Chapter 8
Chapter 8
A Certain Calling
Betty looked forward to Jim’s letters, which arrived at six-week intervals. Sometimes in his letters Jim sounded hopeful that they would spend their lives together, and at other times his words were more guarded. At times his message was clear, and at other times Betty was confused by his words. However, it was a letter from Jim’s mother that sent Betty into a tailspin.
As the school year at Prairie Bible Institute was ending, Betty received a letter from Jim’s mother suggesting that she make a detour to the Elliots’ home in Portland, Oregon, on her way back to New Jersey for the summer. Betty agonized endlessly in her diary about the letter. Would it be too forward of her to visit Jim’s house when he had not invited her? Had Jim’s mother discussed with him the invitation to come and visit? Would Jim be glad to see her, or did he want to focus solely on preparing for the mission field as a single man?
Betty tormented herself with such questions until she prayed about the situation with Mrs. Cunningham. After she had prayed, she felt that it was all right for her to accept the invitation. She bought a Greyhound bus ticket and braced herself for the six-hundred-mile journey to Portland.
Betty was a ball of nerves all the way to Oregon. She tried reading a book to take her mind off arriving at her destination, but that didn’t help much. For a good part of the journey, she sat next to a sailor. Betty did not realize how obvious her nervousness was until the sailor said to her, “I have never seen a person sit so still. You haven’t moved an inch the whole trip. Are you nervous or scared or something?”
Betty did not answer his question.
The bus rumbled into the bus station in Portland, where Jim was waiting for her, looking confident and full of life as usual. On the way to the Elliot home, Jim did most of the talking. He told Betty all about his last year at Wheaton College and what he had been able to accomplish as president of the Foreign Missions Fellowship. But when Betty pressed him about what he was going to do next, Jim was vague. He told her that he was convinced he would be a missionary somewhere in South America someday, and that all he felt sure about right now was that he should stay with his parents in Oregon and help his brother Bob build a house.
Soon they were driving up to the family home at 7272 Southeast Thorburn Street. The house was a two-story weatherboard structure set on the gently sloping side of Mount Tabor. Jim had two older brothers, Bert and Bob, and a younger sister, Jane, along with numerous relatives, most of whom were members of the Plymouth Brethren denomination. Together the family formed a large tangle of aunts, uncles, cousins, and second cousins.
Chapel meetings, as the Brethren referred to their services, and especially the Labor Day Conference, were like huge family reunions, with everyone hugging and kissing and talking over each other. It was nothing like the reserved, disciplined family life that Betty was used to, and she struggled to cope and fit in with the Elliots. Jim’s reaction didn’t help either. He swore that he was more devoted to Betty than ever but that he had no idea what their future together might look like.
The days in Portland that Betty truly enjoyed were those when she had Jim all to herself. The two of them went canoeing, hiked on the side of Mt. Hood, swam, and explored a remote seaside cove. It was the first time Betty had experienced the Pacific Ocean, and she loved the way the waves broke on the rugged Oregon coast and the wisps of fog that drifted in from the gray sea.
As the week in Portland wore on, however, Betty realized that she was not making a good impression on Jim’s parents, who complained to Jim that they thought she was unfriendly. Of course, this mortified Betty. Didn’t they realize that she was too nervous and too stressed to think about small talk with the family?
Betty was both relieved and distraught when it came time to leave Jim in Portland. She had hoped he would have a green light on their relationship. The deserted cove would have been an ideal place to propose marriage to her, but Jim had remained silent. And now they faced another year apart. After spending time in New Jersey with her parents, Betty intended to head back to Alberta, to a small rural town called Patience, where she would be working with the Canadian Sunday School Mission, helping to bring the gospel to a largely unevangelized community.
As she left Portland, Oregon, behind, Betty thought about when she would see Jim again. It would be next summer in Wheaton at her brother Dave’s wedding. Dave had proposed to a fellow Wheaton graduate named Phyllis Gibson and had asked Jim to be his best man. Betty was to be one of the bridesmaids.
As the summer of 1950 approached, Betty found herself looking forward to her brother’s wedding. She could not help comparing Dave and Phyllis’s relationship to her and Jim’s relationship. Both couples had known each other for about the same length of time, but Dave and Phyllis had an uncomplicated courtship: they had fallen in love, sought God’s and their parents’ blessings, and planned a wedding. How Betty wished it had been that easy for her and Jim.
Yet sometimes things did seem to be moving forward in their relationship. Jim had written to tell Betty that he would not consider marriage until he was settled in a missionary location, and now Jim’s letters indicated that he was seriously praying about becoming a missionary to Ecuador. Betty waited eagerly for each new letter. Jim told how his brother Bert, a missionary in Peru, had forwarded a letter to him from Dr. Wilfred Tidmarsh, an English missionary who worked with the Quichua Indians in Ecuador. In the letter Dr. Tidmarsh said his wife had medical problems, which meant that the couple had to leave their new work among the Quichua in a remote jungle location called Shandia. Dr. Tidmarsh concluded the letter by asking Bert if he could forward it to anyone who might be interested in taking over the missionary work at Shandia. Jim confided to Betty that he was very interested in taking over the work and that he had written a letter explaining this to Dr. Tidmarsh but had not yet sent it. He was not sure enough that this was God’s will for him, and he did not want to do anything that might displease God.
In July, Betty headed for Wheaton, Illinois, for Dave and Phyllis’s wedding. She enjoyed the festivities and being with her family again, but mostly she enjoyed seeing Jim. That summer Jim was attending the Summer Institute of Linguistics in Oklahoma and had taken time off to drive up to the wedding. Yet as she and Jim spent time together, Betty was aware that nothing had changed in the status of their relationship. She still did not know what to do next. While she believed God was calling her to the mission field, she had no clear guidance as to where that might be. Her only option was to wait and pray about the matter.
Meanwhile, Dr. Pierre DuBose from the Hampden DuBose Academy in Orlando had written to ask Betty if she would come and teach public speaking at the school for a semester. Betty accepted the offer and once more found herself on a train headed south. Since her graduation, the Hampden DuBose Academy had relocated to a tiny town called Zellwood, about twenty miles northwest of Orlando and the original school that Betty had attended.
Betty found the new school location breathtaking. It consisted of an old mansion set on a hundred acres of woods and lakes. The place had once been the hunting lodge of a steel magnate named James Laughlin. The mansion had thirteen bedrooms and seven bathrooms and formal English gardens, which enchanted Betty. There was even a swimming pool in the basement and an elaborate system of fans to bring cool air up to the bedrooms. Betty found it interesting to see from a teacher’s perspective how the school she had attended was run. Her roommate was Miss Andy, whom she now called Jane. Jane was constantly in motion, writing notes to parents, grading papers, supervising the kitchen, organizing outings, and chauffeuring children to and from the bus station. Betty had had no idea when she was a student at the academy just how much work went on behind the scenes.
After the semester, and with new admiration for the teachers at the Hampden DuBose Academy, Betty left Zellwood and headed home to New Jersey to pray seriously about her future. She was now twenty-four years old, and she felt it was time to make some big decisions.
Betty’s focus for missionary service had always been Africa or the islands of the South Pacific. But as she continued to pray, asking God to reveal to her clearly where it was that He wanted her to go, Betty met Catherine Morgan. Catherine and her husband had been Plymouth Brethren missionaries in Bogotá, Colombia, for many years, but when her husband got sick, they had come back to New York so that he could receive proper medical treatment. Despite the treatment, her husband had died. And now Catherine was living in New York, working for a missionary magazine, and planning to return to Colombia and continue her work there.
Betty found herself drawn to Catherine, and soon the two women became good friends. Whenever they got together to talk, Catherine would challenge Betty about the focus of where she should be a missionary. She urged Betty to consider going to South America, perhaps to Colombia or to next-door Ecuador, where there was a growing need for missionaries.
At first Betty resisted Catherine’s suggestion. In her mind South America was much too close to the United States. She had imagined herself going to the other side of the world to serve as a missionary, not to South America. Yet as she and Catherine continued to talk and as she prayed about the situation, Betty began to feel that perhaps South America was where God was leading her after all.
Once Betty was certain that South America was where God wanted her as a missionary, Catherine suggested she move to New York to begin her training. She knew of a small Spanish-speaking Puerto Rican church in Brooklyn, New York, that would be willing to have Betty come and live in the tiny walk-up apartment they kept for visiting missionaries. Catherine explained that this would be a great opportunity for Betty to begin learning Spanish before setting out for South America.
Betty Howard thus found herself living on the fifth floor of a rundown tenement building in Brooklyn. The building had no elevator and only intermittent hot water and heat. But those were not the biggest problems; that “honor” belonged to the rats! The rats were enormous—large enough to turn over a trash can and rummage through its contents—and they roamed freely about the building. Betty made sure to make lots of noise when entering or leaving the apartment, giving the rats ample warning to get out of her way. Of course, she had no plan of attack if she were ever to corner one of the rats by accident. And as she climbed up and down the stairs each day, she tried to ignore the aromas of strange food cooking that floated out from other apartments.
Yes, the place was smelly and dark and rat-infested, and the Spanish lessons with the church pastor were not as frequent as Betty had hoped they would be, but she thanked God for bringing her to Brooklyn. It was a stepping-stone in a definite direction, and that was something she was very glad about. For the first time in a long time, Betty had clarity about her future. She had prayed earnestly about going to Africa and even to the South Pacific, but God had set her firmly on a path to South America. As she prayed for Him to show her where in South America, she felt the answer was Ecuador—with or without Jim Elliot.
Shortly afterward, Dorothy Jones, a young woman from Texas whom Betty had met at the Summer Institute of Linguistics in Oklahoma, came to live with her in the apartment in Brooklyn. Dorothy also felt called to mission service in Ecuador, and now the two women made preparations to go there together.
Letters continued to flow between Jim and Betty. Jim had finally sent the letter he had written to Dr. Tidmarsh in Ecuador, and now, independent of each other, the two of them were plotting their separate courses to get to the tiny South American country.
Like Dorothy Jones, Betty had been accepted for missionary service by the Plymouth Brethren mission agency Christian Missions in Many Lands, and the plan was for the two of them to travel to Quito, the capital of Ecuador, and study Spanish there together before being assigned to work with an indigenous group who needed the Bible translated into their own language.
Meanwhile, Jim and a fellow student from Wheaton College, Pete Fleming, were making final preparations for their departure for Ecuador. The letters back and forth between Jim and Dr. Tidmarsh had convinced Jim that he was on the right track. On February 2, 1952, Jim called Betty on the telephone to say goodbye. It was the first time the two of them had ever spoken long-distance. Because it was a very expensive call, they talked only briefly. Jim was excited about leaving, and he expected that they would meet up again in Quito if Betty and Dorothy went ahead with their plans.
As far as Betty Howard was concerned, there was no “if” about it. Betty was now certain of her calling and willing and ready to begin Bible translation work somewhere in Ecuador. It was merely a matter of where and when.