6. The Gift of Widowhood
6
The Gift of Widowhood
For four more years after that evening on Mount Tabor, singleness was the gift God was giving me. Like all of His gifts, it was appropriate to the job He had assigned and I tried to accept it gladly. I embarked alone on a freighter to Ecuador, South America, studied Spanish, and then went to work in the western jungle, reducing to writing a previously unwritten Indian language. Jim was doing similar work in another tribe on the other side of the Andes.1
On October 8, 1953, there was a new assignment and a new gift. It was a brilliant morning in the capital city, Quito, the City of Eternal Spring. I was nearly exploding with joy when I happened to meet a missionary friend just up from the western jungle. He chatted about the business he needed to attend to that day, then asked, “And what are you doing?”
“Well,” said I, “among other things, I’m getting married this morning at ten o’clock.”
I was about to become Mrs. P. James Elliot. What an assignment! This was the condition and context of the will of God for me now—and for the rest of my life, I thought. “Till death us do part” sounded like a long time.
It wasn’t so long. Twenty-seven months later there was another assignment.
Five wives and nine children under seven years old waited in Shell Mera, Ecuador, for news of five men who were in the territory of a hostile tribe of Indians with whom they hoped to make friends and open the way for missionary work. Radio contact had been lost. The men were missing.
Life had to go on. Hordes of people had come to help and had to be given food and beds. Babies had to be fed and changed, hundreds of diapers washed (no Pampers in those days). Marj Saint, ever efficient, managed everything. Her house was the center of Operation Auca. Her husband, the pilot, was missing, and she sat hour after hour at the radio, waiting for word from the rescue parties. In between helping the other wives with guests and babies, I ransacked my Bible for promises that Jim would come back. I found one which I hopefully applied: “Jacob shall return, and shall be in rest, and be quiet” (Jer. 30:10 KJV). I knew that Jacob was the Hebrew form of James. To this I added the psalmist’s prayer, “Remember the word unto thy servant, upon which thou hast caused me to hope” (Ps. 119:49 KJV), and the verse my dear spiritual mother, Mom Cunningham, always gave me in her letters: “The God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing” (Rom. 15:13 KJV). I was putting together a neat package on which to pin my faith.
We waited, hanging on for dear life to every shred of hope of any kind. At last a radio message: “One body, sighted from the plane.”
“Sit still, my daughter,” I wrote in my journal (quoting the word of Naomi to Ruth). Then again, “Jacob shall return.”
“Another body.” Whose? we wanted to know. Unidentified.
The United States Air Force sent a rescue squad from Panama. As the C-47 circled the site, reporting to us in Shell Mera by radio, I wrote, “3:20 p.m. Yea, in the way of thy judgments, O LORD, have we waited for thee; the desire of our soul is to thy name, and to the remembrance of thee” (Isa. 26:8 KJV).
The minutes were hours to us. Ten minutes later I noted down the words of Elisabeth to her cousin Mary, “Blessed is she that believed” (Luke 1:45 KJV).
Another half hour crawled by. “4:00 p.m. Still circling. Hope thou in God, for I shall yet praise Him” (Ps. 42:5 KJV).
Finally we knew. The men were dead. All five of them.
I was not a wife anymore. I was a widow. Another assignment. Another gift.
Don’t imagine for a moment that that was the thought that occurred to me the instant the word came. O Lord was probably all I could think, stunned as we all were.
One step at a time over the years, as I sought to plumb the mystery of suffering (which cannot be plumbed), I began to see that there is a sense in which everything is a gift, even my widowhood. I hope I can explain.
There would be no widowhood if there were no death. The Bible calls death an enemy. There would be no divorce if there were no sin. Sin is enmity against God. When sin entered the world through what theologians call the Fall of Man, death and all kinds of suffering followed. Because Adam and Eve took the word of the Serpent (“You will not die”) as more trustworthy than the word of God (“You will surely die”), they ate forbidden fruit. That declaration of independence, a prideful defiance of what they were created to be, had consequences that affect every human being who has ever lived.
But God still loves us. This we know, for the Bible tells us so. C. S. Lewis wrote,
In awful and surprising truth, we are the objects of His love. You asked for a loving God: you have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked, the “lord of terrible aspect,” is present: not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist’s love for his work and despotic as a man’s love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father’s love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes.2
That inexorable Love had allowed me to become a widow. But “allowed me to become” is not adequate. It even seems feeble to me now, for the Lord of Hosts is absolutely sovereign. He holds power over the universe, He holds authority over my life—not because He usurps the rights with which He endowed me in creation, but because I had specifically asked him to be Lord of my life. I had prayed as earnestly as a child and a teenager and a woman can pray, Thy will be done. The coming of this transcendent authority into one’s life is bound to be an active thing, an immense disruption at times.
This was one of those times. He had done more than merely “allow” a thing to “happen” to me. I do not know any more accurate way of putting it than to say that he had given me something. He had given me a gift—widowhood.
How can I say such a thing?
He does not whisk us at once to Glory. We go on living in a fractured world, suffering in one way or another the effects of sin—sometimes our own, sometimes others’. Yet I have come to understand even suffering, through the transforming power of the Cross, as a gift, for in this broken world, in our sorrow, He gives us Himself; in our loneliness, He comes to meet us, as in George Matheson’s He came as the Love that would never let him go.
In His death Jesus Christ gave us life. The willingness of the Son of God to commit Himself into the hands of criminals became the greatest gift ever given—the Bread of the world, in mercy broken. Thus the worst thing that ever happened became the best thing that ever happened.
It can happen with us. At the Cross of Jesus our crosses are changed into gifts.
The Love that calls us into being, woos us to Himself, makes us His bride, lays down His life for us, and daily crowns us with lovingkindness and tender mercy, will not, no matter how it may appear in our loneliness, abandon us. “I will never [the Greek has five different negatives here], never, never, never, never leave you nor forsake you.” (See Heb. 13:5.)
When I speak of the “gift” of widowhood, I do not mean that God made us widows. He did not inspire the Auca Indians to throw their lances, and then see to it that they found their mark. He does not give people cancer, cause a baby to be born with deformities, or persuade husbands and wives to divorce.
These are among the evils which result from man’s decision to disobey. In the Garden of Eden he chose death, as God had plainly told him beforehand. We are still just as free to choose, and the consequences are just as inexorable—but so is His love.