to happen within two weeks.

August 15: I am completely in the dark as to what I am to do when I leave here. The Lord is able to lead me without error—only pray that I may be “in the way.” In so many ways I would like to visit Portland. Bunny [a friend from PBI] said I might possibly ride back with her folks to Vancouver, Wash., if they bring her back to school. I hardly dare think of it. “He shall give thee the desires of thine heart.” Lord, choose my desires.

August 16: Letter from Bunny saying her folks will not be driving back to Vancouver, which means I cannot go to Portland that way.

August 17: There are few things harder to bear than uncertainty—but He holds my hand, and I am certain of Him.

August 18: Mother sent me $100 with which to go to Portland. I do not at all covet this for myself, but want to spend it only for the glory of God. “Guide me, O Thou great Jehovah.”

Then, this. After all she’d been through with her summer roommate, wouldn’t it be a miracle for God to work out her travel plans this way?

August 19: Fay wants me to ride by bus as far as Seattle with her, spend a day or so there, and then go on to Portland. . . . It seems quite clear now that God is leading me to go. . . . I wish I would receive another invitation from Mrs. Elliot, though she has asked me recently by proxy.

August 20: Bless the Lord—received a letter from Mrs. Elliot imploring me to come, and saying how nice it would be if I could make it Labor Day weekend. That is the very time I had written to say I would come! The Lord has led so wonderfully and is working out details.

He did it! He “worked a miracle.”

Less than a week later, she was on her way.

August 25: Spent the a.m. packing and cleaning up trailer. It was pathetic to see poor Mr. K. bid me goodbye. He has been kind and polite, yet he tried to apologize for anything “bad” he had said. . . . The kids all cried and cried when we left. So did I! Came to Edmonton in creamery truck. Dinner in Chinese restaurant. We are staying at Y.W.C.A.

Hitching a ride on a milk truck? Lodging in a room at the Y? How soft we’ve become in what we expect of our travel accommodations.

One more letter came—an excited one—from my father, for the road:

August 25

“Fantastic,” as you say, is hardly the term for the Lord granting us this time—another from His bundle of Good Things which He has opened to us in Christ. Blessed be God—“Great are the works of Jehovah, sought out of all that delight in them” (Ps. 111:2).

And that is what I find myself doing during empty moments these days—seeking out His works. For I look ahead to your coming as a cup of joy tempered with trembling—not knowing what it is God does as you head for Three Hills tonight actually coming this direction. My prayers, I fear, are rather quivering, undefined surges as I entreat the Lord for guidance (and protection!) in regard to your coming—one week from tomorrow, if God’s schedule is as you have suggested.

Again, prepare to be amazed at the 1949 standard for communication and travel arrangements:

“When you get in Portand.” Excited letter from my dad, regarding my mother’s trip to see him.

I have just written a friend in Seattle to try to get a ride for you here. For, you see, you arrive the day our Labor Day conference begins in Portland, and some Seattle folk always drive down. He will contact you Friday indicating whether he has succeeded in getting a ride or not.

When you get in Portland, have whoever is bringing you to town ship you C.O.D. to 7272 with haste. [C.O.D. is an olden mailing term, meaning “cash on delivery.” 7272 was my father’s shorthand for his home address.] Our telephone is LI-2104. [Again, an almost prehistoric language for phone exchanges.] Call if anyone wants directions or if you should come via bus or train. I insist that you stay at least two weeks—preferably a month, as I understand you have no fall plans as yet. My family—particularly one member—is most anxious to see you. . . . “Behold, this is our God; we have waited for Him” (Isa. 25:9).

Quietly, Jim

Across the Canadian prairie she and Fay rode by bus, to the Rockies—“I can’t believe I’m here!”—into British Columbia and on to the Frederickson house. The few days they insisted she stay with them must have seemed an eternity. She did call my dad on Wednesday morning, August 31, “shaking all over—but had to find out if everything was OK to come. His voice sounded so deep and manly. I can hardly wait to see him.”

Two days later, on Friday evening, she was finally there.

They hadn’t seen each other in almost a year.

September 2: I am actually in Portland, Oregon—name that has always sent chills up my spine. Got here about 7:15. Jim met me at the depot. He has gained weight since I saw him—but, oh, it is wonderful to be with him. Family is all so nice and kind to me. Meeting tonight at Gospel Hall.

Yes, life truly orbited around their assembly gatherings and street meetings. Visiting company was expected to trail along. My father even preached at their downtown meeting that Sunday night—“powerfully, earnestly,” she said. She was truly getting to see him in his element. But, of course, neither could hardly wait for the one-on-one, face-to-face conversations they’d been imagining in their heads for months.

The following mixture of their journals tells of it, beginning with Labor Day:

EH (September 5): After afternoon meeting, Jim took me to Mt. Tabor Park where we sat and talked for several hours. He says he still does not know whether God wants him to be married. “We rest on Thee.”

JE (September 6): Very intimate with Betty in speaking of our relation—Sunday on Rocky Butte, Monday on Mount Tabor. Startled to find ourselves talking about marriage so offhandedly last eve. I noticed she was pained in hearing of some of the social aspects of this spring’s Renaissance. I felt sorry myself for much of it. Of the heart Jeremiah said, “Who can know it?” (17:9).

EH (September 6): Haven’t gotten to bed before 1 a.m. any night, so slept quite late. Helped Mrs. Elliot with washing, ate lunch, then Jim took me canoeing on Columbia River. Landed on an island, spent till dark reading over our letters of the past year. Many laughs, and explanations. Moon rose, red and full, over the perfectly still water. Wonderful time of prayer together there on the beach, for one another, others.

JE (September 7): Much perplexed and vacant in soul from long conversation and some prayer with Betty last evening on the Columbia. . . . Stirred to poesy but no proper words, except to say that I wonder why God hangs onto me. . . . Oh, blessed be His name, that He leaves me not but haunts me to follow on, drawing me upward away from earth, with promises of freedom from all entanglements and bondage.

EH (September 7): Talked to Mrs. Elliot quite a while this a.m. She is not too favorably impressed, I fear! Thinks I need to let myself out more—“express” myself. O Christ, be Thou my life! Jim and I walked up on Mt. Tabor and finished reading our letters. . . . Sang and played piano together this evening, then went to a little stone seat on the hillside. Had prayer together. The issue of to marry or not to marry at all . . . ?

JE (September 9): Swimming yesterday with Betts. Prayer meeting last eve was warming. Betty, on reading these pages, exhorts me to confidence rather than the despairing attitude she senses is prevalent. . . . Oh, how much has been God’s giving! How free and rich! But I fail to apprehend for lack of faith. Betty charges me with this daily.

EH (September 9): Although it was cloudy and drizzling, we set out in faith for the Pacific Ocean! Went first to Manzanita Beach and hiked for four hours over huge rocks to Neahkahnie Head. Then drove to Short Sand and took beautiful path through fir forest to beach. Swam in ocean, ice cold. Explored rocks, found lovely sea anemones and deep cove. Seemed like the sort of thing I have dreamed of, but never imagined possible. Built a fire and watched sunset.

JE (September 10): Blessed of God yesterday in fellowship with Betts at the beach. Stirred to thanksgiving for her. Heard the Lord’s voice in 1 Corinthians 3 this morning. “Take heed how you build” (v. 10). God’s garden takes tending that is careful; His building, work that is honorable and worthy of the Foundation.

EH (September 12): One of the most wonderful days of my life! A perfect day. We drove to Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood, took Timberline Trail five miles to Paradise Park—beautiful Alpine Meadow, flowers galore, crystal stream tumbling over rocks. Crossed glaciers to get there. Spent three hours reveling in scenery together. Had supper over an open fire in a lovely forest camp. Oh, it was indescribable.

And then, too soon, it was over.

EH (September 13): My last day at Elliots. . . . Oh, what peace He has given us! Jim took me to get my ticket this afternoon and bought me a whole lot of fruit and turkey for sandwiches on the trip! He took me to the bus at 7:30. I cried all the way down to the station. It seems harder to leave every time.

JE (September 13): She has been gone just one hour. What thunders of feeling I have known in that short time. I could not read the neon lights as I turned away from the bus, and somehow couldn’t face the people as they passed me. My lip kept contorting, and I could not seem to look natural without twisting tight together both my lips. How terrible I sound sobbing. Not like myself at all, but uncontrolled grating, animal sounds—and tears that trickled over my jaw and to my throat. Leaving her is terrible.

He continued working to process his feelings for a long while afterward, writing even more about it, not only on this day but into the days that followed. Poems, hymns, tortured emotions, a day-by-day recounting of events. He hurt for her (because of the assurances he couldn’t give her), just as he hurt for himself (because of his stifled desires for touch and embrace). He even began to question “how much of my path in God’s way is self-determined and how much God-determined for me.” Was all this rugged conviction about singleness, this denial of marriage, a needless restriction he was placing on himself?

I hope you’ll read his own thoughts yourself from this season in his life, as found in The Journals of Jim Elliot. His words are poignant, powerful. But his actual letter to my mother, I publish here for the first time. It was written and mailed to her as she slowly, haphazardly journeyed home by bus via California, the American Southwest, Denver, Kansas City, the Ohio Valley, and finally into Philadelphia, more than a week after leaving Oregon.

Her mother and younger brother Thomas were there to meet her at the station. (“I hardly recognized Thomas.”) Stunning news greeted her too: “I was electrified by news of Dave’s engagement to Phyl Gibson, my last year’s roommate at P.B.I.,” a fresh happening from just that week. How exciting. “How can it be . . .” In addition, a letter was waiting from the head of Hampden DuBose Academy, asking her to consider coming down to teach public speaking for the year.

How exciting also, she thought, when this letter from my dad arrived for her the next morning. He must not have been able to wait before putting his thoughts and memories into words and sending them. I haven’t room to reprint all of it, but will quote from it at length.

Get ready.

September 19

This hour a week ago we were driving home from the forest camp, very conscious that it was to be our last night together. Seems ages ago now, that we ate those beans from one can in the dark there. I remember sounding very absurd as we left the place, saying something about your “militant morality”—and hearing you say something about being thankful—and then the long drive in silence and tears.

“There have been some tense days since then, I want you to know,” he continued. The tension had been demonstrated mostly by everyone’s awkward, obvious silence. No one wanted to talk to him about her. “Dad and I poured a concrete basement for a brother that day, and I was glad the mixer kept conversation at a minimum, as I didn’t feel like talking somehow.” The tension, the avoidance, was palpable. It was killing him.

Not until everyone started talking did he realize he hadn’t yet begun to feel the pain.

I was startled as I was tamping the concrete into forms to have my thoughts broken into by the brother for whom we worked, saying, “I’ll bet you felt bad to have your girl (excuse the expression, I’m quoting) leave, huh?” I agreed and he went on to compare you to his wife—“different looking . . . hard to get to know . . . grows on you . . .” I know he saw you only once at the meeting, and I never even introduced him to you!

I was morbid silent around the house for three days. Couldn’t get rid of the feeling that came over me listening to myself sob aloud Tuesday night after you left. I will tell you of this later. It is a little too fresh just now to discuss casually. Bothered, too, by the fact that no one had mentioned you. Mother and I had some talk Thursday afternoon. . . .

What I am going to write now, I do not know whether I should say. It seems almost like betraying my folks before an outsider, but I am going ahead—painfully for us both—trusting that this will eventually be for your good. Expect the worst.

Well might you weep in thinking of the poor impressions you make. They could not have been worse here. Mother seriously concluded that inviting you here was “a flop.” Her original intention to have you when I was not here would have better suited her. Her word “obsession” comes from this feature of your visit. She thinks you should have spent more time with and shown more interest in the family and not quite so much in me. (She doesn’t reckon of our slim three weeks’ contact.) She thinks you uncommunicative, possessed of a “meek and quiet spirit,” but a very poor maker of friends, and hence a poor prospective missionary. She cites as instances one time at the conference when you were alone and she tried to warm up a “conversation.” Your retort that you didn’t mind being alone “froze her inside.”

Hazel Berney, Ray the giant’s wife, records a similar instance when she tried to make friendly advances, and you coolly made her feel “as if she wasn’t necessary.” She thinks you did not enter into the home life here by way of housework and canning, and I remember one remark you made which I knew at the time would bring judgment upon you. Mom asked, “Do you sew?” Your response, “Not if I can help it—Mother has always done it.” Hence you are to Mother still an immature “institution child” who sadly lacks any sense of home responsibility and who possesses little domestic adaptability. . . .

She described Dad’s attitude toward you as “ferocious.” He opened up Saturday as we drove to Eugene for a weekend’s meetings 125 miles south of here. He described three stages in his feelings of your week’s stay. (1) When he saw you first, he was abashed. “I see nothing in her that would appeal to me—no face, no form, a spindly dreamer who has cleverly set her cap for you, and you have bitten.” He confesses that he wondered such things as, “Is this the product of all my prayers and labors to get him successfully through unstable youth? Is this my son’s ideal?” He calls this his “feeling bad” stage, sort of remorseful that I had developed such poor tastes and been so hoodwinked. (2) His “mad stage” made him sore at me for not using my common sense in seeing right through you. (3) His “Abraham stage” . . . he heard the Lord say as He did to Abraham, “Are you willing to let all your hopes and prayers for Jim be sacrificed My way?”

After some struggle he came to the first peace he had had ever since you came. Though he can’t understand our attraction for a minute, it is as a thing committed. We are “in the Lord’s hands and I will not lay a finger to what He would do.” He is quiet now and open. I wish I could say the same for Mom. She digs me every chance she gets to be cautious and wait—as we both will change.

Jane was looking for a spiritual whirlwind in you. She never saw you reading your Bible and taking any lead in spiritual converse. Registered effect: disappointment. . . . Ruby’s was the only favorable impression: “She has lots on the ball. I admire her for not putting on a show for us.” Bob: “There is no hurry. When you can’t get along without her, it will be plenty of time to marry.” Auntie Frost: “These quiet people feel more deeply than those of us who say so much.”

I think the violent reaction of Dad and Mother springs mostly from the parent-feeling we discussed which involves pride in one’s own progeny and zealous seeking for its best. I must tell you how I had to control myself from strenuously opposing their opinions. I don’t know why I should have to defend you against such charges as uncommunicativeness. I have borne most of it in silence, telling only what I know you to be with me. I don’t understand how you could have made such a universally horrible impression. Dad shook his head as he contrasted you with Bunny. I have tried to put them all in your shoes coming here, and they understood somewhat. I will not defend you further. You, knowing their present bias toward you, must do the rest.

One can hardly imagine a worse reception. And my dad, who also could be less than tactful in his criticism, didn’t help by saying things to her, like, “I don’t write now as if they were all wrong and that you must be excused from all these charges.” Still, he was resolved in his love for her. And he hoped (and prayed) she would not consider this the end of the relationship they had begun.

Do you still believe God led you here? I do. I say without reserve or emendation. Further, I love you now by faith. What God is doing, I cannot say, but this I know: He has led us together.

My dad’s poems describing their time at the beach and then her departure.

He couldn’t see all the way ahead, but he asked her to consider making a deal with him, as they grappled with the now unpleasant aftermath of these precious few days they’d enjoyed together.

As I stood watching you weep on the bus—(forgive me for not obeying your request that I leave, but I couldn’t go somehow, knowing you were still to be seen)—Teasdale’s “What shall I give my love” kept sounding deep within. “How can I give her silence—lifelong?” Every time we have parted, it has been harder. I do not want to part with you on this basis again.

So I have prayed, quaveringly, that the Lord would not let us see one another again without giving us some assurance of His ultimate goal in relation to us. This parting “into undefined silence” is terrible. So, though we might want to be together again this fall, I think it would be better if we prayed—“Lord, show us some word of assurance—” Oh, I can’t say it. Do you understand?

Yet would anyone really expect her to go forward on such terms?

Autumn

Naturally, it took her a few days to give her wounded feelings time to heal.

September 22: A letter came from Jim this morning, telling me of the terrible impressions I had left with his family. I could hardly believe what I read, and was utterly crushed by it. Oh, truly I am an unimprovable, helpless case. Help, Lord. The implication of this opposition from his folks may be greater than we realize now. And the question comes to me, “Am I standing between him and his parents? If so, have I any right to?”

September 23: Why must there be these long periods of such far-distant separation? This is awful. 3,000 miles of possibility for misunderstanding. How to answer Jim’s letter? I feel that his folks have been unfair in some judgments of me—and very unkind to talk to Jim as they have. Poor Jim—he has to put up with so much.

September 24: Keep mulling over Jim’s letter—have not answered it yet. Don’t know how. He says he is praying that the Lord will give us some “word of assurance,” take us from this “dwelling in silence.”. . . Continue to enlighten us, Lord.

She finally took to writing it over the weekend then mailed it on Tuesday. Finally, too, (for us!) we reach the point where her original letters become available to us at last. No more guessing at her words or reading between the lines.

My father, when he received it, wouldn’t need to guess either.

Before seeking to respond to the unfavorable reviews from her visit, she decided to begin first on a different subject entirely—something she’d discovered on the way home—“something else that has been a burden.”

September 27

It’s been a long two weeks since that Tuesday when “wheels carried her into silence . . .” for me, at any rate. And a very strange five days since the arrival of your letter. But before I dare begin on that, there is something else that has been a burden. In Pasadena I met several Wheaton kids. In the course of our reminiscences, talk of this past year and the effects of the “Renaissance” came up. Until that time I had had only my own somewhat warped view, gleaned from letters while I was thousands of miles removed from the scene, and then your own fairly logical but very honest presentation of the situation. I had heard nothing from those who “looked on.” You will remember our talk that afternoon on Mt. Tabor—you said I didn’t look too happy. I was imagining, then, what effect your behavior must have had on others who looked to you as an example. I found, during my visit to Pasadena, that my worst imaginations were exceeded.

I can conclude from this what I had previously feared might be true—your so-called “liberty” was nothing short of license. Now it is true that you have admitted overstepping your bounds, but there seemed to be little true repentance proportionate to the harm that was actually done. I was told that Dr. Brooks felt that you and some of the others would have much to regret if you ever looked back seriously over the year. Mr. Stafford was utterly confounded—said he had never dreamed of such things going on at Wheaton, and had certainly never seen a Sneak to compare with ’49. He said that up until this year he had thought a lot of Dave Howard, but if he was going out under IVCF, they needn’t expect another cent of his money. There were other things. I can’t begin to list them.

But Jim, I must say these things because I feel them strongly, and am not yet at rest about your attitude toward the whole business. I thought we would get it all hashed out and over with while I was there, and I guess we did what could be done, but I didn’t “look too happy,” and frankly was not. To be very specific, for example, it confounded me how anyone who defines the significance of a kiss as you once did to me, could carry on in such an utterly frivolous vein, joking about it, a thing so sacred. I refer to the incident on the Sneak, of course. Jim, it doesn’t hang together. You can’t behave like that one minute, and turn around the next and say you love in purity. Can you? I am still not agreed that your “enlargement” or “broadening” was valid.

It seems now, after what I’ve heard, that you acted contrary to scriptural principles. “Hast thou faith? Have it to thyself before God,” and not to the extent that you (virtually) send a dozen people to hell in order to win two for the kingdom. That is putting it strongly, but it illustrates the point. Numbers were really hurt, and stumbled. Remember, the church has the greatest influence on the world when it is the farthest removed from it. And the same applies to you individually.

Perhaps you wonder why I said none of these things before. It was only, as I said, that I did not have the complete picture before, and I hesitated to judge you or draw conclusions. Why do I write this now? It is over with and done—it cannot be recalled. But do you see the seriousness of it? Or do you feel I have made too much of it? You said that too many people had had you up on a pedestal, and you were determined to show them the truth. All right—so, whereas they thought of you as Christ-like (which I know to be a fact in some cases), you act like the devil to prove you’re not so “spiritual.” You proved it for sure.

Jim, my brother, (I call you that now, for it is the only basis on which I dare talk to you this way)—what think ye? Am I unfair, harsh, unduly concerned? A good deal of my thinking on the 98-hour bus trip from L.A. was occupied with this, and I seemed to have no peace, so I determined to write you of it as soon as I reached home. Little did I know then of what issues awaited me in your letter.

She now pivoted to her main reason for writing.

I fully expected that you would be hearing “the worst” of me after I left, but I did not expect a detailed account of the criticisms. Perhaps I should say of such criticisms, for they were not the ones I had prophesied to myself. But do not fear that you “betrayed” your folks—I sensed their feeling toward me after I had been there only a day or so. In fact, I sensed it very keenly, and was at a loss to know what to do.

Perhaps you remember my suggesting on Wednesday that I thought I should leave on Friday? You snorted and said I was staying until Tuesday or Wednesday, at least. Well, that was the reason I felt I should go, though I couldn’t say anything to you about it. Your mother said several things to me at different times that left little room for speculation on my part as to how she felt. But I was not sharp enough to analyze the reasons, and your letter was full of things that amazed me. I mean, the things I expected her to criticize didn’t seem to be noticed, and things I had meant entirely the other way were used against me.

For example, she wanted me to enter in more to the housework—that morning when I helped her do the laundry, she kept telling me to go out and talk to you. You were picking plums, and I wanted to stay and help her and have a chance to talk. But she pressed me, and said, “I want you to spend as much time as you can with Jimmy. You won’t have much time anyway, and you kids must have a lot to talk over.” So I finally went out, but found you up in a tree with your dad, so went back into the laundry, only to be reproached for not staying with you. I began to feel that she would prefer I didn’t help her. The same feeling came over me when I went in to help Lou Berney with the dishes that Sunday. Your mother was there, and accused me of stealing her job.

Jim, I only tell you these things because I was so confused and hurt when I got your letter, and I want you to understand. Please, please don’t mention them to your mom, for I don’t mean them as accusations, and I do sincerely love her and did so want to please her. I do not for a minute blame her for the awful “flop” I made of my visit. The things I said in my thank-you note were perfectly honest, for she was most gracious and thoughtful of me, especially in view of how she felt about me—I don’t see how she could put herself out for me as she did.

The criticisms you made of me are just. I am greatly in need of openness in meeting new friends. But, oh, Jim—if you knew the discouragement that swept over me as I realized this so poignantly at your house, for it had seemed that God had won so many battles for me on this very line this summer. And had they now all been lost? Yes, apparently. Yet He had given me such wonderful entrance into hearts and such overpowering love for the people of Patience—why did not His love have free course in Portland? This question burns in me. Only the verses you quoted in your letter bring me comfort, for I confess anger at some points, and sorrowfulness to the point of tears every time I read it over. My sorrow is more for you, Jim, than for myself. Why should this happen to you? The anger is with myself for behaving as I did, unconscious though it was; with your folks for saying such things to you.

Forgive me, I am being brutally honest, but I cannot imagine their putting you through such an ordeal. I think if my folks hated a person they would not say such things about him to one who loved him, supposedly. Moreover, I cannot imagine your folks talking that way about anyone. The accusations which you quoted to me are things which you said you hoped would help me in the end. Look them over, Jim. Not one is capable of being remedied. Furthermore, none of the specific examples you gave had any direct bearing on the basic problem we discussed that night on the hill. Perhaps they have in your mind, but if you could see the letter again, perhaps you’d see what I mean.

You said it is up to me to do the rest. There is nothing I can do. I have sealed my image in their minds, even if I do improve, which by the grace of God I have purposed to do. Letters would accomplish nothing now—I am the faker who writes high-sounding letters and is a different person in actuality. I don’t expect your mother will be writing me anymore anyway. Gladly would I “do the rest” if there were anything I could do.

Pray for me, Jim—and continue to be devastatingly honest, even if it crushes me flatter than I am now! You are right that I cannot be excused, and the Lord alone is able to do anything with this mess. Oh what if I didn’t have Him? “To whom, Lord, could we come save unto Thee?”

She closed with a few odds-and-ends.

As to your question about whether we dare pray for some word of assurance—it gave me joy that God had led you this way, for He had led me the same way this summer, and I have prayed to be taken from this “Silence” if it could be His will. I can see now why He could not answer this prayer yet. But I think we need not fear to pray this way, in spite of our frailty. Lean hard upon Him—He will let none of our steps slide. You ask if I understand—yes, Jim, I understand. You need explain no further.

I liked the last two lines of your hillside poem—“The sun that ruled our days has lit the moon to rule our night.” You are learning the thing I have been praying for you, and for myself. The other poem was an example of the cadence of our thoughts—so much so that it came as a surprise.

Just before I got home, Dr. DuBose called me from Florida to ask me to come down to teach speech. I wrote him on Monday, saying I would be glad to fill in second semester if he wished, but that I was certain the Lord wanted me here at home for a few months. There is already so much to do, I find it hard to sit down and write letters. (It’s now 12:45 a.m.) I am making a dress and shirt, believe it or not. I do sew, and enjoy it, but have done very little for some time, since mother loves to sew, and would rather I did the housework and left her free to sew. (This I was preparing to say when your mom was called to the telephone or something—I too knew it would bring judgment if I left it where it was at the time!) Also I have been assigned the job of painting the porch and a room inside; baking bread, cleaning every Wednesday and Thursday, etc., besides regular household chores. Now don’t tell your mom this: I’m not trying to impress you or her or anyone else—these things simply must be done, that’s all!

No doubt Dave wrote you of his engagement. Were you as floored as I was? More so, probably, for it was you who said, “Oh no, he’d never do that.” Tell me what you thought when you heard. They seem supremely happy, so I am glad.

Tonight—last night now—we went to the Wheaton alumni mtg. to hear Coach Coray. Saw the movie of you and your fiancé. Coach announced afterwards that you were not engaged or going to med school. I was glad for that word.

With mixed feelings, Betty

My dad’s return letter arrived about two weeks later on October 7, answering every point.

The Renaissance: Your recent concern over the Renaissance I consider neither harsh, undue, nor unfair. My private regrets are more than I care to share with you—deeper than I am able to share, I think. . . . I have confessed to God, to the senior class, to the FMFers, to you, to other individuals, and I am eased. If there is more that I must do, I stand ready for reproof. Do you expect yet more of me?

The kissing incidents: I have no sensible answer to your charge of the kissing incidents. I stood there, said and did as you have been told, entirely in the flesh. And the same “me” wrote of “purity in my love.”. . . For the fact that it has blackened my conscience, hurt you, stumbled others, and brought dishonor to Christ, I now experience overwhelming sorrow. The act, the effect of it, the regret for it shall be consumed by the flashing of my Judge’s eye, and I shall suffer loss. There’s an end of it, and a costly one.

The family visit: In regards to Mother’s inconsistencies (they are not surprising to me any longer), I think Nietzsche has well spoken: “In the love of woman, there is injustice and blindness to all that she loveth not.”. . . Mother has not deep love for you [because she doesn’t know you yet] and interpreted all she chose against you, unjustly and blindly. I have since shown her this privately, and she remarked, “Well, we must have her back again, I have misjudged.”

Maybe, then, it wasn’t so bad after all. In fact, maybe some of the rush to judgment had arisen simply from the difference in their family styles. That’s a common source of friction anytime a young man and woman become prospective mates. My mother had hinted at this dynamic in her letter, when she wrote of how her own parents would never say such things about another person. My dad’s parents, he said, were simply more frank and outspoken.

His October 7 letter continues:

Don’t compare them with your own family. Where you or Dave would remember and be quiet, framing private opinions, Dad or Mom would blurt right out at the dinner table their feelings.

I am sorry this has prejudiced you against them—particularly because you fear lest it hurt me. None of it! I am very glad they expressed themselves—for that is all they will do. There will be no scheming, subtle tricks to prejudice me against you. They have spoken their mind and will, but should I choose to go on and marry you, they would stand by to help. Both of them have said this.

Admittedly, there’s something refreshing about that kind of honesty and forthrightness. Less damage is often done by those who get it all out, all at once, rather than hide their real feelings beneath a mask of politeness and courtesy. My Elliot grandparents were more the former.

But even with the aftermath of the Portland visit dominating this letter, the most important subject remained the condition of their relationship and how they should continue it (or discontinue it) moving forward.

Uncle Dave had sent a recent letter to my dad, warning him as previously that he needed to stop writing my mother. Here is my father’s report of it:

He warned me solemnly that I will “absolutely ruin the girl if I’m not careful.” He stands firm in the conviction that our correspondence is nothing but an opening for your love to flow through, which is illicit so long as I have no word from the Lord that its fruition will be marriage. He may be right, and if he is, it is your place to say so.

You will remember that my word from the Lord for writing was in connection with liberty. He gave me freedom to write if I pleased—for me there is no sin in it. But in this, my liberty may have now become license in carrying things too far for you to endure, should our relation be cut off. I am ready now to renounce our correspondence if my liberty has come to its end in imposing itself upon you with harmful results. I now feel it is your place to precipitate discontinuance. You know better than David or I what our writing is doing to you.

My answer from the Lord about marriage is now a decided “no” so long as present conditions prevail, with no conditions as to what might happen when and if they change. Can you afford to continue to feed a growing love in you which may be cut off without any fulfillment at some future time? One word from you will settle it. . . . My word from God for now is “Nay,” and I have no right to leave you in indecision, and for now that is the oracle from the Lord. I leave you the decision of whether or not you have full liberty to write in those circumstances.

She didn’t seem to like where this train of thought was going. In her response, you recognize her frustration at this strange relationship they share. (She wrote it from New York City where a family acquaintance had asked her to come substitute teach a Greek class at National Bible Institute.) Again, how were they to keep writing without expressing love, since neither of them possessed any claim upon the other?

October 14

Your letter of the 7th came Monday. It’s a toughie to answer. My first reaction as to how I would reply was a clever one, but would not have been truthful. I planned to cut out your sentence that ran thus: “Can you afford to continue to feed a growing love in you which may be cut off without any fulfillment at some future time?”. . . I would have affixed the word “No” and returned the clipping with no further comment. Succinct, at any rate, huh? I can hear you guffaw.

Well, as to why it would have been “the truth, the whole truth, etc. . . .” If I have love for you, it is not a very thriving one, choked and inhibited by a multiplicity of circumstances and restrictions, and surely it finds little vent in so erratic and impassionate a correspondence. The termination of our letters will likely have little effect on either its growth or depletion.

She then took on the line from her brother’s letter that categorized their so-called love and correspondence as “illicit” if no intention to marry was declared.

Consider a moment, Jim. . . . Have we not hashed this out from start to finish? Have I not told you that the whole business, for my part, has undergone exhaustive examination several times in the past six months? Would I not long since have thrown in the sponge without waiting your “permission” had I had any doubts as to its legality?

No one need worry about the courage of her convictions!

You speak of your liberty, your choices (e.g., “If I should choose to marry you . . .”), your decisions. Rest assured, Jim, my consent to correspond was based on the liberty the Lord gave me. Don’t worry about whether I can “endure.” This is a two-sided proposition. If you can, I can. I am not so fragile a thing as you and Dave would make out.

And I am not just sure whether your fears that I shall be hurt are fostered by a genuine tenderness and solicitude for my well-being, or are perhaps faintly tinged with the suspicion that things matter far more hugely to me than they do to you. If this latter is your thought (and I do not suggest it accusingly, for it may be true, I being of the “weaker sex”), I wouldn’t worry my head too much about it if I were you. . . .

Funny, she broke off writing for a moment because the Queen Mary, she said, was steaming up in the harbor, and she “wanted to watch her pull out.” Then she concluded:

You leave me the decision as to whether or not I have full liberty to write “under these circumstances.” As far as I can see, “these circumstances” have altered not one whit from what they were when we began to write. Then why all this ado? Had I not liberty then? I have it now. Did I consent to correspond with any illusions as to the outcome? I think not. We were very clear on this point.

Therefore, for the immediate present, I am content to “endure.” If you have reasons for being exercised which you have not expressed, then it is your place, not mine, to precipitate discontinuance.

Peace and safety, Betty

“Content to endure.” Was the Lord giving her grace here to “endure”? I think so, although she did sound frustrated with my dad and maybe angry at his expectations of her. Yet in her diary around this time, she continued to speak of “how I long to be with Jim sometimes,” how “often my first thought upon waking—yea, before waking sometimes—is of Jim.” No wonder, then, she would worry the next day after sending this letter, “Afraid I wrote a bit harshly to Jim.”

Yes, I’d say that’s the way he took it.

October 23

It is easy to misinterpret letters when one does not read them in the mental set that possessed the author when they were written. I have so misinterpreted both of those I have gotten from you since I saw you. I say “misinterpret” because I refuse to believe that you mean to sound as you carped and caviled at me, and that is what I have sensed in these. I am satisfied that your feeling toward me is the same as it was when you wrote of tender intimacies last winter, though you change your tone to fit the occasion. I should be surprised now to learn that you did not anxiously look for this letter days before it arrived, and I say this because my moods—I take it—interpret some of the things you say as carelessness toward me. Your using regular mail rather than air mail has been so taken.

Sure enough, she had made special mention in her diary of sending these letters by regular ground service, even though she noted “he writes airmail always.” Desired effect accomplished.

Statements like “If I have a love for you, it is not a very thriving one” in your last are easily taken to mean nonchalance on your part. Your speaking of our “erratic and impassionate correspondence” makes me feel as though you were not taking me as seriously as I should like you to! . . . In short, Betts, I am persuaded that you love me, and if my saying so angers you (since you have never actually said it), well, then you had better condition yourself to my assumptions and get used to feeling “as though I had you where I want you.”

After rereading what he’d just written, he tried again, a little softer this time.

What I wanted to say is that I didn’t feel your last letter was long enough, gracious enough, loving enough, and some other “enough” to satisfy what I have understood to be love for me in you. Then your added suggestion that I might not really be considering “your welfare” but some notion of mine about easing you off in this re-questioning of our correspondence was unsettling. And the flat statement that you suspected in me other “unexpressed reasons” [for it] was, and is, not a little aggravating!

As a matter of fact, I think now that I wrote not for your sake nor for mine, but for Dave’s. . . . What worried me was that Dave seems so sure of the dangers involved in our continued writing, that I feared he had interpreted you more wisely than I. He plagues my conscience with his words of “ruining the girl.” Next time he writes, I’ve a notion to send him your last. I’m glad at least to have your convictions in writing.

May I ask a favor? Will you please write that brother of yours in the same vigorous tone in which you addressed me and convince him that you are tougher than he thinks? Make him understand that this is not all my decisions, my liberty, my choices, my leading. They are the Lord’s leading in respect to both of us, and we have both experienced that direction. It is neither of us leading the other on, but God leading us both on. I haven’t been able to convince Dave of that. I’m sure a word from you would be effective.

He also wondered if she’d be open to something else—that they should sit for and exchange new pictures of one another.

You always complain about your set of me, that I am “such a little boy” (your very words!) or that you have plenty of the back of my head, thanks to Dave. What say we get some professional proofs and exchange them for lack of something better to do for Christmas? You send yours here, I’ll reciprocate, and that way we can get our own choices. Before this I have always regarded picture-giving as some form of ego-expression. In this case I argue from the standpoint of necessity.

“Necessity.” He needed her.

The day this letter arrived in Moorestown was “one of those radiant October days,” my mother said. The days leading up to it had been less so. “No word from Jim yet,” she’d written on Tuesday. “I almost hold my breath to see what he will say of my last letter. O, the uncertainty, the waiting, the wondering—it is hard, but it is God’s way.” The following day, Wednesday: “Still no word. Mrs. Elliot wrote a note simply telling all about the family. Conspicuous absence of the love and cordiality she expressed before she met me.”

Then came Thursday—“and a wonderful letter.”

October 27: Jim is incorrigible, bless his heart! And inimitable. Never have I been treated like this before—especially by a man! What worries me is that I seem to thrive on it. But I must wait a little while. O discipline—thou art a jewel, but cumbersome.

She wrote the same sentiments to him in her letter the next day, a note much more light-hearted than her previous one, full of happy, smiling personality.

October 28

Jim Elliot, you are incorrigible. That’s all I can say. No man has ever treated me like this before, and I don’t expect another one to. . . . I’m persuaded that you know a lot of things about me that I don’t even know yet, and seem to have access to a barometer of my feelings that I’ve never had a glimpse at. Well, carry on, brother, it’s fascinating.

And as for this picture-swap idea . . .

I had already thought of having mine made for mother, but didn’t want to commit myself by letting you know, because they might turn out to look just like me, and then of course I wouldn’t have sent you one! But I suppose they can’t be worse than the ones you have. I would like to have one of you, though, past the age of 18—for you are now 22. I didn’t forget your birthday. . . .

It is getting late—my hand is tired. So, whether this letter is “long enough,” etc. or not, I must say good-night. At least it was written soon enough—which is more than can be said for some folk’s letters! So good-night, Jim—though for you it’s just 9:30 now.

Joyously, Betty

How delightful to read her jokes. I can almost hear her laughter, even as I’m writing.

But quite serious things were happening at this time as well, in terms of their thirst for following God to the foreign fields. Their friend Van (whom I’ve mentioned before) had recently stopped at my mother’s before leaving from New York on her way to Africa. “What a heart-gladdening thing to see her. How she refreshes my soul. . . . My, how I wish I were ready to go with her!” In the days after Van left, my mother thought of her friend “out on the ocean, such a new ‘venture’. . . and here I ‘sit’—not knowing whither or why.” Or as she’d prayed while composing her diary entry of a week or so earlier, “You won’t let me miss the sound of going in the tops of the mulberry trees, will You, Lord?”—a reference to God’s call to battle for David against the Philistines in 1 Chronicles 14:15.

Even in this most recent, upbeat letter to my dad, she had said:

I have been conscious of inward fretting over my apparent “inactivity.” It gives me a dig every time someone asks, “What are you doing now?” It is not what I am doing that is nothing. But it is what God is doing, and even for that I cannot point to specific things, like Exhibit A, for questioners to gaze at in proof. I know He is working, and has purposes for which I know nothing, but it takes faith—and I’ve found that this means active, operative, continued faith and faithfulness.

My father knew exactly what she was feeling and talking about. “Your comments on the present waiting period were no less applicable to you than to me. The Guiana project is slow,” he said, mentioning that nothing would be coming of it until first of the year at the earliest. Like her, he realized that God was primarily calling him to be faithful in the now, in the waiting.

November 1

Today I went out to the Christian High School to place my application as a substitute teacher. Tonight I went to the local detention home for boys to tell a Poe story at their Halloween party. Tomorrow even, I am to help in a newly beginning craft class for unsaved kids in one of the suburban assemblies. Wednesday afternoon—children’s meeting at the hall. Friday morning—chapel service for the Goodwill Industries employees. Days I spend in the books.

But according to my dad’s journal, God was also beginning to reveal clearer information concerning future-tense answers as well. On October 29, he mentioned reading a letter that my Uncle Bert received six weeks earlier in Peru. As people tended to do with letters in those days, Bert had apparently forwarded it home. My parents’ correspondence often included with their own letters a handful of additional cards and notes they’d received from someone else and wanted to share. This particular letter was from a Wilfred Tidmarsh, written from the jungles of east Ecuador, speaking of a need for reaching the natives in that area of the world with the gospel.

This, again, from my dad’s private journal:

October 29: On the reading of Wilfred Tidmarsh’s letter to Bert written September 9, I responded to a simple urge within me to offer myself for the work there. It struck me as quite a presumptive action, and I covenanted with the Lord quietly that I would not post the letter unless I had some definite word from Him. It seems the situation he is in demands that he abandon the Indian work among the Quichuas because of his wife’s illness. He had asked the Christian and Missionary Alliance to take over, but they have given no verdict as yet.

Remember, among the directives he believed he’d received from the Lord at the end of 1948:

I feel quite at ease about saying that tribes work in South American jungles is the general direction of my missionary purpose.

Was this new opening in Ecuador the door through which God would send him?

Not having the luxury of hindsight, he didn’t yet know. But in seeking answers to all the year’s questions, only one thing would do. As my mother said, “The only thing that keeps me stable and settled in these days of uncertainty—yea, utter perplexity—is the absolute dependability of God’s Word.” My father, of course, was on the same wavelength, challenging himself even as he challenged her: “Let me warn you not to neglect conscientiously directed Bible study these days.”

But what I love from watching them navigate God’s answers through His Word and through prayer was that they weren’t merely seeking His personal instruction in regard to their ways, though they desperately craved it. They were equally, if not more diligently seeking to discover only His ways, which would ultimately give God the glory.

I’m encouraged, for instance, reading my dad’s journal entry of November 11, after he’d obviously spent much of the day in reading and study, thinking ahead:

I see clearly now that anything—whatever it be—if it be not on the principle of grace, it is not of God. Here shall be my plea in weakness; here shall be my boldness in prayer; here shall be my deliverance in temptation; at last, here shall be my translation. Not of grace? Then not of God.

And here, O Lord Most High, shall be Your glory and the honor of Your Son. The awakening for which I have asked, it shall come in Thy time on this principle by grace, through faith. Perfect my faith then, Lord, that I may learn to trust only in divine grace, that Thy work of holiness might soon begin in Portland.

I was all too legalistic for at least twenty years of my adult life, believing if I could just be more disciplined, God would be more pleased with me and I could climb that ladder of perfection, earning the reputation I desired. My own rules of godliness were my ideals. More than I loved Him, I loved my rules of what a devoted wife and Christian home should be. Therefore, to borrow from my father’s words, I was not being “delivered in temptation,” or being “bold in prayer,” or understanding that His grace covered all my “pleas in weakness.” Nor was I learning what my mother had told me throughout her life—how we shouldn’t always be examining our own holiness but simply seeking to please Him, that it’s up to Him to bring about change in us. As He helps us do His will, He conforms us into Christlikeness. It’s all grace. It’s not all about us.

Knowing the ways of God helps us know the way to go.

My parents knew this. And so while my dad was learning from the Word the deeper meanings of grace, my mother was learning from it as well—the deeper meanings of love, specifically what God was saying to her in Scripture about the way she and my dad should see and handle their uncommon friendship.

November 17: In seeking the Lord many days and weeks for light in darkness, I believe He is beginning to give some explanation—Chambers says, “Love is spontaneous but must be maintained by discipline.”

November 18: The Lord is wonderfully opening my eyes and showing me what I believe is the explanation of my confusions and perplexities re: the course of our relationship, its changes and anomalies, nature, and degree.

This extensive few weeks of study, including deep analysis of the original Greek, resulted in an exceptionally long letter she wrote to my dad on November 29. She began, “‘And after many days . . .’ But these days have been occupied with study and thought which seemed to me necessary before I could answer yours of the tenth.” I’ll let her explain, at length:

November 29

I was not a little concerned over your words, “Do you think I would dally with you if I shared any notion that you were staying with me?” I thought this over, asking myself, “Am I ‘toying’ with him? Has he any misconception of the nature of my feelings? Have I been fair?”. . . If I were to go on now, without clarifying some things which have become clear to me in the last two weeks, I should not be fair to you.

You have been unfair to me. The question expressed in the above quotation from your last, along with numerous other broad allusions to the fact that I had never declared my “love” to you, were unfair. You have repeatedly wanted to “test” my feelings. Why? To what end? Anything but selfishness?

In other words, your love is dependent upon requital. This you will admit, I feel sure. Yet I have been content to go on, sharing plenty of “notions that you were toying with me.” I need not go into all the instances which have raised serious questions. Dave tells me he is sure you are not in love. . . .

All of which brings me to the principal conclusion of my meditations of late: your feeling toward me, and mine toward you, have not been on the same basis. How to explain what I mean? Oh, Jim, this is another one of those times when I would give anything to talk instead of write. I fear that I may omit much that would convey to you my true intention.

Her study had given clarity on the different kinds of love declared in Scripture. And while she realized the Lord might one day cause theirs to be a love that would culminate in marriage, for now it was a friendship love. And rather than resist friendship love as insufficient or complicate it with claims and attachments, she believed they should embrace it. After all, it would hardly be a waste, she’d been learning, since “no love in any relation of life can be at its best if this element of ‘friendship love’ be lacking.”

I do not wish to be unkind—last of all to you—but I cannot help but feel that you need to know more of this “friendship, which consists in loving, rather than in being loved,” as friend Aristotle put it. . . .

Think back—you have spoken of the desire for possession, laying claims, etc. I was insistent that such should have no part in our relation so long as it was on this present basis. I am now more convinced than ever that a love which is pure, and of divine origin, can exist entirely without compact or condition. Yet, as you wrote once, you found joy in my letters when you wanted “to be loved.”

H. C. T. says [in one of the books she’d been reading: Henry Clay Trumbull’s Friendship: The Master Passion], “No love is more liable to misconception than a love that is without limit or claim or craving.”. . . It was the love known among the Christians of Acts 4:32—knowing no “rights.” It is the love of John 3:16, poured forth freely and without return, to all the world, possession-less in a sense, until individuals become members of the family of God, when a new element enters.

The Greek word in lines eight and twelve is philia (friendship love); the word in line thirteen is agape (unconditional love).

Slowly but surely, she said, “to return to application to our own friendship”. . .

You will recall telling me quite candidly that you did not know a constant, “never-turning-ever-deepening flow” of love—in fact, I think you said that you were not capable of such. This I refuse to believe. You are as “capable” of it as you are of any virtue—by God’s grace, by discipline, by drawing from Him the power. Whether or not you know or ever shall know such a love for me is not even a consideration at this point. My concern is that you recognize the nature and source of this love as divine. . . .

I believe the 15-week period of silence in the summer of ’48 indicates that we have experienced something of true friendship as expressed above. I know I did, at any rate, and from things you said, your feelings were pretty much the same at the end of that period as at the beginning. And in many other particulars, I think there has been a mutuality of this real friendship, but I also feel that other elements have entered in. . . .

I believe that you and I, Jim, if we are to continue, must know this true friendship apart from everything else, for it is this alone which continues without consummation for it is in itself and by its very nature, a fulfillment.

For a long time, it seems to me, we have gone along—you insisting on claims and evidences, I trying to maintain a relationship that is “from feeble yearnings freed.” True, there were all too many instances when I sought selfish ends. The love which is true friendship is selfless, divine. I am selfish, human. So I have fallen many times. But can you see any evidence of my goal, at least, in our past contacts?

I understand so much better that which was obscure before, and by God’s grace I trust He will make of me one who is true in love, no matter to whom that love be given, and pour through me His own vast and high and holy love. If we seek now to mix the two, we place ourselves in a paradoxical position. . . .

So, to reduce the example to the degree of our relationship, I feel perfectly free to write, or not write, as I wish. It will make no difference to me whether or not you agree to the conclusions I have outlined here. You may say that you violently disagree with all I have said, or that you do not wish to continue correspondence if I am not willing to declare for you a love of the kind you want, or that you cannot continue on this basis. So far as I can see now, if I know anything of being a friend, “none of these things move me.”. . . I am asking the Lord to teach me—and you—for our separate good primarily, regardless of His ends or purposes in our mutual affinities.

It was quite a treatise she’d written, both scholarly and heartfelt.

But to understand how my father reacted to it, perhaps the following insight will help. A few weeks earlier, when her previous letter had come, it didn’t include a copy of one of my mother’s poems he’d repeatedly requested; instead, she’d repeatedly withheld it. The piece in question was a poem she had read to him while on one of their picnic excursions in Portland during the summer, written in March 1947:

I love not with the evanescent flame Of wind-touched candle,Or with sporadic passions Fostered only of the moon.I love with steadfast quietness of heart,Dynamic, strong, which plumbs an untold depth.I love with purest singleness of heart,One never-turning, ever-deepening flow Of warmth and power, of fathomless devotion.

After receiving (apparently) a smart-aleck reply from him, she had torn it up right then in his presence. But as reported in his letter of November 10, after again no poem had appeared, he took matters into his own hands.

After lunch I headed out for Mount Tabor to the place where we discussed the letters that afternoon. I had difficulty recognizing the exact spot as things are much more in a tangle since the falling of the leaves. This hindered considerably my search for those bits of paper into which you rendered the much disputed poem of March 22, 1947. I found a few pieces, some badly soaked, some only shreds, all crumpled and decomposed. You would have laughed to see me carefully inching over all that spot with the dogged determination of a paleographer, and laughed unkindly too, did you not appreciate my purpose. Well, I have succeeded by only 75%, having pieced together parts of all the lines, but completely satisfactorily only the first and last two.

Does this sound like a man who only wanted to be “friends”?

In this same letter is where he’d written the line she’d referenced: “You insist that you are ‘just Betty,’ no strings, no emotion, no feeling toward me but kindly friendship, when Dave, Van, and Bunny all tell me, ‘Betty really loves you.’ Do you think I would dally with you if I shared any notion that you were toying with me? I hope you think better of me than that.”

Maybe, then, she should’ve expected the obtuse reaction she received, even from such a well-thought-out letter. “Very little comment on my epistle,” she wrote in her diary a few weeks later, December 20, when his letter arrived, “except to call it ‘pretty much exalted nonsense.’” He said he couldn’t make heads or tails of it.

December 17

After two weeks of pondering your letter, I understand less of it than I did when I began. I still find myself reading two or three lines over and over, shaking my head, wondering. On Thursday I sat down with ten pages of notes to answer you, to refute and upset your new theory. After I had written four pages, I saw how impossible it was to answer, when I hardly understand what you are talking about.

She’d realized, even while she’d been awaiting word, that the waiting itself was a test of her own theories of love. “No word from Jim for a month,” she’d written on December 10. “It’s all right. God gives me love that asks no return—for Him, and for him.” She’d been anticipating my dad’s letter “with fear, for the most part. I am prepared to receive a final goodbye, if that is how he takes it.” When it came, she bravely “spent a while with the Lord this afternoon and received peace. ‘Ye will not get leave to steal quietly into heaven, in Christ’s company, without a conflict and a cross.’”

Perhaps, though, the main reason my dad wasn’t inclined to worry at present about such deep issues of the heart was because of his excitement over something else that had come up.

He’d been communicating with Dr. Tidmarsh.

Since writing you, I have had detailed correspondence with two missionaries who I wrote: one, Wilfred Tidmarsh of Ecuador (whose wife was badly injured in an MAF plane tragedy [Mission Aviation Fellowship] when Nate Saint was pilot), who is having to leave an established forest work among Quichua Indians because of his wife’s illness; the other, Rowland H. C. Hill of Bangalore, India. Both describe fields of tremendous interest to me, and both are quite anxious regarding my leading from the Lord.

From one standpoint, the works are almost opposite, as the Ecuadorian work is among a primitive unsettled tribe, while the India project is among high school and college age upper-crust Hindus who are studying English. Brother Hill wants to start a Bible school of some sort and is looking for someone who would qualify as a teacher of Greek, etc. . . .

Since beginning this letter, I have had one from Ecuador, asking definitely about my leading, since the work must be turned over to someone soon. I will be writing him this afternoon, but what shall I say? How is one to decide when the heart seems equally torn for both works, and one’s capabilities fit either sphere? To top this, Dave wrote me asking if I could take his job with FMF next year, suggesting that it would be excellent training for the field. But what better training than the field itself?

And as to her thoughts on love, on their love, on whether they had love . . .

I think you will sense my predicament and forgive me if I sorta skip over the admittedly important, but laborious study of your friendship ideals. Further, I don’t see how we could possibly come to any settlement on such a matter in letters. We should have to talk over it personally, in a situation where it is possible to retort on the spot. . . . If you read my letter to Dave, you know my sentiment about “loving in faith,” and that is as far as I have come by experimental, spiritual reasoning. The degrees and qualities of that loving are variable and poor; yet they are in faith, and it is there they must grow. I don’t mean that you should cut out the subject from your letters, but only hope you will understand its absence in my own.

Having read this, imagine my mother’s emotions when on the Friday before Christmas, a packet arrived by mail at the house. It was the picture of himself he’d made for her.

December 23: I went upstairs and cried.

Here’s where we leave them at the end of 1949. In reading through the letters from this year, one can’t help but detect a storminess to their relationship. My mother insisted on keeping it “just friends” because of the lack of assurance from my dad that they would ever marry. The uncertainty and heart-searching had to be painful, as they both did love each other. But my mother could not express it as romantic love, only as true friendship: a true, Christ-honoring friendship, a meeting of mind and heart. My dad, however, couldn’t quite accept this. He wanted to hear from her that she desired and admired him. He hoped she could go beyond the harmony of their minds toward something deeper. But intellectually he knew. This was only his flesh talking. It’s why he often confessed in his journal of how his love for God could be divided, hungry for more of my Mama’s expressions toward him.

He wrote to her once more before year’s end, recalling with laughter “the vacation spent with you all there in 1947—the skating party, sledding at McHutchens, the midnight fests.” He also sent belated wishes for a happy birthday.

December 27

I forgot to mention your birthday in my last, the twenty-first if memory serves. I can’t remember if we ever discussed giving gifts or not. . . . But somehow it seems such a cheap sort of a thing to do—entirely too conformist a practice to have much place in our relationship! The practice at Christmas has gotten to be such a commercialized hoax that I will be sincerely glad when all good Christians abandon it.

He closed with a prayer, asking for “a 1950 for you that is both directed by the will of Christ and executed by His power.”

She followed with a letter written New Year’s Eve.

December 31

Your letter was welcome, and I was glad you were pleased with the picture. . . . To know that you accepted [it] without derogatory remarks is enough. As for yours—I like it very much, and do not think the tinting detracts at all. The family went wild over it, but it only made me wish I could see that frank smile in flesh and blood!

Yes, we have been all through the gift business before, and I agree with your sentiments in the matter entirely. The first time was up on a grassy hill not far from the Roarin’ Elgin tracks. You had thought perhaps I should be hurt if you gave me nothing for graduation. The thought had not even occurred to me. In fact, I’m sure I should have been disappointed if you had given me anything. Occasions—why must we be bound by occasion? Perhaps we have been “cradled in custom,” but must we grow up in a “showcase”? Be yourself, James—as you’ve always been, I think—I sorta like you that way.

And “for 1950, remember this,” she said, quoting the ancient hymn:

The King of Love my Shepherd is Whose goodness faileth never—I nothing lack if I am His And He is mine forever

The bellow of the tide

From the Blue expanding wide

Beyond the roughness of the rocks of Falcon Head,

Funneled hugely, vainly tried

To rend our cavern, where it died

In quiet cool of Sandy bed

Beneath our feet.

We shivered as we stood,

Found no words to fit the mood

Which numbed us silent. We quaffed

Each other’s good

But, not knowing then to brood,

Spoke nonsense, laughed,

The touch of naked shoulder

As each felt his own the colder

Melted other touch-things into dream.

False, every fact I told her.

Lie, that overhanging boulder.

All things that were did only seem

As we knew love.

Jim Elliot

Lord, let this love be pure and high,

As clean and vast as Thy great sky.

O God, engulf us in the tide

Of love Inexorable—and hide

Us ever in Thy secret place

Where we, as one, may see Thy face.

Because He first loved us, we love—

So let us drink from Thine above—

And mirror, as we there abide,

The love of Jesus for His bride.

Elisabeth Howard

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