Elisabeth Elliot: A Passionate Romantic (Episode 2)

well ellen you have written or co-authored 20-some books i have written or co-authored 20-some books and i don't know if you feel the way i do but each time a new one comes out it feels like the birth of a new baby and you wait for it and you you work hard on uh writing it and then you have that waiting period while they produce it and then the day comes when it officially launches and then do you feel celebrative on those days you feel excited like eager to see how people respond to the new baby well there's always a healthy dose of fear too how will people respond but to me it isn't a wild thing every time to think oh my goodness this had been just ideas and nights and days of arduous labor and then to see it out in public something that people can have in their hands and read and draw their own conclusions is a wonderful thing the labor i've told my sister many times that when i'm writing a book i'm in labor it's like birthing a child well she's had five children and she says i don't know what i'm talking about that could be true in a little different way the labor and delivery process and it really is a joyful thing to see it take on a life of its own and today is a birthday hooray of a book that you have poured a lot of heart and labor into the new authorized biography drum roll please of elizabeth elliott our listeners have been waiting for this book have been eager for it this is the early years of elizabeth it's called becoming elizabeth elliott and i'm already telling you i can't wait for the second bite because i've read this one and i know you're still working on that and we don't know exactly when it will release but in the meantime we're really thankful to have this one and to be unpacking for our listeners what i've already had the joy of reading and that is glimpses into the early years and the making of the elizabeth elliot we knew and loved when she was an older woman some things that your book helps us discover that we've never known before right it was interesting to me even when i started working on this book all of us i think have a tendency to think of elizabeth elliott as twice widowed and middle-aged yes because that's when we first came to know her right right and much of her public ministry was in that season of her life but she was a young inquisitive curious passionate funny not yet formed young woman and that's the story that this book tells she didn't start old she did not start old she didn't start mature she didn't start this woman who was this font of wisdom right right had her on a journey and those things were developing in her and sometimes through really hard pathways right and the thing that i enjoy about this is it this book made elizabeth elliott more relatable yes uh in her older years when she was on a platform she was fairly severe and intimidating and we knew what she was saying was true but there was not necessarily the kind of connection that i found myself feeling with her as i wrote this book and a lot of that came because i was given all of her journals and so to have the these uh a lot of them leather-bound books filled with her flowing handwriting that chronicled the the year the days the years the decades of a long life was an incredible privilege very poignant to me she started journaling really young didn't she right this was expected in her family a very literate and literary family and actually from the philadelphia area yeah where i'm from yes and so my parents were familiar with the howard family right and uh it's fun now to look back and see what was going on in her life when she as she was growing up in that home yes yes and we'll come back to that in a second because it's interesting all of us are products initially right of our home of origin so elizabeth started a young betty she was betty of course back then betty elliott betty howard excuse me we didn't dare call her betty but that's how she was known then to everyone back then yes and so her first journal that i have at home in my office is this little uh stubby sort of diary that's written in pencil in handwriting that is is immature and it says on the outside of it uh private property no boys allowed men women and girls may look at this but no boys so what's in it yeah yeah it's uh she was what around 11. yeah and so in it are very dutiful journal entries about her daily life as an 11 year old and what she they played each day after school out in the neighborhood and then the journals over the years take her through like all of us uh high school and she went to a boarding school and had many adventures there none of us would want our high school journals known by others right right not me for sure so full of romantic intrigue we'll come back to that but i was struck in these journals as the story of her life over the years that it poured out day by day by day by day and again the picture that some of us have of elizabeth elliott is that very severe controlled woman proper and and so i found like in in this journal i have here which happens to be right after the time of jim elliott's death and so here pouring out page by page in her beautiful handwriting her incredible prose and let me just interrupt a sec ellen to say for those who aren't familiar with the story just give us a nutshell of who jim elliott was and what had what she had just experienced when she made this entry in her early years at wheaton college elizabeth howard her maiden name had fallen madly in love with jim elliott and after a long courtship they had married and they were missionaries in ecuador together and they had a vision of reaching an unreached people group uh indigenous people to who had never heard of the gospel and were known for their violence and jim and four of his colleagues felt that god was leading them bit by bit through a lot of careful planning to make contact with this unreached people group in spite of many positive indications that it would be peaceful in fact all five of the men were speared to death and as elizabeth and her fellow widows mourned they all felt committed to continue on in ministry of various types and elizabeth felt that if there was any way she could she wanted to go to the tribal people who had killed her husband that's another story we can talk about maybe on another day but she did so and lived among the people who had taken her husband's life and really lived out the gospel among them incarnationally i was struck as i said i as i had all of these wonderful journals to see again unfolding in real time what she was thinking and many of us thought oh she if you've read through gates of splendor that's a very detailed and yet a dispassionate account of the missionary's deaths and you think she must have just been very strong and she was she was very strong but what you find in these journals and what i've included liberally in the book because i think we all can relate so well to this kind of of loss is what she was feeling day by day and particularly night by night after jim was killed yeah and she dreamed of him constantly and here's just a sample where she is writing in the journal about having dreamed about jim again and she's she's dreamed that um she's with him and he's wearing his favorite tweed coat and she buries her face and the smell the smell of gem and wearing his coat and she is saying uh this isn't a dream is it darling this is not a dream again and he's like no this time i am back for real so what i wanted to read you is a particularly poignant uh journal entry after jim's death when she was dreaming of him constantly and she said 5 45 a.m march 16th i've just had one of the most vivid dreams ever the theme the same old song jim came back he and pete and olive pete fleming was one of the other missionaries who was murdered and his his wonderful wife olive we were all in morristown going shopping jim was wearing his favorite coat elizabeth berry's her her face and in his shoulder holding on to him tightly and she kept saying to them i'm so afraid that this is just another dream and they're no no this is real we're back and then there's an odd discussion of how their bodies were found in the river and it's like no we really are here i could not keep my eyes off of jim he was as handsome and cheerful as ever i felt so so happy that i had not decided to remarry because he was back in her dream she says we went into a restaurant i was telling jim about my dream and how i had um i had called my mother and told her that jim was back and he said it's real darling this is really happening and then i said to jim in in the dream oh darling if this turns out to be just another one of those dreams i'll just die on that last phrase my voice choked to a sob and he put his arm around me and he squeezed me hard to reassure me that this was no dream with that i woke in the same hammock the same gray mist the same embered fire beside me and the jovial voices nearby of within the tribe of dewey and kimu two of jim's killers wow when you read material like that and you think wow how is it that god orchestrates all the days of our lives and i want to know more about this woman who went through such incredible loss and and wrote about it in ways that all of us who have experienced loss can identify and yet how she stayed steady how she stayed true in her relationship with jesus that's a transferable truth that comes out of this story that i was excited to to discover and try to to write in a way that it would be accessible to readers to be of help in their lives and for any of us who we are as adults is shaped and influenced by our childhood our family of origin and there were some remarkable aspects of elizabeth's upbringing that were unique to her and that influenced and shaped her as she was becoming the elizabeth elliott we knew and loved what did you find about her childhood or your younger years because you spend some time there that was really interesting to me how did that shape her for better or for worse because we get things from our childhood that send us in the right direction and then we get things we have to overcome and she has some of both sure i mean we all have a mix of influences in our lives and elizabeth's parents were missionaries in belgium when she was born so they then came back to the united states and her dad became editor of the sunday school times which at the time was a big periodical that went out to all of christendom yeah premiere yeah yeah and so she grew up in a large family where all the kids were expected to be punctual and prompt and there was morning devotions there were evening devotions one sang all the hymns with all five of the verses one kept everything in exact order all the pencils were sharpened the shoes were shined the windows were clean the floors were waxed it was a home in spite of the number of people there that was of extreme order and discipline i'm thinking of the sound of music before julie andrews came yes well it was order it was a lot of order now uh elizabeth's family was so kind to me i interviewed her brothers and her close friends and and quite a few and what tom howard her younger brother said is if you describe it as this place of incredible order it sounds like it was no fun but it was a house of great fun there was much laughing till they all cried and and there was a lot of wit there was a lot of mimicry uh in terms of being able to reproduce accents and tell stories with great uh vigor and so a close rollicking family elizabeth went from this home of great order to an unnamed boarding school a christian boarding school which at the time was the place that a lot of prominent christian families sent their kids for high school and there the same tendencies toward order or reinforced if you had dust under your bed then you shouldn't carry your bible around sloth was an indication of of running morally rampant and so there it was it seems to me as an outsider reading the journals and the interviews with people from the school days and reading elizabeth's many many letters that this was a place that had the tendency shall we say to enhance legalism all right and so that already kind of coupled with the young elizabeth elliott's personality that we check off the boxes we do all the right things if we love god then everything is tidy and in order and just right and she already was an introvert by nature she already was spent a lot of time quote in her own head and she already had a very severe way of looking at her own self and behaviors and so she went from then that high school to wheaton college near the end of world war ii so a highly patriotic time in the country a time when a number of uh young men who had served in the army were coming back to wheaton for school and there too there was a great sense of duty and performance and discipline a lot of other wonderful things as well when you read the book you'll see how her college years were a great time of flowering in a lot of different ways but i need to pause there because it's interesting she wrote in her journal during her her college years today we took a test in psychology class and i have discovered that i'm an introvert i have 11 of the 12 tendency of of an introvert and she felt like this it is a very bad thing to be an introvert clearly i must change and all of her life people who saw her as remote i think the introversion explains a lot she would get completely all of her energy used up in social situations or if you saw her in a setting where she was speaking and then you waited in a long book line maybe to come and talk to elizabeth elliott and if she might be brusque she might even be rude it's because as an introvert all of her energy had been used up just in being around people so there were insights like that that i picked up along the way that explained a lot to me about her personality and also the fact that a lot of her childhood uh influence was that you don't express emotions yes you control your emotions yes and she went through many emotional seasons of her life but it's more in her journals it seems that she unpacked what some of her emotions was things that maybe she didn't feel free to share publicly or with even some of her close friends but the the feelings were there yeah we're going to talk later in the series about what she did with those feelings that was positive and how she taught us to deal with runaway rogue emotions but there was it felt like there was a cap on that and then she got to wheaton college and meets jim elliott and those first of all she had been remember was this a season where she had made a list of the things that she wanted in a husband this long list yes i mean she in her later years i think forgot that she had dated so much at wheaton sometimes in the journals you'll see the older elizabeth's handwriting coming in and saying things like huh i hadn't remembered i went out this much or that type of thing so it was fun to discover a college romance that i had not been aware of that was before jim for example and jim elliott was a guy in her greek class he was a close friend of her brother her younger brother dave who's 13 months younger than elizabeth and initially she thought that jim was a good guy he had a reputation on campus for being a little too uber spiritual and uh so she noted him but was not necessarily attracted to him then dave invited jim to come home for christmas went to howard to the howard family home elizabeth's family home and there elizabeth really watched jim and saw how he washed dishes for the old lady who had brought them wonderful food to eat or how he would just enter into whatever or how he went sledding with the younger kids and the two of them would stay up late at night and talk about philosophy and theology and the things about which they were both very curious and what i love to see in the sort of the inner cycling of the romance especially in those early days is she felt like she had found her soulmate someone who who wondered about the same thing she wondered about who almost would finish a sentence for her before she had expressed her thought that was a new feeling for her she had been perhaps a little bit intellectually and emotionally lonely prior to that so you have rolicking jim elliott the school wrestler and by now a pretty popular guy on campus and the somewhat aloof elizabeth howard and against all odds these these two fall in love now that romance is pretty well chronicled in in books that your listeners may well be familiar with the first time elizabeth went to visit jim's family didn't go quite as well as when jim went to visit her family tell us about that yes so they realized that they had strong feelings for one another and they were 20 21 years old it boggles my mind at this time they both felt once they recognized that yes they really could love each other that that love was to be sacrificed if god so asked on the cross for him they both felt that that they needed to cleave first to the love of christ and secondarily if he's so willed to do something about their relationship it's hard to find 21 year olds who think that way and i certainly didn't think that way when i was 21 at any rate their relationship continued they wrote millions of letters to each other very beautiful in literary letters and so it was not the email generation or the texting generation and no emojis i mean exactly so thoughts were actually articulated it was wonderful but elizabeth was invited to spend i think a labor day weekend with the elliott family in oregon and she went and they had a wonderful time swimming in the ocean and picnicking and singing and worshiping with the family it seemed to have gone quite well when elizabeth got home she has a letter from jim that basically says you made a universally horrible impression your visit was a disaster now at that point i would have completely given up on jim elliott and and gone in the opposite direction but elizabeth read the rest of the letter and discovered that his family had seen her as very standoffish and so some of those things about her personality that were a little bit off-putting the elliott family which was very different from the howard family had seen as as a as a distance that they did not care for and they said some harsh things some very harsh things that jim later regretted having passed on to elizabeth yes but she was a a gifted debater in her years at wheaton college and so in her responses to jim even though he had mortally wounded her by relating his family's less than positive remarks about not just her personality but also what she looked like yeah right at any rate once um she had gotten over the shock of those things she rallied and almost as if she was on the debating team began to make points about what she felt was viable and that she had chosen within the relationship and what was not and that kind of robust intellectual and spiritual back and forth really characterized their five-year courtship and some of that back and forth over those five years was because both of them had this passion for christ this passion for ministry this sense of calling to missions and it seems that both of them on their own were wondering am i supposed to be am i called to singleness right is it is it less spiritual for me to get married and they had a lot of back and forth in their own hearts and then in their relationship about whether whether it was okay to get married and whether you could really love god with all your heart and still choose marriage right and i have to say perhaps i am uh not the best judge of all of this but as the biographer i'm standing on the sidelines looking at this as it unfolds and thinking oh my goodness just get married and go to the field together what's all the big deal but for them they they were really weighing and very careful to make sure that their commitment to obedience to christ was above all else and i think that flies in the face of what so many of the rest of us have experienced and certainly what goes on in our culture at large you're in love follow your heart get married right and i wanted christ first you read some of how they went about it and at times you do think right just you both love jesus and you can love each other too but one of the hallmarks of elizabeth's life as we knew her later was this this deep deep commitment to obedience to not just follow your feelings she learned that it was okay to have feelings but that all feelings and personal desires had to be brought into submission to the obedience of christ right and that was interesting to me because in the midst of her relationship with jim elliott she constantly had her feelings bridled and she wrote a very poignant letter to her mom at that time and talked about from the time she was young she had quote taken pride in bottling her feelings she had taken pride that people not know what she was feeling she had somehow gotten mixed up early on that stoicism was a virtue and that feelings were to be ignored or to be disguised or not acknowledged all of that and then she she came to realize of course that that was not the case but she was so constraining herself not to blurt out to jim how much he loved him not to get ahead of him in his leadership of the relationship that at times it drove her crazy and at times it drives me crazy really about it of course i'm just amazed that they both hung in there they can get with the program jim yeah right so when they were in they both were pursuing the relationship but but not pursuing the relationship and as god was guiding them they both knew they were called to the mission field elizabeth initially thought to a hut in africa that was a picture she had had in her head from childhood and she had grown up having missionaries visit in their home so this had made a real mark on her yes very much so been very affected by missionaries in fact who had been martyred who had lost their lives in the midst of bringing the gospel to people who had not heard it very strong part of who she was way prior to meeting jim elliott so in her pursuit of god's will for her she spent some time in new york city i wasn't familiar with this part of her story she lived in a tenement flat in brooklyn and worked with an hispanic congregation there learning her spanish and working with the plymouth under the auspices of the plymouth brethren and during that time she met a woman missionary who talked with great passion about an unreached people group in ecuador known as the wawa dhani and that they were violent they killed all outsiders and they had never heard the gospel and so though many of us think that elizabeth elliot's interest in the wow dani came because of jim elliott in fact it came through another female missionary who dared to dream that where men had failed perhaps women could go and bring the gospel to this violent tribe and so she and jim both ended up in ecuador but at different mission stations correct not married yet but staying in contact and in god's providence he did bring their lives together we're going to pick up on that part of the story when we continue this conversation but ellen i i want to just say that i think one of the really helpful things you've done for those of us who knew and loved elizabeth elliott and those who were just being introduced to her life now it's not too late but you've helped us to see how her upbringing how the influences in her life in her childhood and her teenage years were all part of shaping and molding the woman that god was making to be used for his kingdom purposes and some of those influences were extremely positive and some of them were well things you wouldn't want to grow up with or have as a part of your experience but in god's providence he used all of that as she was becoming the woman we knew as elizabeth elliott uh this is why i love reading christian biographies because they they help me to lay on my own life and experience the stories and experiences of others who've had a journey of coming to know god to walk with him to serve him and i could not be more thrilled that you have written this new authorized biography on the early years of elizabeth elliott

Channel: Revive Our Hearts

Views: 10,728

Keywords: Elisabeth Elliot, Ellen Vaughn, Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, Revive Our Hearts, Jim Elliot, Nancy Leigh DeMoss

Id: uGQj9pBHS10

Length: 28min 43sec (1723 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 16 2020