1950 Love Lets Go
Love Lets Go
The year 1950 with its nice, round number, positioned squarely in the middle of the twentieth century, was enough to get my father’s Brethren assembly thinking about end-times prophecy. He wrote to my mother on January 3, reporting on a recent prayer meeting discussion where another young man “looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘We are within forty years of the millennial reign of Jesus Christ, and that’s a conservative estimate!’ At supper, Dad said tonight, ‘Children born today will see the wind-up of the age.’”
But while any attempt at placing a date on Christ’s return is certainly subject to miscalculation, the imperative of keeping a watchful mind-set is not.
Do consider this, Bets, slowly and for several moments at a time. What is my relation—practically—to the end of the age? . . . How lost, alas, a life lived in any other light!
Maybe that’s why the next day in his journal, his heart turned philosophically to the “extremely dangerous, cumulative effects of earthly things.”
January 4: One may have good reason, for example, to want a wife, and he may have one legitimately. But with a wife comes Peter’s (the pumpkin eater’s) proverbial dilemma—he must find a place to keep her, and most wives will not stay on such terms as Peter proposed.
So a wife demands a house; a house, in turn, requires curtains, rugs, washing machines, and so on; a house with these things must soon become a home, and children are the intended outcome. The needs multiply as they are met: a car demands a garage; a garage, land; land, a garden; a garden, tools; tools need sharpening! Woe, woe, woe to the man who would live a disentangled life in my century. Second Timothy 2:4 is impossible in the United States, if one insists on a wife.
I learn from this that the wisest life is the simplest one, lived in the fulfillment of only the basic requirements of life: shelter, food, covering, and a bed. And even these can become productive of other needs if one does not heed. Be on guard, my soul, of complicating your environment so that you have neither time nor room for growth!
My father’s precise and artistic handwriting—he loved trying different styles!
This is the typical Jim Elliot! He couldn’t abide the American craving for possessions. He was right in saying they came with “dangerous, cumulative effects.” How well I know it. The urge to simplify my life by getting rid of “stuff” is often inspired by memories of my childhood with the Indians, who never seemed to suffer with discontentment. We needed little, wanted little, being so far removed from stores or from others’ homes where the finest amenities were available. My mother often echoed the same sentiment, teaching that we should hold God’s gifts loosely, truly recognizing them as gifts, not as personal possessions to be hoarded and clung to.
But my dad wasn’t referring just to material things. Despite his love for my mother, he continued to be wary of marriage, of its distractions and divided loyalties. He still felt as if marriage would only complicate his calling to the mission field, the details of which were proving complicated enough. From his current spiritual vantage point, God was speaking loudly and consistently to him about the conviction for remaining single.
January 7: I cannot say what led me to read the Law of Moses yesterday, but I was strangely affected by a verse that seemed to leap out of context of itself and apply to my attitude toward marriage. I have been considerably reminded lately of the one-thousand-years-equals-one-day principle of Peter and its application to the length of human history.
The third day speaks of Christ’s returning to rule (see the “after two days” references in Scripture). . . . Exodus 19:15 spoke, as I said, of its own force to me, “Be ready against the third day: come not near a woman.” This with Matthew 19:12 and 1 Corinthians 7 and, in type, Revelation 14:4 present to me a challenge I never heard from any pulpit.
Time was simply too short, he believed, to be weighed down with personal pleasures and entanglements, or really to plan much into the future at all.
I must not think it strange if God takes in youth those whom I should have kept on earth till they were older. God is peopling eternity, and I must not restrict Him to old men and women.
I’m not sure of whom he was specifically writing, but he did have several “premonitions” about his own life being short, and he preferred being “burned out for God” rather than wasting his passions.
Such was his thinking at the beginning of 1950.
Now, to reset the general scene for you: My father was living in Portland, teaching at a Christian high school, leading Bible studies for teens, as well as generally helping out at home and at his father’s assembly. He was often called on to preach and speak at various gatherings and ministry venues. As to his short-range plans, he did mention in his January 3 letter that he’d received acceptance into the summer Wycliffe program in Oklahoma.
Feel as though the Lord would have me take the time there—whether I go to India or South America. The British Guiana project is dragging, so I will likely spend my spring here. Pray for more openings for the Word, will you? Oh, that God would cause His Word to “run and be glorified.”
The Christian school board verified a standing offer to take two weeks’ meetings in their high school. . . . I have never done any such thing and feel quite insufficient for a crowd of active minds as they will have. Pray that the Holy Spirit will do His work of lauding, lifting, and enlivening Christ before them.
My mother, meanwhile, was still at home in New Jersey—helping her parents with the cooking and cleaning, teaching Sunday school at church, and preparing to leave soon for Florida where she would be on faculty at Hampden DuBose Academy for at least the next semester. One night, after finishing a short letter to my dad, she wrote in her diary:
January 12: I think of him so much “when the dawn flames in the sky.” He said he looked at Mt. Hood, in its icing of snow, and thought of me every time. I wish he could visit H.D.A., but there is no prospect of this as long as he holds to his resolution.
This “resolution,” I believe, was their commitment not to see each other until the Lord confirmed in my father’s mind that marriage was a clearer possibility. They prayed fervently for God’s will, as evidenced in their diary and journal entries, keeping it uppermost in their minds. Their constant desire was to seek Him, wanting to ascertain the path He’d chosen for each of them.
This she clearly expressed in her letter of January 12, where she asked, “Jim, please pray for me as I go to H.D.A. There are things involved which I cannot write, but will mean the necessity of keeping low before God.” She didn’t want to sound arrogant, but the faculty thought so highly of her that she recognized ahead of time the temptation to feel “full of herself” as she re-entered this familiar environment. She’d learned through all of Amy Carmichael’s writings (and through Scripture, of course) that she must be “willing to be considered a nobody.”
I do not want to be cowardly, but I do ask your prayer that the Lord will perfect in me His heart’s desire. I don’t know what else to ask than “Thy will be done”—in me and in those at the academy.
For one thing, Jim, I think some of them have the idea that once they get me there and sink their talons into me, I will stay permanently. And if I know God’s leading at all, He wants to send
She closed her letter with a sequence of biblical commands she’d discovered again recently in Psalm 37, which she’d committed to both her journal and diary a week earlier, and which would reappear in future letters.
Delight thyself . . . Commit thy way . . .Trust in Him . . .Rest!
It seemed almost like her personal charge for this year of “resolution.”
And if she and my dad were truly serious about keeping themselves separated from one another, they certainly achieved it by the contrast in their living conditions as mid-January arrived—one of them in Oregon, the other in Florida.
January 19
You would not like Portland this afternoon, but you would thrill at her tomorrow morning. Last evening frozen rain lashed down the Columbia Gorge and poured a solid icy crust on drifted snow. All day today the rain has come finer—almost as a blown milk—waiting until it finds surface before freezing. Now every twig is swollen to twice its true proportions with accumulated ice.
Schools are closed; there is practically no traffic; the sky is all gray. Icicles reach wriggling from the eaves. Oddly enough, there are three or four pale robins hopping about the yard, shivering, I swear.
Tonight the temperature will fall considerably, and in the morning every telegraph line, tree limb, sign post—anything exposed—will be crackling with several times its own weight of ice upon it. And then will come what we call here the Silver Thaw. It is one of the most beautiful phenomena we know here in winters (unless it be Mt. Hood by moonlight!), and one of the most damaging as well. Dad pokes his head out the front door occasionally and casts a quizzical, apprehensive look at our sagging eaves, then turns inside shaking his head and making that little clicking noise with his tongue on his teeth.
My, his writing!
And hers!
January 30
Sunshine on the long, blue lake . . . live oaks shrouded with Spanish moss . . . throngs of azaleas, shouting with color . . . bamboo and banana leaves rustling in the warm breeze . . . palms of all varieties bowing and rattling—this is H.D.A. in January, while ice storms tear across the north!
I have just been supervising and helping with the cleaning up of some of the front lawn. It is hot in the sun, but the warm sweetness of camphor and long-needled pine is pleasant, and the lake is a cooling sight below us. I went down and hung my feet from the dock in the water, and wished I could have slid the rest of the way in!
Yet her days, she said, were busy ones. “I have two sections daily of public speaking, and also I help with recreation, music (boys’ quartet, girls’ trio, glee club, as well as some individual instruction), outdoor work, being senior class sponsor, etc.”
All in all, it couldn’t have been going better. My father’s prayer for her, that “all your misgivings will be melted to thanksgivings” was truly being answered in the affirmative, she said.
The fears I had had when coming here have been dispelled, and everything is wonderful. They’ve given me a grand roommate—my favorite teacher when I was here as a student. We live in a picture perfect of a room: blue flowered walls, white furniture, white organdy ruffled bedspreads and curtains. Some contrast to P.B.I.! But Paul learned how to be abased, and how to abound.
She saw the faithfulness and goodness of God as she looked around. And when she looked to the distant northwest, she prayed for the faithfulness and goodness of God to cover all of my father’s labors as well.
Ewell Hall at HDA. Home of the headmaster and headmistress, as well as a girls’ dormitory with formal entertaining rooms. My mother lived here as a teacher in 1950.
Tell me how your meetings went, Jim, the ones at the high school. Were they resumed after the storm? I did pray for you—and continue to pray that you may know God’s will, that you will be filled with joy and peace, and go on to perfection.
In Him, who alone is Altogether Lovely, Betty
Yet not only were they farther apart geographically than ever, the lag between their letters would grow farther apart as well. Instead of the more customary week-to-ten-days’ distance between writing, the periods of silence throughout 1950 would routinely stretch into months. They were doing what they felt sure to be God’s will—pursuing Him, learning of Him, willingly surrendering themselves to be useful in His service, while ordering their feelings and desires for each other to take a back seat. Love was letting go. This was to be a season of following only one love—delighting, committing, trusting, resting—submitting themselves individually to the Lord’s shaping and perfecting.
They were believing God’s Word that says, “Delight thyself also in the Lord; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart” (Ps. 37:4). “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you” (Matt. 6:33). “This one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 3:13–14).
As my father said in a letter from early February, his last until April 1:
February 11
I have finished Gold Cord [an Amy Carmichael book] with threats to go at it again. One cannot get all it’s worth in a single reading. Wilfred Tidmarsh, the brother with whom I correspond re: Indian work in Ecuador says he is an avid reader of her works and that he constantly derives spiritual exhilaration from them. Peculiar that such widespread blessing should come from a single life.
But God does that for those who wholly follow. It is said of Samuel that Jehovah let not one of his words fall to the ground. What reward for the one who listens in night seasons and requests, “Speak, Lord, Thy servant heareth.”
One of my mother’s diary entries from the same period yields solid evidence of this posture as well.
February 9: In reading Luke 12:1–3, I find solemn warning against hypocrisy. All shall be revealed. Nothing shall remain uncovered. This drives me to the evermore solemn prayer, “Remove from me the way of lying: and grant me thy law graciously. I have chosen the way of truth: thy judgments have I laid before me” (Ps. 119:29–30).
Yesterday I read, too, in Deut. 25—“Thou shalt have a perfect and a just weight,” an exhortation to justice, fairness, impartiality, absolute truth. Lord, may Christ Himself so fill me that there may be no room for “covered things.”
I’ll tell you why this selection of hers means so much to me. If there was ONE thing I was certain of in my mother, it was her truthfulness. Many other traits, of course, were wholly admirable in her, but I loved that I could depend on her every word. I knew she meant exactly what she said, and if there was to be a consequence to any disobedience of mine, I could certainly expect it. None of that cajoling with empty threats not followed through on, which leaves children with no sense of secure boundaries or consequences for sin.
She spoke with exactness of detail and used words fittingly, so that anyone listening to her was instantly captivated. When she recounted a conversation or described a person with her keen observational power, I could picture them perfectly. She also spoke with authority on the Scriptures because she not only spent time in God’s Word but lived it out.
Now she did enjoy “having the floor.” I smile to see her confessing in her journal that she oughtn’t wish to sound so dogmatic or authoritative, that she needed a more listening heart, because I clearly recall her confessing these same things to me. She could be cut to the quick at times by her own insensitivity toward others who were speaking to her, and she wanted to become more gracious to those who didn’t have their words or facts straight.
But, oh, the habit of correction—of correcting others! I’m afraid I inherited it, too, and I am frequently ashamed of myself for practicing it. She wrote in a couple of her books about her realization as she grew older in Christ, that she didn’t need to have the last word on everything and didn’t need to always be straightening people out. But I so appreciated her honest appraisal and her clear thinking on just about everything! The truth of the Bible and her experiences of God’s faithfulness to her were the high marks of her speaking, and were also indicative of her private practice at home.
“Absolute truth?” Yes, indeed.
I feel similarly drawn to what she wrote in these next two entries:
February 16: “The Lord is the strength of my life.” Ps. 27:1. This morning I was on the verge of discouragement because of the instability and sinfulness of my heart. The future seemed to be dark before me, and the past loomed heavy in my sight. There is no strength in me. I am the weakest of the weak. The Lord, then, in gracious revelation, gave this verse: “The Lord is the strength of my life.” Here is rest and victory, peace of heart and confidence of mind.
March 3: “The beloved of the Lord shall dwell in safety by Him, and the Lord shall cover him all day long, and he shall dwell between His shoulders.” Deut. 33:12. Oh, the joy, first of all in simply being “the beloved of the Lord,” then in the assurance of dwelling safely by Him. Analogous to the sense of security in being close to one whom one loves, I feel this rest and peace in being “by Him,” secure from the multitude of confusions which Satan has tried to hurl at me. The words “all the day long”—that means all this day—moment by moment. Not just from now till 11 a.m. but to the rising of the stars. Could there be any place of greater quietness and love than “between His shoulders”? I thank Thee, dearest Lord, for this verse today.
These two pieces typify her life story. She walked carefully with the Lord, needing His strength and peace continually. When I was a child, she gave me that same security in her own love. She always pointed out to me how much the Lord loves us, that we have no reason to fear anything. Whenever I would grow discouraged, she reminded me that He would be my helper and that I could depend on Him completely for everything I needed. Even years earlier in the jungle, she never gave me any reason to be fearful. Because of her confidence, I was rarely concerned about the very real dangers around us.
Obviously she’d been cultivating her trust in His love and protection long before.
Finally in March, she wrote to my dad again.
March 10
Your letter of a month ago has sat on my desk, amid stacks of papers that need grading, and yearbook material, and declamations. Finally, a moment (which is likely to be broken) has come when I could try to answer.
I wonder if you are still teaching at the Christian school . . .
Yes, he was. In fact, “they want me to teach for a year in the high school,” he’d recently written in his journal, and “the board wants me to decide soon about what I am to be doing in the fall.” My mother’s brother Dave also was eagerly recruiting him as a speaker and conference leader with the Inter-Varsity ministry organization.
February 18: O God, so many turns, so many ways, so many pits! Help me, Lord, to see all Thy way for me—and to do it without consideration of any man. If I refuse Inter-Varsity work, I offend Dave; refuse the school board and offend them; go to India and discourage Brother Tidmarsh in Ecuador. How am I to know, my Father? It looks like I must make a decision soon, but I can make no decision unless I hear Thee speak, O Lord. Be not silent unto me.
The kind of work my uncle Dave was proposing drew my father, of course. He was certainly skilled at exhorting students and young people to take seriously the mandate of Christ on their souls and futures. But “this leaping from place to place, here a night, there a day, has been shown in the summer of 1948 to be ineffective, lacking the substantial quality of settled building. My exercise [a word he often used, meaning striving in prayer, searching God’s mind] seems to be undergoing crucial fires just now.”
March 6: I sensed afresh last evening the truth of Paul’s word, “How shall they preach, except they be sent?” O God, here I am, send me. Let me not miss my path in running ahead. Send me, oh, send me afield!
My mother, too, equally desirous of the foreign fields, continued faithfully in what she was sure would be her “temporary work.” But God was working in her heart, graciously allowing her not to rest too much in that contented place which might give way to complacency. Closing her March 10 letter, she said:
Such love He has given me for these students, along with joy and peace in this temporary work, is something I had not thought possible.
The Lord has opened to me new avenues of love in the past few years—so different in scope, but so illuminating of the love of God! Truly, it “hath neither brim nor bottom.” And, lest discouragement come in measuring my portion of the fruits of the Spirit, I simply think of this: All that I ought to be, Christ is. And Christ liveth in me. Enough? It is enough.
Amen.
“There are times,” she wrote in her diary, “when I should like to tell someone about Jim. Not a soul here knows anything about it, and I would dare not let Mrs. DuBose know.” But though far from home, and though far from certain about where her life was ultimately headed, she rested in the knowledge that God was there, that she was surrendered to His will, and . . . well, her words still say it best: “It is enough.”
If only other people would stay out of her personal business . . .
“Your letter was full of joy and blessedness,” my father wrote on April 1, yet it had arrived in Oregon not long after her brother had been there visiting. Despite being engaged and busy and moving ahead with his life, Uncle Dave continued to feel responsible for coming to my mother’s defense against what he considered my father’s almost toying with her emotions.
April 1
Dave stirred me up again to reconsider our relationship, and I had come to agree with him. But it seemed like re-digging old graves to begin. Somehow it does not seem that I must explain myself to you again.
Dave and I are both in agreement that if you are “clutching at any straw” (as he puts it, referring to an unsurrendered hope for marriage), and that straw is our correspondence, it must be dropped pronto. Dave feels still that it is so; that you are fooling yourself into thinking that you have no expectation, but that your actions deny it. These actions to which he refers are the weeping episodes you undergo upon receipt of my letters—evidence, says he, that you are deceiving yourself. . . .
Betts, if this is so, and it represents in you an attitude which defines our relationship more deeply than the family one we know in Christ, I must hear of it and take action. (Dave says if anything is going to happen, I must be the one to do it, since you cannot tell your own heart.) You cannot be any more to me now than a beloved sister. Anything beyond that . . . must culminate in marriage, and for that I have neither word nor prospect of word.
From later comments, which we’ll soon see, as well as earlier ones we’ve already seen, I don’t think she felt any need for this rehashing of terms. She knew where things stood in their relationship, and she knew her own heart and mind better than anyone else could know it. I can imagine a frustrated sigh escaping her lips as she read this admonition from him, where he said:
If you are in any way unsettled, deferred from thoughts which would exalt Christ, shaken with underground expectations of any sort by the reading of my letters, then my letters shall come no more.
Okay. If that’s how it needed to be, she wouldn’t send a reply explaining her side of the issue again. She’d already done as much—to her satisfaction. The best use of his time, she believed, was to continue the waiting and struggle in trying to hear from God, which he said he was already doing.
I have been under deep exercise re: the field again, yet have no leading from God. Who can search the wonders of His wisdom; who can follow Him in His ways toward His children? But surely Light shall arise in darkness for them who fear His name. In His Word is my trust.
Yes, as hers would continually be too.
Spring and Summer
Still, the specific way forward in my father’s missionary calling was no more exact to him as springtime arrived, and the approaching warmth hinted at the nearness of decisions needing to made for the summer.
April 19: In seeking a promise of God’s acceptance of my trust in Him for guidance in the next one and a half months, I got this encouragement from Isaiah 42:16—“I will bring the blind by a way that they know not; in paths that they know not I will lead them; I will make darkness light before them, and crooked places straight. These things I will do, and I will not forsake them.”
I then picture him sitting back from his Bible, perhaps smiling to himself, before writing this priceless prayer and takeaway:
I fulfill the qualifications for once, Lord. Most surely I am blind.
Yes, even blindness, he was learning, was not the same as having no direction. As he wrote in his journal the following day, “I asked earnestly last night for some token of guidance to be shown me today concerning my going to Wycliffe. I got none.” And yet . . .
April 20: I see that God is going to give me specific leading, not when I ask for it, but when I need it, and not until.
What God was giving him, however, were some overall principles to establish within himself as he looked beyond Wycliffe, beyond the summer, looking more broadly toward where the Lord was ultimately leading him. Among the main ones were these:
One, remember always that God has taught you the importance of a building ministry. Staying in one group for some period of time, stressing emphases consistently, is the best way to accomplish lasting work for God.
Two, do not put yourself in a position to any man or group so that they, and not you, direct policies which you know must be decided on the individual’s exercise before God. Never let any organization dictate the will of God.
Later that day, a third principle seemed to coalesce in his mind as coming from the Lord—not quite so general in nature as the first two, but more directed at my father personally.
Three, whenever the choice is between the doing of spiritual work (whatever sort) and a secular job (again, of whatever sort)—the choice for me must be the former, regardless of financial conditions.
Therefore, with this guideline in hand, he felt assured of at least one specific ramification:
Turned down Vancouver school board’s offer to complete the school year as a seventh and eighth-grade teacher. Found some difficulty in discerning the Lord’s will, but believe He has guided. It is easy to be swayed by minor (or even major) points when one comes to making decisions if one cannot hark to principles of guidance.
By summer, he was certain. The path that God had painted for him through these principles and through the Word was leading him to Wycliffe. And if he would diligently obey what he felt in his spirit to be God’s will—as well as the teachings of Scripture he knew to be God’s will—he was certain of staying precisely where the Lord could keep speaking to him and using him.
June 2: Impressed with Ephesians 5:17—“understanding what the will of the Lord is,” and Romans 12:2—“proving what is the . . . will of God.” Every moment I may be conscious and rejoice in the knowledge of God’s will. Obedience to every command puts me on that track and keeps me there.
Decisions, of course, must be made. But as in railroad, so in life. A block signal—a crisis—is lighted only where there is special need. I may not always be in sight of a “go” light, but sticking to the tracks will take me where the next one is. Understanding the will of the Lord is believing Him, that He will in all situations where I have obeyed make that way His own way, effectual for eternity.
How marvelous, though, when God’s ways that are “effectual for eternity” are able to be enjoyed in the moment as well. This is what happened when, on July 1, my parents’ journeys brought them together again, in Wheaton, at the event of my Uncle Dave’s wedding to my mother’s old PBI roommate, Phyl Gibson (“Gibby”).
They weren’t together for long. Only a couple of days. And obviously the wedding festivities occupied most of their time, preventing them from any prolonged, private conversations, such as the ones they’d been able to share in Portland the previous summer. But being around each other was precious just the same. “Saw Betty again with joy and refreshment,” he remarked in his journal on July 1. “I am most grateful to Thee for her, Lord Jesus.” His comments were almost as brief as their visit.
The lengthier account came from my mother’s letter to him, written from the quiet of her family’s home in Moorestown and sent to him in Oklahoma.
July 8
Little did I dream when I wrote last that I would see you before I wrote again! I had no idea, of course, that there would be such a long interval, but furthermore I surely never expected to see you at the wedding, since you had told me in February that you were going to Wycliffe. But once again the Lord’s direction was unmistakable.
Last night I was reading Psalm 71, and it seemed so appropriate for several things God had been showing me. Jim, I wish I could tell you how wondrously the Lord has given me an absolute rest and confidence in Himself. Though He has not shown the next step, I find it impossible to “take thought for the morrow” or to be anxious. This, to me, is miraculous. . . . Does verse 7 bring comfort to your soul as it does to mine, Jim?!
Her whole letter, which wasn’t long, indicates a maturity that exceeded even the highly mature character already present in earlier letters. This one is confident, focused, noticeably exalted, reflective of the comment my father made a day after seeing her—“The Lord is at work in her.” Rather than bemoaning the shortness of their visit or gushing with emotional reaction to it, she was far more interested in celebrating what God was accomplishing in her heart.
The last time she’d heard from him, you may recall, had been the letter from April in which he’d felt need to affirm the uncommitted, nonbinding status of their relationship. But spring had been incredibly busy at HDA, and she’d never found the time (or had the desire) to respond to it.
“It’s a bit late to answer your letter of April 1,” she said, “but I have it before me now, and it blessed me and riled me as I reread it.” She’d been “blessed” by its reporting of God’s favor on his preaching and the effects the Lord was producing in people’s souls as a result. She was “riled,” however, by the rather demeaning insistence that her heart needed constant petting and coddling. After all . . .
“Well, we’ve discussed that,” she curtly said. “Let people think we are nuts. We have trusted and, I think, been obedient.” She hoped to be over and done with all this tiptoeing around her feelings.
Though no one could seem to understand why they weren’t getting engaged and making plans to go to the mission field together—or, if not, why they weren’t just leaving each other alone—she knew she’d put God first and knew my father was attempting to do the same thing (maybe with a little more frustration than she). And as long as God’s will was uppermost in each of their hearts, they were under no obligation to explain themselves to anyone or give out all the details of their prayer life and relationship dynamics. “Let people think we are nuts,” then—while she and my dad went on alone, seeking to expand God’s kingdom by being His witnesses, to the ends of the earth.
This was what “defined their relationship,” if such definitions were even necessary. There was simply so much more than themselves to be thinking about, as my mother said. . .
My—as I write, there are so many things that crowd my mind which I wish we had talked about. But what are two brief evenings? I do praise God for them, though. I think I was conscious of a happier fellowship than ever before on Saturday evening.
Isn’t that beautiful to hear? After everything they’d been through? Love had let go. And God had given them a friendship even more special in return.
My father answered her letter quickly, grateful as well “for the time together two weeks ago. I hardly remember two lines of conversational sequence from that Saturday night, but am impressed with a most pleasurable sensation on recalling it.”
(Some of this “pleasurable sensation,” to be frank, may have come from the transporting scent of her perfume emanating from the envelope as he opened it. “The Tweed was delicious,” he said in signing off. “More?”)
But more importantly, he was writing to share with her a monumental development in his calling to the mission field. [Note, in the following excerpt, “Bill” is Bill Cathers; “Bob” is Bob Weeber, a roommate at Wycliffe.]
July 16
I must tell you now of the ten-day period Bill and Bob and I spent praying about the abandoned station [Shandia] in Eastern Ecuador among the Quichua Indians. On the fourth of July, we were at dinner when a brother from the area began casually discussing the work. We were so impressed that we came up to the room to pray and covenant for ten days of separately seeking God’s mind about our going there.
He was really getting serious about Ecuador and the Shandia location. But beyond this agreement to keep praying, he and his friends sensed nothing more definite that night. The only connection they’d become aware of, beside the leading they’d felt at the dinner table, was that “unbeknownst to each other” the previous fall, both Bill and my father had communicated with Dr. Tidmarsh about the possibilities of coming there to continue his work.
“Well, to keep the story on this page,” he said in his letter to my mother, “we met yesterday morning”—Day Ten. But in his journal from a few days earlier, he went into more detail about what all had happened between the Lord and him, just prior to that morning meeting.
July 14: I was reading casually in Exodus 23 when verses 20 and 21 came out vividly: “Behold, I send an angel before thee, to keep thee by the way, and to bring thee into the place which I have prepared. Take heed before him. . . .”
Coming as it did (plainly out of context) with such preceding feelings and such simple believing for some promise, I take this as leading from God that I should write Tidmarsh telling him that I should come to Ecuador in the will of God.
Bob, he said, had no such leading, but Bill did. “So, in the will of God, it is destination: Shandia from now on.” None of it was the result of any “thinking visions,” but simply a “quiet confidence that a door is open which no man can shut.”
Gird me on, fearless in battle,Draw me up tight to Thy side,I would drink blood as true metal;I would with warriors ride . . .
“Shandia from now on.” July 16, 1950.
He had faithfully waited.
And God had faithfully answered.
The Lord had chosen for him—Ecuador.
My mother was exultant at the news. Writing in her diary:
July 20: Bless God—He has answered many prayers for J. that he would be guided as to a mission field. Had a letter from him saying that he and Bill Cathers are setting their faces toward Ecuador, to a place among the Quichua Indians which has had to be abandoned. They have written the elders of Portland and Wheaton, respectively asking counsel or commendation for the coming fall. How very glad I am to hear this. “God is faithful.”
Again, two days later, still beaming with spiritual excitement:
July 22: The more I think of the decision Jim has made, the gladder I am. The Lord keeps His word without fail, though we wait what sometimes seems a long while.
Through it all, of course, through all the praying and waiting, she remained very much in love with him. But she had given him up to God and was truly thankful for how the Lord had led him so specifically toward a mission focus.
As for herself, she’d received no such clear direction toward the mission field as of yet. But despite what she considered to be areas in her life still in need of sanctification—“a tendency toward too much casualness,” for example, “and a sort of off-hand attitude”—she maintained absolute confidence in God’s love and His working in her heart. He had led her “into such a new sense of His nearness and restfulness and intimacy with Him.” Oh, that he would lead her toward an even “greater reverence for Thee, my dear Father, and a deeper thankfulness that I know Thee as Lord and Master.” Her spirit was willing. Willing to wait.
As always, though, it wouldn’t be easy. Waiting rarely is. Back home in Moorestown as the fall drew near, she often wondered what my father was out there doing, knowing he’d set his sights fully on South America.
August 26: No word from Jim since July 19. I suppose Wycliffe is over now. Wonder where he is, what the advice of the Portland elders was?
What she couldn’t really know, until his next letter arrived, was that my father—even with Ecuador so richly on his mind—was often wondering about her too.
August 31
Your name has come to mind much lately, and I have asked God to strengthen you and demonstrate His leading plainly to you this fall. I presume you are back at Birdsong now, or at least will best be reached there. I have wondered if the Lord has given further guidance about working in Philly and perhaps becoming acquainted in some assembly there. That seemed best to me last time we talked, but perhaps His ways of unfolding secrets have led to something better.
Yes, “to something better”—to be revealed through the Lord’s “ways of unfolding secrets.” I’m sure she thrilled at knowing my dad was praying along these lines for her, just as she’d been faithfully doing and would continue to do for him. Nothing in this world, nothing in this life—nothing, absolutely nothing at all—can ever be “something better” than that.
Autumn
September came, dawning upon my father at the conclusion of ten weeks of language study. Yet even so, “Bill and I felt that the pillar-cloud was not lifting for us, so we are staying on,” he’d said in that August 31 letter he’d written to her. “There is abundant opportunity to minister in the area—high school kids in Norman, needy country folk all around, welcome in the Oklahoma City assembly, and when school starts, work on the University campus.” Their plan in the interim was to find paying work as odd-job handymen while simultaneously seeking the Lord for openings through which to pursue their true mission, their first love: evangelizing the lost and boldly discipling the believers.
It was a good way of staying busy through an unavoidable holding pattern.
Bill has not yet received word from the brethren in Wheaton re: commendation, though he wrote weeks ago. They may refuse to commend him on the basis of not knowing him well enough. We rest in the Lord as to the outcome of this exercise.
Yet on the plus side . . .
The brethren in Portland wrote a very encouraging letter of commendation for me, and seem quite happy about letting me go. All are agreed that we should go out together. Brother Tidmarsh was expecting to go on furlough this November, but he is holding up his plans if we can get there soon so that he can introduce us to the work.
Apparently then, even in waiting, things were picking up speed. “If it is God’s mind,” he said, “we will leave as soon as we have gotten passports and seen home once more.” To this end, there were a number of related matters to handle, other official documents to be pulled together, as well as “some supplies to be collected.” But nothing major. Nothing extraordinary. In fact, (naturally, he couldn’t keep himself from saying it)—
. . . nothing like most married couples require.
There it is again—the missionary’s freedom of being unencumbered by marriage. Sounds like those three resolutions he’d made at the end of 1948 were each coming together in real life: (1) tribes work in South America, (2) a summer at Wycliffe, and now (3) “jungle work, single.” How else, unless he were unmarried, could he be seeking passage to Ecuador by “working on a deal which would take us there as crew members on a banana boat”?
To be single at this key moment in his life meant that no matter how dangerous the challenge or how daring the cost, he need not worry about anyone’s safety or well-being other than his own—which meant, for him, since he was willing to do absolutely anything in pursuit of proclaiming the gospel, he was free to sail ahead with no worries in the least.
No wonder his fearless example has inspired so many people’s zeal for taking Christ to the nations.
Yet as genuinely thankful as my mother felt when hearing of these exciting activities in my father’s life, I’m sure all the breathless updates left her at least a little bit envious, as well as lonesome for his company—someone with whom she shared equal dedication to the gospel commission.
She’d once pondered to herself, in daydreaming about the foreign-land work she longed to do, “Is this ‘love of adventure’ a mere desire to do something hard? Is it wrong?” No, it wasn’t wrong. But like everything in God’s kingdom, it must be done in His strength, in His time, and in response to His guiding hand—the result of waiting, resting, and trusting. Yet to the patient, watchful follower of Christ, it can still be a time of blessedness, even against the cries of comparison.
September 4: The past weeks have been an almost agony of waiting—wondering what the Lord would have me do this winter. And the waiting has not been without its manifold temptations of doubt and discouragement.
But it is in times like these when our dear Father speaks to the heart most blessedly, giving reassurance and new promises, and almost fondling His child with an “excess of love.”
Oh, the joy which has come in knowing that I am one with Christ . . . oh, the marvelous, unspeakable interchange of joy—He my joy, I His joy—He my satisfaction, I His satisfaction. For I am accepted in the Beloved. Right now I am as fit to stand in His eternal light as I shall ever be, for I wear the perfect robe of Christ’s righteousness. I am in Christ—may He be seen in me.
Her next journal entry on the subject, though lengthy, is worth reprinting in its entirety. Perhaps you’re in one of those places where these insights of hers will speak with perfectly timed wisdom in your life.
September 7: For some, the steps which are “ordered by the Lord” are illuminated with such a bright light that they are visible to others. There seems to be a great and wonderful series of “miracles,” “surprises,” “open doors,” “coincidences”—one thing after another in rapid and thrilling sequence. Those who look on say, “That man is truly led by God.” And indeed, that man truly is.
But, “He calleth His own sheep by name, and leadeth them out.” So His merciful and miraculous leading is individual—“Thou (singular) shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God led thee.” The temptation is great to imitate or to expect the same manner of guidance which God has given another. “What is that to Thee; follow thou Me.” His Word abounds in examples of His separate leading of His sheep.
For me, He has not chosen to give signs which may be shown to others. He has not led in any spectacular way, or by steps which could be proved to another. Rather, my Father has quietly opened the way, often after much “sitting still” on the part of His daughter; repeated disappointments; “hope deferred”; and finally, a revealing of some plan which does not at all fit my expectations.
But, oh, His thoughts are not my thoughts! And He knows the thoughts which He thinks toward me—they are “of peace, and not of evil.” And in the meantime, while I am waiting, watching, praying, He gives quietness and peace. He will never suffer me to be tempted above that I am able. (And it is He, not I, who knows what I am able!) “So I go on, not knowing—I would not if I might. I’d rather walk in the dark with God than go alone in the light.”
Over and over, I am impressed with the importance of walking alone with Him, following Him regardless of all else, not concerning myself with the paths where He is leading others. “Thou will show me the path of life.” “He shall direct thy paths.” Amen, Lord.
Summing up, she then sealed all these thoughts about God’s all-wise, individual thoughts toward His children in a fitting, closing prayer.
I accept Thy way for me as good, acceptable, and perfect. Thou knowest every thought and desire of my heart. They are not hid from Thee. And Thou well knowest that my ways have not been Thine—my plans not what Thou hadst so wisely planned. So once again I acknowledge that “so foolish was I, and ignorant . . . as a beast before Thee . . . nevertheless, I am continually with Thee: Thou hast holden me by my right hand. Thou shalt guide me with Thy counsel and afterward receive me to glory. . . . My flesh and my heart faileth, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.”
I praise Thee and thank Thee, blessed Lord, my Father. Thou hast done all things well.
Though she was such a young woman when she wrote of it here (only twenty-three), this practice of being alone with God—waiting, trusting, being assured of His Shepherd heart toward her—was her lifelong journey. People often said of her, “She seems so serene and peaceful.” But only through the sincere reading of Scripture and continually giving her heart in trust to God was she able to maintain that peace, even as she entered into dementia in the early 2000s. She truly lived out the deep, hard beauty of these words she wrote, bearing witness, like she said, that He does “all things well.”
My father also, during this time of active waiting, was learning from the Lord some of those maxims for which he’s become most remembered:
September 24
And this one:
September 25: He who maketh Ease his god, Sufficiency his altar, Pleasure his priest, and Time his offering knows not what man is born for.
He was trusting, as Psalm 31:15 says, that “my times are in thy hands.” Or as Psalm 139:16—“In thy book they were all written, even the days that were ordained for me.” These were “ordained days” then, he called them . . .
. . . whether spent in waiting, working, or whatever. We have asked guidance, been obedient where we understood what was to be done, and now wait word for the next step.
Meanwhile, no letters passed between them until my mother wrote on October 2, saying her brother Phil had received “a card from Bill, and I think he said you two would not be able to go out to the field for a year or so. I didn’t know whether this applied only to Bill or to you also,” but . . . either way, the letter she wrote him at this juncture was both charge and blessing.
October 2
Jim, you and I have had so much of the Word, with so much of the fellowship with those who know Christ, and so much knowledge—oh, that we might know Him, the Altogether Lovely, that His life might literally be manifest in us. . . .
I realize afresh how desperately little of Christ others may at present see in me, but truly I have learned to love and adore Him as I never did before. This of course makes me the more earnestly desirous that the inward peace and joy, which are of His Spirit, may be daily, hourly manifest, that my life may be hid with Christ in God.
And surely, if I ask this of my Father for myself, can I not also ask that you, in preparation for His special work for you in Ecuador, may become truly Christlike?
I have prayed fervently that you might know the Shepherd’s voice, and no other. I trust that you will let nothing deceive you in the details of your going out—not common sense, experience, advice, ambition for souls rather than adoration for Christ, or any other voice than that of the living God, who will not suffer His faithfulness to fail.
All the things God had been showing her and doing within her this year—all the things she herself would want to be told if she were the one who was currently in my father’s shoes—she shared them now in ink through this letter.
But as she reread the previous paragraph—the one counseling him to trust none but “the Shepherd’s voice,” being careful not to get ahead of God in “your going out”—a thought occurred to her. He might misconstrue the motive behind her words. “You may think I am concerned for selfish reasons. I am quite sure nothing of that nature enters in. In fact, I was disappointed to hear that your going would be delayed.”
Yet perhaps the fact that she even caught herself and questioned how her words would be received is telling on its own. I’d say she couldn’t completely escape the disappointment any person would feel, conflicted over her desire for someone—a desire which now seemed more unlikely than ever of leading where she once had dared to imagine. As recently as ten days earlier, she’d written in her diary, “Dreamed last night that I was with J. again. I miss him beyond words.”
But here was the truth, as plainly as she could say it:
You are to me, now, only a brother. I understand what you have felt in calling me “sister,” and the freedom with which you associate with other girls. I have been, in part, blinded by feeling. I trust it shall no longer be so.
She closed, simply and inclusively:
Say hello to brother Bill for me. May the Lord strengthen each of you with might by His Spirit and cause you to know Christ as you had not dreamed it possible to know Him. For who that knows Him can help loving Him?
[Signed] Your sister, for we are “builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit,”
Betty
Being “just a sister” to my father was now her aim, though her feelings did still rise up in hope of some future day when she could be more assured of God’s leading them together. Certainly for now, though, she did not want to interfere in his desire to go to Ecuador. And I believe she did not . . . even though my father, perhaps reading between the lines, picked up on whatever traces of loss and heartbreak she was possibly feeling. I think you’ll spot him doing it in his next letter, mailed a month later from the home of a former Wheaton friend, Ed McCully, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Ed McCully with my father. They were best friends at Wheaton and beyond.
This letter requires a bit of setup. He’d received word near the end of September that Ed was considering quitting school and beginning to look “for open doors for a sold-out life.” He was speeding up his interest in leaving for the mission field. “How I praised God to hear!” my father wrote in his journal at the time, “even wept as I read of the Lord’s dealings” with his old friend.
I wonder if he may not be the man God would send with Bill and me to Ecuador. I have prayed for one more for the work, and perhaps God will answer thus. Grateful if so, Lord, very grateful.
Several weeks later, as new developments arose in their timeline, my dad had felt “constrained to go to Milwaukee to seek Ed McCully, much the same as Barnabas went to Tarsus to seek Saul long ago.” He elaborated on the current status of their mission plans in his note to my mother.
November 4
A letter came from Tidmarsh this week informing us of his intended departure for England in November and his projected return to the States next spring. If he goes to Ecuador in the fall of ’51, as is now planned, Bill and I will probably return then with him.
He followed this update with a second wave of news, intimating how it related to him and my mother.
Bill writes that he intends to marry as soon as Irene graduates from nurse’s training—September 6, 1951—and that they will go to the field together. I do not share his liberty in this for adjustment reasons, but will let God lead. My personal exercise over the entire marriage problem remains fixed as it was at the IVCF-FMF convention in the winter of ’48–’49. You will recall my letter from there.
(She certainly would.)
Now back to the part where he reacted directly to what she’d written in October. He began this paragraph of his letter with rather ominous sounding words. They were surely sparked by the disruption he felt was being created by the change in Bill’s marriage plans. Imagine my mother’s thoughts when she read this:
You are still a problem for me.
What did that mean? The “problem,” I think, is that when he finally locked in on the coordinates for his missionary pursuit, he slammed the door for good on marriage. He’d mentally moved on, I believe. And I think when he read my mother’s attempts in her letter at explaining what she meant, he saw someone trying too hard to keep her feelings from showing through. She hadn’t given him all the way up, he thought. And though he didn’t really want to slow down in the midst of his gung-ho efforts toward Ecuador to do it, he again felt the unwanted pressure to apologize for ever starting something with her that the Lord was refusing to let him finish.
He did it rather awkwardly this time.
My fluctuating and forgetful affections cause me often to wonder if I have ever loved at all. But the boldness with which I have stirred up affection in you shames me now to silence, and I could wish for your sake something had come of it sooner. This is not to reopen old sores. I am delighted at your remark re: the predominance of family feeling between us, as brother and sister, for it is all I can appeal to now for a basis of fellowship. But it is sufficient.
Translation: When you said, “You are to me now only a brother,” I hope you meant it.
And I believe she did, especially judging by her initial reaction voiced in her next letter, sent two weeks later. She opened with a few select Scripture verses she’d recently encountered. (“Read these words several times, Jim—I wonder what words stand out especially for you?”) She poked fun at him for writing so seldom. (“Thanks for breaking down and letting me know where you were!”) She challenged him to go easy on Ed, not to exert his own will upon him. (“I trust that you are trusting the Lord to lead Ed, and not putting undue pressure on him to do what seems good in your eyes.”)
In other words, she was writing the way an older sister in the Lord might write a younger brother.
November 19
And, oh, I do entreat you to really rest with regard to our relationship. You say, “You are still a problem to me.” Let it not be so. I am in the Will; you are in the Will. Therefore, there is no problem. Tomorrow does not concern us. It is our Father’s.
You speak of “forgetful affections.” If this is what created the “problem” or any confusion of mind, cease wondering. Are we not creatures of time and space? Are we created constant by Nature? No—whatever there is of steadfastness in us is Christ Himself. It is not for us to strive to control and steady ourselves. It is for us to commit our poor beings to Him who is all steadfastness and truth and love. Then let Him do with us today as He wishes—perhaps as yesterday we should never have anticipated He would do. . . .
She returned then to a theme carried over from earlier in the year.
So “delight . . . commit . . . rest.” It is the only way. I have prayed, when thinking of you, the psalmist’s prayer: “Let not them that wait on thee be ashamed because of me.” Have no care for me, Jim. He alone is enough. And He has never failed us yet. “Lacked ye anything?” And they said, “Nothing.”
I rejoice, oh, I rejoice—and you do the same. I do not like to think of you troubled about all that has gone before in these two and a half years. You know that there is no need for any feeling of strain between us.
In closing, she joked again about the work he said he’d been doing while staying with the McCullys—painting their house.
Should you happen to be any farther east in your “missionary journey,” there is always welcome for you here—in fact, I’m doing some painting, so any willing workman would be more than welcome! . . .
Say hello to Ed, if you happen to be there or to your Auntie Eileen [in Chicago] if you are there when you receive this. Trust our Thanksgiving will be one of thanksgiving.
Gratefully, Betty
See, I think she’d truly let go—out of a sisterly love for him, out of a childlike love for Christ.
His final letter of 1950 came from Huntington, Indiana, home of Bill Cathers’s parents. He was redeeming the time by leading a number of families in Bible study on basic tenets of the faith as well as robust discussions on the more controversial theological topics of the day. He’d been there since a few days before Thanksgiving, and it was now nearly Christmas.
December 19
Last week Ed and I met in Chicago for a spying out of a little town (5–6,000) in southern Illinois called Chester. The prospects in radio and in literature distribution seem now so bright that we feel it to be of God to go there, facing a pioneer situation together and trusting God for that demonstration of His power that Paul knew in the early days. . . . After the first of the year, we will return there, and then I shall be better able to describe the work for your prayers.
Billy may be home next week for a few days. We have heard recently that he ponders marriage early—perhaps by March. Tidmarsh is furloughing in England now, and will return in the spring for U.S. preaching, intending to return to Ecuador in the fall, God willing, and we with him.
Those were the high points of his latest news. But the best, most satisfying piece of news seemed to be what God had done in their relationship through this year, spent all but two days apart. I think he finally believed her, that she wasn’t covering up or pretending. They were discovering the real joy of just being themselves, the result of being fully His.
Somehow I have a new rest in thinking of you now. Far from troubling me, thoughts of you bring thankfulness for the steadfastness Christ has wrought in you. I trust you, in a way I cannot explain. Not in the sense that we usually use that word between man and woman, as if you would be faithful to me. (That now has no place in our thinking.) But in the sense that I have no fear of offending you. I trust your understanding of me—an understanding forged in the furnace of distance and long silences. The trial of separation has made us one in a way the pleasure of association could never have done.
So we end the year of 1950 in their writings with both of them deeply committed to God’s work and His plan for each of them. Even if it meant no further reunions, they were willing to give those up, if only that Christ be magnified even more. My mother captured both their feelings well, I think, in the following journal entry on her birthday.
December 21: For twenty-four years the Lord has guided and preserved me, taught me and loved me (yea, He has loved me from before the foundation of the world), been merciful and gracious, and in thousands of ways shown His lovingkindness. What shall I render unto the Lord for all His benefits to me? There is nothing, nothing which I can give, save the very life He died to redeem, and in this life He designs to dwell! . . .
Lord, I do once more acknowledge, with all my heart, that I am Thine. No claim have I upon this life—past, present, or future. I am all, all Thine own. . . . Therefore, O dear Lord and Master, Redeemer, Lover, Friend, Beloved—do Thou work out Thine entire will in my life henceforth at any cost, in the time that is left for me on this earth. How short that may be, I do not know at all.
But I trust Thee.
I set my love upon thee, Child,
I knew thee far away
I wept to see thee wandering, wild, I yearned ’til thou didst pray.
One of a hateful rebel band,
Strong in thy lust for sin,
A furtive, fitful, fiery soul, I loved: I called thee in,
Stripped thee of thy grimy pride,
Laid bare thy secret want,
Poor vagabond of empty ways
I sent my Spirit to haunt.
Now, desert son, the choice is thine;
So let us drink from Thine above—
The love of Jesus for His bride.
Jim Elliot
Kiss me, heavenly Lover, in the morning.
Be Thou the first to sweeten
This whole day’s speech with that warm, honeyed touch
Of Thy caress.
And tenderly, while yet each eye lies unawaked,
Come lightly and impart to them
For day’s long hour a heavenly set
To see all things as through a lover’s eyes,
By soft caresses from the lips of Him
Who lives in Paradise.
Kiss me, Christ of beauty, here alone
The two of us, while dawn
Steals down the slopes and
Wakens day’s bright eye to smile on me.
Let not its luring draw me from the sense
That I belong to One
Whose first embrace full ravishes,
Who has kissed the son.
Jim Elliot