The Legacy of Jim and Elisabeth Elliot

legacy and what the lord has taught my husband and me over the last 44 years almost 45. i'm going to start with a poem by amy carmichael who happens to be one of my favorite authors but was my mother's probably very favorite author and it was this from prayer that asks that i may be shielded from winds that beat on thee from fearing when i should aspire from faltering when i should climb higher from silken self o captain free thy soldier who would follow thee it's called the captain of my salvation i am continually humbled and continually amazed at what my parents wrote and what they represented as soldiers in the kingdom and so i i come very i come like a pauper um i have learned and grown so much from reading their works and i'm sorry that i've gotten emotional but they were pretty amazing people and they were not perfect of course i think many people who aspire to go to the mission field may think that jim elliott was practically perfect i think of my mother as practically perfect in every way like mary poppins but i know that they struggled with sin i know they were very vulnerable to hurts and yet they were determined to follow the lord jesus so most of you know probably that they met at wheaton college which is also where i went to school they were greek majors i always hasten to say i was not as high in my grades as my parents were so i'm not exactly like either one of them in the uh when i'm done there's a background noise does everybody else hear it or is it just me yeah i heard it yes would you uh just note to everybody could you please make sure that everyone's mic is muted just so valerie is the only one with her icon muted thank you so i'm going to share um some things from my father's journal which some people who have read it of course would recognize and most people have of course heard the famous uh quote he is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose but these things i picked out from his journals because when i first read them in uh probably my 20s i was of course amazed as most people are and then i read them again as i got ready to write the book about their love story called devotedly and his words were his his life i mean he wrote exactly what was on his heart and he was restless he was eager and somebody called him a dramatic and i just moved aside the paper that i had it on um anyway that he was dramatic and also he had a flare uh he loved to quote poetry and stand up and act and he was also quite funny but his drama really was in his heart with the lord you know always seeking after and then hating himself for his weaknesses and sin and then glorying in the glory of christ glorying in the the joy that christ had in going to obedience going in obedience to the cross so he wrote he makes his ministers a flame of fire when he was studying psalm 104 am i ignitable he asked god deliver me from the dread asbestos of other things the love of the world that is saturate me with the oil of the spirit that i may be a flame but flame is transient often short lived can't thou bear this my soul short life in me there dwells the spirit of the great short-lived jesus died at the age of 33 my father died at 28. whose zeal for god's house consumed him and he has promised baptism with the spirit and with fire make me thy fuel flame of god he had some inkling during his college years that he may have a short life and that he may die early and yet he looked forward with with much longing to being able to say see christ his captain and he wrote father if thou wilt let me go to south america to labor with thee and to die i pray that thou wilt let me go soon nevertheless not my will and that was probably two years before he actually got to go into ecuador a few weeks later in his journal he wrote i prayed a strange prayer today and this is probably my very favorite of his of the quotes that people don't hear because it's buried in the journal he said i covenanted with the father that he would do either of two things either glorify himself to the utmost in me or slay me by his grace i shall not have his second best for he heard me i believe so that now i have nothing to look forward to but a life of sacrificial sonship or heaven soon perhaps tomorrow what a prospect he also wrote this quote that i have in a nice frame on my wall be on guard be on guard oh my soul of complicating your environment so that you have neither time nor room for growth in other words loosen the clutch and the grasp of things in this world he was consumed with longing to know and to do god's will he when he told my mother right before she graduated that he loved her he also told her that he felt god was calling him to the single life on the mission field so i always often think of god's sovereignty in allowing the passion and the drama of my father's heart to tell my mother that he thought he was supposed to be single and yet at the same time he felt he should tell her that he loved her and it was a it was a complete shock to my mother to hear those words because she also had been taught by her parents that a man does not tell a woman that he loves her unless he's ready to ask her to marry him so uh in those two and a half to three years of waiting before he got to ecuador they started writing letters it was actually four years that they started writing because my mother was was graduating from college when she when he told her that he loved her and then the the most amazing and profound picture of the cross was shown to them through the shadow of a cross on a tombstone when they were sitting in a cemetery which was significant because they both knew they had to die to themselves and so during those years they wrote each other pretty regularly and they only saw each other five times in five years the last year was when they both got to ecuador my mother arrived two months after my father did and he would remind her things like satan says go and work but god says go and sacrifice and my mother was all about hard work she really did work hard throughout her whole life and so i think of the things that my father influenced me by these words just his determination his longing to bring glory to god he laid the foundation for my mother and i to go into the to live with the elka or the wyodani indians just by his passion to go to them to bring the gospel and yet he didn't get to bring the gospel to them and through his waiting and his prayer life and his obedience to the call god made the way for him to actually see the alkas which he was actually very thrilled to see face to face i found the quote that i was trying to uh say of somebody somebody who has said of him jim elliott was an intense self-assured young man with a dramatic flair because my mother was hard-working she actually uh got greek down in her head pretty well and then they learned spanish together in ecuador and she actually was faster at learning spanish than my father was and that made him pretty embarrassed and insecure i do believe god just gave her a gift for languages but my father's death of course that story of the five men being killed went around the world and was a shock to thousands and thousands of people and yet this is what he had said lord my life could be a short life on earth then may the zeal for you consume me so i would i would like to focus a little more on well not a little more i'm doing both i'm what my mother taught me and what my father taught me through his writing um my mother of course i remember well and she died in 2015 and i prayed and prayed and prayed for the last 10 years of her life that the lord would heal her of dementia god didn't answer that prayer but my mother's love for me was deep and abiding and wonderful and that's why i said she was practically perfect in every way um i don't feel that i was spoiled she expected me to work she expected me to obey she did not pour out tons of gifts and things upon me though when she did buy clothing for me or a gift for christmas or birthday she was generous and kind but as a little girl she took absolute good care of my physical needs and when she saw me struggling with wanting to make sure i spent enough time with each child alone reading to them or just talking or praying with them she would say val when you were little all i thought i had to do for you was to love you and feed you and put you to bed clean and read out loud to you maybe sing sing him she read she's saying a lot of hymns to me and she said you don't really have to spend extra time individually with each of your children of course she was always overwhelmed that i had three and then four and then five and then six and seven and eight but uh and and you barely do have time to to do that but i was thinking of susanna wesley who had 10 children 17 altogether but seven died in childhood um but for 10 children she tried to give at least an hour per week not to all 10 but within the two weeks she gave an hour individually so that's what i was trying to do anyway my mother was just smiling at me and saying just love them take care of them teach them to be obedient and that's your main job she was very affectionate with me hugs and kisses were regular but with the howard family they were not so she had determined she would be more affectionate than they had been her her family was the howards but the special bedtime routine is of course something i remember so well reading the bible to me or telling the stories in her own words and then praying with me and always teaching me that my father had given me the good shepherd jesus and that the good shepherd was leading us wherever we were and when we were in the jungle we were of course among very dangerous creatures the lord allowed the lord protected us so that no no snake ever bit us and no poisonous spider ever gave us any illness uh the worst thing that happened to me was bumble bee stings one day when we lived among the alkas but i just remember having a ball playing in the river we had a baby otter for a while which was a joy um building fires with the alka kids of course my grandparents were weren't too thrilled about that because of the safety of it and we had little knives that we could quit all sticks with and the lord protected me all the way but one particular story and i know some children are listening one particular story about god's protection is when i went to bed in the little hut without any walls and i was on a bamboo bed and my mother was in a hammock right next to me and she prayed we sang jesus tender shepherd hear me bless thy little lamb tonight through the darkness be thou near me keep me safe till morning light there are three lovely verses to that and i won't quit them all but she would sing me many wonderful hymns but i remember especially that one and one night as she woke up to stir the logs to push the logs together to keep the fire going that we had to have because it was quite cool at night time she looked over at my bed as she always did and there was a black circle on my stomach i was underneath a blanket and so she touched it with the stick that she touched the that she pushed the logs together with and it was a black snake and it just smoothly curled uncurled itself and slid off into the jungle and of course it could have been very poisonous she didn't tell me at the time i was probably too young to even understand but the lord protected us amazingly and i'll never forget seeing an ocelot being caged by the alkas they had set a trap for it and in the middle of the night they woke us up to come and look at the ocelot in the trap and i remember thinking how fierce and angry it looked and the lord protected us from those night creatures which were panthers and ocelots and so anyway there were anacondas in the river we never saw them that i remember so i'm just so very grateful for how god protected my mother and me and very clearly led her to live with the elka indians along with rachel saint and i'm so thankful that she never showed any fear to me if i had seen her alarm and fear and worry all the time that would have made me alarmed and fearful and worried all the time and i never saw it so i'm very very grateful for that example she said that maybe inside she might have been fearful at times but she never let me know it and in that bedtime routine there was this confidence and security that the lord was watching over us as uh mealtime was the main thing i had to come to i had to obey her about of course i was always hungry and we had sometimes jungle trips with the alkas where we didn't have anything to eat for most of the day we might have had a little cup of chicha which is chewed up manioc cooked and then chewed up by the alco women and that gave us some starch for the day but we went one time all day long and when we arrived where we were supposed to be my mother looked at me and said are you hungry and i said yes and she said what would you like to eat and i said rice and egg so rice and egg was a common food if we had eggs but anyway i digress the lord used her to teach me to look at things practically and to do things as efficiently as i could and yet i still struggle in my own lack of efficiency she taught me that obedience was very important and that i was never to talk back to her which i don't remember doing but she taught me that it mattered what we said and what we did we were to bring glory to god in all of our behavior so when we actually moved to the states everything practical had to be done well i had to wash the dishes well thoroughly i could not waste water i had to turn off lights when i was finished in a room i had to dust even the baseboards the edges and the windowsills everything had to be thoroughly done and i'm very thankful that she taught me that but always teaching spiritual truths especially not to live by our feelings which is of course what she and my dad had to constantly uh remind themselves as they had given up their hearts to christ and they were willing to go even if they weren't positive willing to go to ecuador even if they didn't know when or if they would get married but it was in that last year in ecuador when they were six months learning spanish together and they were more and more convinced that someday god would bring them together and amazingly my father even said to her it might be another five years that we before we can get married because he was so sure that he'd have to live in the jungle by himself or at least with another male missionary but the lord opened the way for them to get married in october of 1953. so i remember her saying as an adult underneath are the everlasting arms and so many of you who have heard gateway to joy she always started with that you are loved with an everlasting love and underneath are the everlasting arms and of course that was lived by her uh in her her expression of acceptance of what god had done he had taken her husband her acceptance of how the alcazor the quiche was sometimes treated her her willingness to serve without uh unfair and without saying to anybody look at me everybody look at what i've done she was completely secure in what god had called her to do and it was not it was always not about her and this is what i finally learned when i was about 40. it's not about me and the fact that i am jim and elizabeth elliott's daughter it's about christ and what he has done for us so she she showed that to me that god's love is complete it is it's not people that we're looking for um praise and admiration from it's simply knowing that god loves us because we're his children and i depended completely on her word she meant what she said she never said anything vain to me she would not say she was going to punish me and then not punish me if i disobeyed her words were true so that truth is an amazing legacy to me completely true and never any silly threats she was careful in her work she expected me to be careful and to do a job well if a task is once begun never leave it till it's done she would say be the labor great or small do it well or not at all grammar and sentence structure were very important correct words as mark twain said the difference between the wrong word and the right word is like the difference between a lightning bug and lightning i love that quote um so she expected me to obey and i was spanked soundly if i disobeyed and i knew i was disappointing her when i disobeyed and i remember being so disappointed and upset with myself i disobeyed but that courage and love of adventure that both my parents had was given to me uh so much so that i often have a love of adventure and longing for it without with with the zeal for it without much knowledge of what it might mean um i think of again that that quote he is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose and what what good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world and yet forfeits his soul what's most important it's living for him and his glory um through waiting and prayer they were the hallmarks of their lives uh those especially those five years and as my mother carried on the missionary work with the kichwas do you know what she said to my father as he left to go to the alkas she said what will i do if you don't come back and he said teach the believers darling teach the believers she she did that the rest of her life her love for the alkas gave me love for the indians as well as the kichwa indians i mean i was just always expected to love them because god loved them and so the impact of their lives of course has made a huge difference to me and uh i just want to take a little break from from talking about their legacy of course the obedience the truth the prayers all of those things went into their their expression of who they followed they didn't follow the world and many of you have heard my father's quote about americans don't need a call to the mission field they need a kick in the seat of their pants and he felt that too many americans were just too comfortable and satisfied and it's still very true it's still very true so we'll take a break and i'll drink some water and then maybe some of you would send in a question or two to sashko so is that good that's good thank you valerie we'll take we'll take a short break now who valerie okay i was going to mention uh some of my mother's books and i'm sure most of you just because you got on you had already you know of my mother's books i want to tell you probably my two favorites are the two biographies that she did one is called a chance to die it's about amy carmichael and it's an amazing book she did a lot of hard work uh to read up on her went to donavor twice talked of course a lot to the donovar fellowship in england and uh did a beautiful beautiful book of her life and she did she does slightly uh hint at the weaknesses or the sins of amy of course i wouldn't be able to enumerate because she didn't do make that clear at all but there you know there was there was definite human weakness just that like there was in my father and in my mother um so that's a chance to die and then the second one of course is my father's biography and when i read that i was continually just amazed continually thrilled that that was my daddy and uh every once in a while when i was younger my mother would say oh val you're so much like your dad and that would please me and and make me wonder you know what what what it was it was mainly that love of adventure spontaneity and sometimes craziness uh did any questions come in sashko so we have a number of questions here uh it's interesting about about ecuador or about my mother um it's neither actually quite a few people are asking for an update on lars oh okay okay yeah lars is right now living in florida with his brother whom he had been estranged from for many years so it's a good thing his brother asked him to come and live with him i think they are about seven or eight years apart lars is the elder and um so you can pray for lars he does have a home in little rock he sold the home that my mother and he lived in for 34 years or 36 years and uh that was in massachusetts so he has some dementia but he's doing pretty well he's always been a pretty active man and always took walks and um yeah does that answer that question thank you another question is uh will there be a second biography of becoming elizabeth elliot yes there will be a volume 2 because the first one stops in 1963 and ellen vaughn is working on the rest of it it'll probably take another year to two years to finish that volume there's probably a lot more to be said in that biography than there was in the first one though that biography i thought was absolutely wonderful it's becoming elizabeth elliott by ellen vaughn it is an authorized biography thank you valerie um there's another one here there was one quote that you referenced that you framed the one you framed uh could you please repeat the quote or say which book it was in started with be on guard oh yeah that's in my father's journal be on guard o my soul of complicating your environment so that you have neither time nor room for growth in other words take time to meditate on god's word don't spend so much time on worldly things and tv and internet of course takes way much more time than it should because it it interrupts our bible reading or our prayer times and i'm still learning that i'm still trying to say no to all of the dings all of the uh notifications on the phone so it's it's from his journal be on guard oh my soul of complicating your environment environment so that you have neither time nor room for growth anything else before i go on we'll finish this section uh of questions with the last one do you remember what color were your father's eyes that's a question i've never been asked uh no i really don't maybe from some pictures we could tell that they were brown but i'm not positive gilbert do you have any idea gilbert's quiet he's mine they were pro i i think they were probably brown that's what i know that would that would be my guess valerie yes okay yeah okay thank you thank you okay so i'm gonna share my own testimony i call it my adult testimony though i did give my heart to christ in a serious way when i was 14. now everything my mother taught me and said to me as a child i i obeyed i listened i learned i believed so i believed that jesus was my savior but at the ages of 10 11 12 we had moved to the states when i was eight and a half so i started fourth grade in a public small public school which was actually a good school and but when i began to go into adolescence i was much more distracted by friends and uh when my mother remarried the second time which was in january of 1968 uh he addison leach was a presbyterian minister and professor of theology and we lived in franconia new hampshire which is where we had been living my mother and i had been living since 1963 and that summer we moved to massachusetts because he was going to teach at gordon conwell seminary which is where my husband walt shepherd went to seminary so he sent me to a presbyterian christian youth missions conference it changed my life uh i as i said i certainly believed everything my mother had taught me about sitting in church when i was 10 11 12 13 it went in one ear and out the other i remember just being cold in this little community church that had been started by christian women's club in sugar hill new hampshire i ate my mother's mince from her purse while she played the organ and i was in sunday school and i remember being frustrated that i seemed to be the only one that wanted to answer questions but i was basically bored in church so when i went to this conference it was about 300 high school students with some very good preachers jerry kirk bruce thielmann and the third one escapes the name the name escapes me but anyway they were wonderful and i'll never forget the singing of christian hymns by those teenagers they had the boys and the girls separated in the auditorium that we sat in it was an outdoor auditorium but we got to hear these three different preachers and i knew the lord was calling me to himself to be his disciple and it was at that week that i understood i had to get more serious about learning his word loving him praying so i was 14 and i'm very very grateful that my stepfather sent me that conference that conference has been going on for about 120 years presbyterian youth conference so i went into from from that experience of really wanting to be serious about my faith i told my mother when i got home from that conference i want to start a journal and i want to read the bible every day like you and my dad did i said to her and she said that's wonderful so she gave me a journal and i already had a good bible and i began and i within three weeks was faltering at the daily habit and i would go a few weeks and keep saying to myself i need to read my bible and knew that it was the right thing and the good thing to do but let me just say for the next five to six years i continued to struggle with the regular daily bible reading and daily prayer i just was not as determined and persevering as my mother was and so that's why i say i'm very different from my mother but i dearly love the example she set um my first few years of college were very difficult because i was not willing to seriously study i wanted to have fun but in my second two years of college i got a single room which helped me tremendously and helped me study and then i began to love my english lit major and then i fell in love with my husband my junior year of college because he was living in my mother's house i didn't get to know him until really the following fall but my mother kept writing about this walt shepherd and i was curious i was very curious and came home for christmas he was there for just one week before he went home for christmas he was a border because my mother had asked at the seminary for a guy to come and help her with my stepfather who was dying of cancer and my stepfather did die at the beginning of my sophomore year when i was 18. it was a very sad time it was also a huge lesson in the sovereignty of god because i had been pretty determined that he was going to be healed by the lord and in june he died in september in june my mother came to me and he said she said val i think you might have to accept the fact that he probably will die and i said but mama all the people that are praying for him and you know god can heal and he he he just needs to accept that that god will heal him and i was sure um and she just kept reminding me that he didn't have the will to live he really wanted to just go on to heaven and so when i said goodbye to him before i started my sophomore year and this really was my first big lesson in the sovereignty of god in my own heart i said to daddy he's lying on a bed of course and he was not doing well i said daddy when i see you again it'll be thanksgiving and you'll be all well and i said it with a smile and my normal optimistic spirit and he looked at me very seriously said no val i'm dying and i gave him a kiss goodbye and got to wheaton the next day and a half a drove drove with my cousin to wheaton and sunday night i moved into my dorm monday my mother called me during this day and said he was in a coma and that he would probably die soon so that was friday that i said goodbye to him saturday drove to wheaton monday he died well do you know the peace of the lord that passes all understanding it just fell over me no other way to put it i just knew right away when my mother said that he had died that god was sovereign god knew what he was doing and that i couldn't demand something that i wanted and i i just understood suddenly that i could accept god's way instead of my own way and what my mother must have gone through in uh hearing that my dad had died she had said you know he's yours lord and she had said she had hoped that they would live a long life in ecuador being missionaries but the lord took him in the same way and my mother and i both grieved and i know she grieved in a much harder way because of course it was her second husband and she loved him so much but that was really understanding that god knows what he's doing and god will give you peace if you trust him and accept him this is the true grace of god in which you stand says first peter 5. so i get married to walt shepherd right after college may of 1976. and i am thinking i am going to be a wonderful mother i'm going to have 10 to 12 children and i am going to have um a wonderful ministry to the women in the churches or church and my husband's going to be a wonderful minister because we're wonderful people and i wasn't consciously saying that but that was a subconscious hope and we go into our years of ministry first in southwest louisiana a place i did not like the physical looks of southwest louisiana's flat land its cane fields and and uh swamp and i had come from new hampshire with mountains and glorious fall days with those colors of the trees and so that first year though i was very happy to be married to walt i was not accepting where he had put us and i just kept thinking well he's gonna put us somewhere better somewhere that's prettier and uh three years we were there actually my husband had been there for one full year before i got there and our first baby was born at the end of our first year of marriage his name is walter and so i was focused on having a child and the joy of being a mother and i was not really focused on serving and dying to self serving the people in the church but the lord brought me to a book called what happens when women pray the first book i read right before i read that one was also a huge influence it was called a severe mercy by sheldon van aaken and that really convicted me that i was not reading the bible seriously and seeking him seriously so because of that book i made a pact with the lord that i would promise to read 30 days without missing a day because every january i had been doing this starting and then stopping and i said the lord i want to see how your word is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword and i started in the old testament as many of us do when we start reading the bible and and that's why in the years past i had always gotten bogged down probably in leviticus but at this point in my reading i was in jeremiah and i came upon the verses thy word was found and it it became to me the joy and delight of my thy word was found and i did eat it and it became to me the joy and the delight of my life i was really i was really blown away by that verse it suddenly came alive it jumped out at me and i thought this is it this is why i'm supposed to be reading the bible it is the joy and delight of my life and uh we moved to mississippi a year and a half later our son was 21 months old we moved to laurel mississippi which is just two two hours north of where i am now and my husband started a ministry there of uh a piece a presbyterian church and it was in laurel that we had four more children so when we left laurel i had five children and i was all about i'm going to have a huge family and everything's going to be wonderful because i read cheaper by the dozen and i'd read little women and i'd read five little peppers and how they gr grew and i was just all sure but that everything was going to be wonderful but i didn't calculate sin into the picture my husband's sin my sin my children's sin i had not grown up with any conflict with indian children or even in high school i in it was actually in junior high was the first time i recognized there was some irritating people around first time in junior high and i remember being kind of annoyed but not too concerned about it because i went on my merry way and here i am now raising children struggling with my own sin struggling with my children's sin and especially being critical of my husband so that was the wrong way that i was going i was all about writing lists i see a friend from mississippi watching she teases me about my three by five cards and the chores that i had for each of the children each day and i wanted to be so organized and i could be organized for one day and then the next day be completely forget the organization i'm i'm very um up and down back and forth not very determined all the way so anyway long story short 15 years of marriage and we have moved to california and i didn't want to be in california even though we were in a beautiful spot orange county that's beautiful of course the pacific ocean is beautiful but i wanted to be overseas i felt that raising children overseas would be much easier quote unquote much better environment for them and so i was pretty disgruntled the first five years we were in california and i i looked down on people who looked down on people which is not a good way to be it's pharisaical and i looked down on people that didn't have it together and yet i knew in the deepest part of my heart that i didn't have it together that my sin was in the way my children's sin would make me upset and frustrated and so things kind of began to snowball so that by the 10th or 11th year of our marriage i was beginning to think how in the world did i think that we could raise a wonderful christian family when these children are sinners and i'm a sinner and i really wasn't saying the the phrase it's all about me but that's actually the way i was living i better do this right or i am not going to be admired by people i may not even be admired by my mother although she was always encouraging when she came to visit us she was always prayerful for the children she was always telling me that i was doing a good job and yet i was saying no mom i'm not doing a good job i'm so inconsistent and uh the lord brought in 1992 a study through my husband's going to a pastor's conference where he heard a man say hi my name is jack and i am a recovering pharisee he came home from that conference and he looked at me and he said val would you be willing to do a bible study with me and i said i was holding our seventh child a baby in our arms my arms i said how much time will it take but i like the idea of doing a bible study with my husband because we've never done one before so we began a study of galatians and it was a written study by this man named jack and his name was jack miller he's in heaven now but we worked about six months to finish that study because we had to take breaks because of how much time the children in homeschooling took of course but we listened to tapes we had to memorize many of the verses in galatians and we had to answer questions which by after that we would send the fax of our homework to a counselor who was on the east coast the only way to meet at the proper at the right time for both of us was early in the morning it was 7 30 for him on the east coast 4 30 for us we did it once every two weeks with this one hour uh with our counselor well do you know uh it really did change our lives because we suddenly realized in that study that we had been living just like pharisees and that though we had amazing parents my husband grew up in congo with wonderful missionary parents i had had amazing parents we both had loved our our uh lives on the mission field and i had been thinking as we lived those first five years in california it's so much better to be in the mission field because the kids wouldn't have all this stuff to deal with they wouldn't have these movies they'd want to go see they wouldn't have to go see disney world or disneyland they didn't have to have all these toys because i had no toys hardly any in ecuador so that's the way i wanted to raise my children but this study helped us see that we really were living for the admiration and honor of people rather than for the glory of god and that's there's a big difference there and i do want to say this real clearly every one of us has the temptation and the bent to become legalistic to become like a pharisee i knew the word legalistic those first 15 years but i i didn't consider myself legalistic i thought there were other people who were way too legalistic but the more we went into this study and read what galatians what paul was speaking to writing to the galatians how he was saying you know if i'm serving men trying to please men i am not serving christ and we had to of course memorize that verse as well as the one galatians 19 and 20. i've been crucified with christ nevertheless it is not i who lives but christ who lives in me and the life i now live in the flesh i live by faith in the son of god who loved me and gave himself for me that opened our eyes to the grace of god we recognize that we could not live by looking good to other people here we were in our spheres my husband wanted to be a successful minister and here we are in california where churches are huge and booming and we have a little tiny church of 30 people when we moved there and he thought you know he's preaching the word people should be flocking to hear him preach and people should all be loving one another because he was a very loving personable man still is and i was thinking i should have a wonderful family with happy obedient children and everybody should be looking at us and saying wow what a wonderful family but again i said inside i was thinking i'm a complete failure at this being a mother and being consistent in training my children and i realized that at that point in 15 years of marriage we had been thinking subconsciously again it was not consciously thinking i've got to look good everybody but underneath that's what we were doing we've got to look good to other people and we had to confess our pharisaism we had to confess that we had been living for the approval of men rather than for the glory of god and that's when that phrase it's not about me it's about god began to come alive to me and i began to actually use it it's not about me it doesn't matter that i had amazing parents that doesn't make me a holy person and so as we read galatians uh galatians 5 6 says that you bite and devour one another with criticisms condemnations and that's exactly what i've been doing to my poor husband i told him he ought to do this and he ought to do that if he wanted to have a successful church and by the fifth before the fifth year we had a couple of people leave the church and that absolutely devastated him and he thought i must be i must be a terrible minister i might as well become a plumber as much as he hated plumbing he thought he might be a better plumber than a preacher but as we learned this truth in galatians that through the holy spirit living in us love could flow out of us and grace could flow out of us because his grace is flowing into us then we began to have joy in knowing jesus and i can honestly say that at the beginning of my walk with the lord i had joy knowing jesus was my savior but in the natural way of man i was beginning i had begun more and more in my marriage to think well if i get everything right then god will be pleased with me and everybody will approve of me but i had to confess to the women in my church in a bible study you know you all may say that my children are well behaved but we bite and devour one another by our words or by our tones in our house and we also lose food shoes before going to church and we're also all fussy and whiny in the car and the van going to church and we're normal we're normal sinners and i began to be much more vulnerable with the women in the church and when i began to be humble enough to be honest about my struggles then i began to have real friends um real people that said oh you're not way up there on a pedestal right no i'm not at all and so uh it really changed our lives the grace of god and he says offer to god your sacrifice of praise and we've often we've i'm sure as many of you young christians would have thought you know why is it a sacrifice well it takes time to praise god and to recognize who he is in your life and what he wants to do so in that journal that i was trying to keep with reading my bible i decided one year that i was going to write down at least two things i was thankful for every day and that made a huge difference to start thinking in thankful ways rather than in all the things that are wrong ways and i have a phrase that i just love to use now it's grace gets more and more amazing the older you get grace gets more amazing because god is not finished with us and he loves us so much more than we even can imagine or can believe and so it's his obedience that gives us perseverance it's his prayers that help us keep our eyes on the cross as that's what he did my will be be done no thy will be done so his perfect life on earth his absolute will to do his father's will which has saved us is not about our trying hard to be good christians it's about accepting this grace and shedding it spreading it out to our children our families and our friends and whoever we see so it's even more of a of a truth to me today 44 years into being married that it's about grace and it's about being kind to people and it's about giving people showing people that they are important instead of wishing people would go away because they're annoying even as a junior high student i wish i had known that i could be kind and gracious to those kids that were annoying to me but who am i i'm just one of his many children all things come from you said david and of your own have we given you yours oh lord is the greatness the power the glory the victory and the majesty and so my mother's influence in her obedience her hard work her speaking the truth and no vain words it's still it's still an example to me um learning obedience through the things that she suffered as jesus learned obedience through things he suffered i see that that's what god is doing in each one of our lives trust him trust him trust him he's saying to each of you and i can't say it any any other way except what my mother used to say the hymn trust and obey for there is no other way to be happy in jesus and that trusting really means take on the righteousness of christ into your own life it doesn't mean hey i'm all about being a good christian it simply means living out what christ has done for you to other people so what do i have to offer to women or to any of you not all women here when i speak but the same thing that my mother did was to point to god point to god the same god that they trusted and loved and obeyed and they lived and they died for this is my legacy to offer christ to others um it's their legacy of course to me but to be able to as as i said right before my mother's memorial service that i was in charge of there's one on youtube that was at wheaton college and i was just overwhelmed by how would we make this memorial service done well for my for my mother and for the glory of god and my father said it's not your legacy to carry it's christ it's christ himself and so we live out the love and life of christ by dying to self and by doing things cheerfully washing the dishes without complaining cleaning the house folding laundry it's all about serving him not about having a house that looks perfect but just doing what god has put in front of us to do and one of the one of the wonderful things my mother continually spoke on was do the next thing when she felt overwhelmed by the sorrow of losing her second husband it was fixing a meal that helped her get through the next hour what's the next thing that needs to be done and i'm all about i want to go for a walk or go work in the garden but god is saying val there's things there are things that need to be done inside the house um so our tendency is to be legalistic our tendency is to look down on other people and god is saying we're all on a level at the foot of the cross jesus is our savior we're all in the dust at the foot of calvary because of our sin and god has covered our sin by the righteousness of christ and that's what amazing grace is all about and his grace gets more and more amazing so i tried to teach my children and i know they're still learning it as we all do have to keep learning the same lessons over and over again but to do god's will you have to learn sacrifice in the littlest things first you know jesus said when you are faithful in little things i will make you faithful in bigger things well that's what you moms have to teach your little children being obedient in the little things so that they can grow up to be faithful in bigger things and i'm still learning to be faithful in the little things that's what god has put in front of me and but to offer christ to other people rather than it's all about me and how amazing i am because i'm the daughter of jim and elizabeth no it's all about him and what he has done to save us that's about all that i have um questions or if there's something carl did ask me to mention some of the other books and i'm so glad that uh goodwill writes is it called sashko goodwill writes that's correct yes is the publisher that is translating some of my mother's books into polar polish and i i just want to mention a book that was published right before my book devotedly it was called suffering is never for nothing and my mother had written a book called a path through suffering and of course going through two widowhoods and one of them my stepfather with cancer was real suffering um but that she the book a path through suffering is different from the book suffering is never for nothing and the reason for that is because as she grew in her she expanded her talks on suffering she did quite a few speeches or talks in different places on suffering and what excuse me one of the dear ladies dear friends of my mothers said what's happened to the transcripts for all of those talks and my mother said they're in cassette tapes underneath my bed in a big box and so she said would you mind if my mother said if you'd like to transcribe them i'd be happy for you to do that so margaret ashmore did the work of typing out all of the talks and as uh the publisher and my agent read through those talks and then read through a path through suffering they realized this was new material there was more and more material on suffering so those are two different books but i would highly recommend them another one of my mother's one of my favorites that my mother wrote is passion and purity because of course it is about my mother and father's courtship and she keeps it very simple and short and that's why devotedly is such a long book because there was so much to share from their letters to each other that i just when i started reading my father's letters i just couldn't get over the depth of his spirituality and i have to share this little story i don't know how many of you already know this but when my mother gave me my father's letters she said val you know i hope that someday you'll have time to read them right now you have most of your children at home seven at home at the time she said so you don't have time to read these but someday you'll want to sit down and read them and she said and it's so sad that he destroyed all of my letters and i thought wow yeah that is really sad so in 2011 when my old my youngest child was just about graduated from high school uh somebody two different people within two months of each other that didn't know each other asked me what had happened to my father's letters or the the any of the love letters of my parents and i said well i know that my mother told me my mother's letters were destroyed and but she did give me all of her my father's letters so i started looking for them found them in the bottom of a trunk of memorabilia so so thrilled to find them and as i started to read them i thought these have got to be published and so i thought well i'll use my mother's journals that she had given me from 1948 to 1956 58 uh of course he died in 1956. um i'll use the journals and i'll use his letters and see if i can kind of combine what she's saying what he's saying it the more i tried to do that the more complicated and difficult it was but i was in my mother's attic the year after she died looking for his original journal and couldn't find it i called wheaton college and asked if they had his original journal and they said yes they had it but it had really fallen apart because of jungle rot and he said but the guy that's in charge of the archives he said do you know that the journals have everything that was in his original see i was thinking there might be stuff that was not in the published journals and so he said so really when you read your the journals jim elliot it's everything and so i was looking still for some other things memorabilia and i came upon the ecuador trunk and in the very bottom of the trunk were my mother's letters to my father and that she had thought really they were gone so you can imagine my thrill when i found those and i took them home began to just relish every page and just again the depth of spirituality the depth of commitment the beautiful writing the way they wrote which we have lost so much of because we use texting most of the time um was just incredible but the sad thing again as i was working on the book was the first year of her letters seemed to be gone and so the book is published with her letters from 1949 on and do you know that the chairman of the elizabeth elliott foundation kathy reeg was going through everything in my mother's house when lars was selling their house and she found the first year's letters of my mother so eventually those will get published we're not sure whether it will be in a new edition of devotedly or whether it will be in a separate little book but i was so again so amazed and thrilled that god had preserved them so let's see another book um people keep telling me that 12 baskets of crumbs and oh well there's there's daily light uh there's a there's a carl you have to help me the book about the the daily devotions i can't think of it you think of the the lamp unto my feet okay lamp unto me my feet is a beautiful it's not a year-long devotional but it's definitely two paragraphs per day you can read and her thoughts her essays on what it means to obey and trust are wonderful in that and that is still being published but the one i met mentioned 12 baskets of crumbs um is not but somebody just wrote to me today and asked is that being published and i'm hoping that someday it will be and it's a wonderful book of just many little vignettes and her essays um that's all the books i can think of right now the course the shadow of the almighty my father's biography and as you know most of you know my mother wrote about 30 books so they're wonderful and i'm hoping that this book can be republished this is uh my jungle memories and i actually have two publishers looking at it again they said for when it went out of print in 2012 no publisher was interested because children's books were not really in being marketed well and also that they're expensive when they have colored pictures so i'm praying that i can republish it in a a shorter form so that younger children can enjoy it even more but that name is pilipinto and that's what the kichwa indians called me it means butterfly any questions by the way by the way valerie before sashko uh continues yeah we'll we'll do our best to see if we can uh we can get some interest so we can see that book back in uh thank you absolutely somebody has actually asked about uh this book and and commented on how difficult it is to get um so it's out of print and currently it you can't buy it anywhere is that right you can buy it but it's ridiculously expensive it's people that bought a bunch of them and now they sell them uh so that happens and uh i heard somebody say that they saw it for 135 dollars but i have a friend that bought it for 35 on amazon so you know it might be found cheaper i i doubt it but that's that's what happens oh we're looking forward to that being published again that valerie could you please tell us um which titles which particular books are we to be expecting in the nearest future say maybe is there anything coming out this year uh you mean brand new books or my book my mother's books republished your mother's books and also your your books as well well um as i said ellen vaughn is doing a second volume of of the biography and i doubt that that would come out before what is this 2021 i doubt it would come out before 2023 but maybe the end of 2 22. um carl has asked me to work on a book about amy carmichael's devotions she had many books that had many devotional uh writings in them so with margaret ashmore the same one that transcribed all of those tapes into the book uh suffering is never for nothing she is going to work with me on a book on amy carmichael and maybe two we don't know yet but um that's one thing and then i um i don't plan i'm i don't consider myself a writer it is very challenging for me so i don't know what will come in the future but my mother's books that have been recently repackaged are the shadow of the almighty as a different cover it's got a painting of my dad on the front and then um the one that is about i'm so sorry i didn't write this down now it's it's um about trusting for eternity but i can't think of the name of it oh it's been it's been i know that my mother's first year of missionary work was originally called these strange ashes but now it is called um securing the everlasting arms is one valerie okay that's the one i was trying to think of just a second ago secure secure in the everlasting arms has been repackaged but the first year of her missionary life is now called the can you think of it kathy oh gosh it's a new title and it's very different it's no graven not no graven image no graven is her novel that's right i don't know okay it'll come to me i think well we're done okay it's hard to leave all these faces and then also be thinking of the name of that book so i'll look that up okay okay uh thank you so david writes here my father was in the military uh during the war um he went with jim to wheaton and wondering if jim had any connections with the military during world war ii no he was a conscientious objector growing up in the plymouth brethren assemblies he definitely did not believe that men should go to war so he was able to opt out of being a soldier when they were all being drafted and the other man that worked with him among the kichwa indians uh pete fleming was also a conscientious objector he was also plymouth brethren um but the other three guys i think at least two of them roger udarian and nate saint had been in the army so they had lots of discussions about going into the alkas with a gun or a couple of guns for self-defense of course they didn't want to kill any alkas but they also knew that because of panthers or poisonous snakes they might need a gun so they did take a couple of guns in but nothing the conscientious objector issue was not there's not a whole lot of writing between my mother and dad about that at all and my mother had two brothers that were in the military um so valerie you moved uh to the states when you were eight is that right that's eight and a half yeah okay so uh do you remember anything from that time uh would you describe your culture shock if there was such thing what are some of the vivid memories from that time what what surprise surprised you shocked you culturally i'm not sure i was truly shocked because we had seen the mountains around quito a lot from flying in and out of shandia and quito i mean shalmetta is where the maf missionary aviation fellowship planes had their headquarters so seeing those mountains when we moved to new hampshire they're gorgeous mountains in new hampshire so that was a homecoming almost for me of course we weren't in a jungle but we had woods around us and it was wonderful i was allowed to roam free through the woods and went down to a river was not a deep river i played and played just like i had in the jungle i don't remember being terribly lonely though um because my mother found two girls that were going to be in my class that i got together with a couple of times before school started i don't know how she found them but the lord led her to them and i'm very grateful for those two friends because they welcomed me into their classes i had to come in a little bit late that first day as the bus drove right by me as it was to pick me up and i was all ready to be picked up and it went on up the mountain and what my mother had not heard him say was that he was going to pick me up on the way back down from the mountain so that was my first sorrow you know like i thought i was going to school today and i'm all ready with my new lunch box my new clothes and all this but anyway these two girls saw me come into the room and the teacher said we have a new girl all the other students were already seated and so i was very self-conscious and these two girls whispered to me come here valerie come sit by us so they had a place for me and i just remember the first week or two of school being a little bit scared a little bit nervous because i'd never been in that setting before but the lord just the lord helped me to be adaptable i had that kind of personality anyway i like changes so it was it was uh fun uh i i wasn't real crazy but i was thankful thankful for um just being able to go to a small school and have some good friends and my fifth and sixth grade teacher was absolutely fantastic and so i loved her dearly and i remember the excitement of my mother saying let's have her over for supper and we had her for dinner one night and she loved her too and so i don't remember any huge shocks i really don't it was an easy adjustment for me um i did miss my friends probably the hardest thing was when we went back to ecuador when i was the age of 11. we went from marge saints wedding to abe vanderpoi she got married in quito ecuador and so we went to see the indians that we had lived with just three years before the quiche was and then we went to see the alkas too the waorani and i was so sad because i had completely forgotten the language even though my mother had tried very hard to help me keep speaking it she kept those languages in her head the rest of her life she didn't speak it much when she had dementia but she certainly did remember it in 1996 when we went down to ecuador and saw the wow dani and the quiche was many of the same ones that we had lived with so um she was amazing with her with her understanding of languages and perfect imitation too um valerie so if if jim thought that americans were too comfortable and satisfied back in the 50s what do you think he would say now he would be horrified just as my mother would be horrified too there's just way too much silken self as i read that poem there's too much of this expectation of i need to be comfortable it's about me it's about what i want uh it's about how i feel and she she would have just decried that continuously is it's not about our feelings yes god gave us feelings they're not all wrong but we are not to be focused on how i feel about everything and that's what happened in the 60s and 70s that that kind of jargon started coming out more and more and she just shook her head in disgust most of the time um valerie what are some key pieces of advice that you would have for families today we have a number of questions um along those lines um raising teenagers raising young children what are some of the things that you would say to to young families mothers and also which of elizabeth elliot's books would you recommend for reading on the on that issue yes i would recommend my mother's book called the shaping of a christian family and she would very strongly say it is not a prescription for raising children it is a description of a christian family so when i read it she had to remind me of that several times i said oh mama i could never i could never raise children the way grandma and grandpa howard did her parents and she said val they were an unusual couple and in every couple there's there's individual uh gifts and so every family is going to be different um the most important thing is to teach obedience and respect to your children that is very very very important and of course i'm dealing with seeing my own children now trying to teach their children obedience our oldest grandchild is 15 she's a lovely young girl very gifted in both music and art and and elizabeth her mother and her husband matt have done well at teaching their children to obey and i do really strongly encourage moms don't read everything that's on the internet about how to parent it's really about following god's principles so proverbs is still a wonderful book in teaching how to parent the young other children are very young the oldest in the states is four years old and the others are younger so we're we're watching and praying all the time um i would say my own struggle with being consistent had to do a lot with my own spontaneous personality some days wanting to be very disciplined another day is wanting to just say oh forget it it's too hard but it takes real serious commitment to train to teach our children obedience and i would just encourage moms and dads who have children at home don't give up no matter how difficult the child is and i have to tell a story about this and how much time we have about 20 more minutes is that right um my youngest child i have four very strong-willed or it's my mother would say willful children and i have four pretty compliant children so as they were growing up those four that were very willful were the difficult ones but my youngest one was the most persevering stubborn child of the four and my second one elizabeth the mother of those four in england was very very persevering but then sarah came along as the last one and i realized that because i knew she was going to be my last my husband said we were done with having children he's 9 years older than i and i had to really discipline myself to seriously work with sarah and she is now a medical student has been determined to be a doctor since she was about seven years old and we're very very thankful and proud that she has that determined spirit um she's about to graduate from liberty university in may but i remember one night i was trying to train her to sleep through the night because i had finished nursing her and she would wake up at exactly the same time she still had been nursed she wanted to be nursed and i would just tell her no we're done i'd give her water and i'd say it's time to go back to sleep but she'd wake up screaming mad and i went in and said mama has to spank you and i believed in using a paint stick which is the rod that is in proverbs i don't believe in beating a child i believe in getting a good whack on the back of the leg and uh hard enough that hurts but not to you know hurt them too much of course and parents have to be very careful with their own issue of anger and and disciplining themselves to train their children rightly so i would had three nights in a row had gone in to deal with this screaming i said sarah if you wake up you can call mama if you want some water but you're to go back to sleep and after the little quick quack on the back of her leg she would keep crying but she wouldn't scream i said you cannot scream but on the third night i was thinking this isn't working she's just not getting this so lord is there something else i'm supposed to do and you know what verse came to me i knew it was the holy spirit all discipline for the moment seems in the old in the king james it says most sorrowful it seems painful but afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness and i knew that god was saying persevere you have to give her that spank again and you know it lasted maybe two more nights she woke up and after that she slept through the night so persevere with children that are very difficult don't give up on teaching them to obey they must understand authority children a parents can have the voice of authority with firmness and kindness they do not have to be yelling they do not have to be screaming at their kids and if you say i'm going to count to three then you are training your children to delay obedience and delayed obedience is disobedience so i would say teach your children the first time to come and two simple commands that you give to a little child know and come and i was trying it out with my two-year-old grandson i was just with because he just had a little brother born and he just looked at me and i knew that his parents were working on training him and i said jackson come and he just stood there he's about six eight feet away from me i said come he stood there and looked at me and i stood there and looked at him i knew that i didn't have the place to spank him because they were still discussing about spanking um but i just looked at him i said jackson grandmama said come and he suddenly decided in his little heart well i guess i better go he came to me wasn't any crying but that teaching the one the first time obedience is very hard i am not gonna say it's easy i don't want it to sound like yeah it can be done it can be done but with the help of the lord because you know the lord perseveres with us he perseveres with us and uh so i would encourage parents not to give up on difficult children children that don't want to obey children that want their own way i remember when elizabeth was about eight she was whining she was manipulative i had done probably too much yes not probably i was doing too much dealing working out things with her trying to help her be happy and i remember one day thinking it is not about elizabeth's happiness it is about teaching her obedience and respect and my husband had said to me in that same year value let elizabeth argue with you way too much and i knew he was right so i began to say it helped me to say this as well as it helped elizabeth to hear i am the mother elizabeth you cannot whine and fuss and get your way mama said no and uh to to keep it simple like that you know instead of trying to make deals or saying if you do this then you can do this and if you don't get this then you can you won't have it's just too difficult for young children to follow through on a reasoning like that on a dealing things i just i think they need clear commands and they need clear quick punishment that is not in what what my daughter and her husband are doing right now with jackson is they are putting him on a chair which i had suggested too and setting a timer for a certain amount of time if he's throwing a fit they put him there and they say you can't throw a fit at the table you can't throw a fit if we tell you we're going upstairs and so he sits there he's for a couple of times he would cry but the other times he just sat there realizing this was his punishment and when the timer rang he was happy got down and did what he was supposed to do so it just takes mom and dad talking to each other about what is uh what is a good consequence you know that's reasonable um i would not advocate beating at all i just truly believe that the child has to have some kind of hurt uh to see that their disobedience has a consequence so if it's hurt by being left on a chair i used to have a a whining chair if they were whining too much they had to sit on the whining chair until the fussiness was gone and that worked it was great but direct disobedience uh direct disrespect really has to be dealt with pretty seriously if it's allowed when they're little it gets worse and worse especially as teenagers thank you valerie um earlier you referenced two books that you read that had big influence on you one was on prayer could you please repeat those titles yes i forgot to mention more about the prayer book but the first one was called a severe mercy by sheldon van alken a-u-k-e-n and it's a true story of a young couple who become christians after they've been married and her excitement this is what really challenged me to read the bible 30 days in a row her excitement over reading the bible convicted me as a christian i thought i've been a christian all my life i've never really been that excited to read the bible and so i'm going to ask the lord to show me and i didn't finish that part of the story is that in when i found that verse um words were found and their words became and i ate them and they became to me the joy and delight of my life um it was really true that i needed the word of god daily so that that second book i actually found in those following two weeks of that 30-day commitment we went to dallas to visit walt's parents whose father his father had just had a heart attack and he was between death and life and he said he felt like paul be twicks in between wanting to be with christ but also knowing he still had work to do and i was in a bookstore during that two weeks and saw that book what happens when women pray by evelyn christensen it was written i believe in the 70s and it really opened my eyes to how women's work and prayer with women could really help the women in the church and so a little bible study i'd been doing once a month with the women in that church in louisiana which i had no clue what i was doing because i had never taught a bible study but this book opened my eyes to the possibility and joy of prayer about everything and i tried to show from reading that book to those women tried to show them it's not just about praying for people's physical ailments it's about praying for god's glory to be seen in their lives uh in their husbands and children's lives and it just became a much more alive group when we started to say okay let's be real about what we're really worried about what we're really longing for and uh god answers prayer and he answers it sometimes in very unusual ways or ways that we have to wait for a long time before he answers but it was it really opened my heart to prayer and helped my relationship with those women in louisiana valerie the book that you were referring to um these strange ashes of your mother yes and can't be changed made for the journey made for the journey thank you so much that's the book of my mother's first year as a missionary and it was a very surprisingly disappointing years because year because she lost everything that she'd worked on for about nine months and it wasn't her fault that it was lost it got stolen and then the man who was her interpreter got murdered and so that was a group of indians on the western side of the andes before my mother and dad got married so it used to be called these strange ashes could probably still be found in used bookstores um but also it's now called made for the journey thank you valerie another question is about ecuador so you've mentioned earlier today that um you and your mother have you actually visited ecuador in the 90s if i remember correctly and some people are asking have you ever taken any of your children there have you traveled there with them uh did they see did they get places yes just our oldest one 1996 my mother and her husband invited my husband and me to go uh to ecuador and meet in quito we were actually celebrating the 40th anniversary of the death of i don't know if you say celebrating it was a memorial service at the hcjb radio station um and we met steve saint there who is marge saint's son nate saint's son and our son walter was actually living with my uncle burt who is my father's older brother who's now in heaven also and uncle byrd had been a missionary in in peru for many years at that time and by the time he died i believe it had been 63 years of work in peru and so our son walter came to see us when he was in peru is an unbelievable way that god allowed him to get on a bus for 36 hours cross the border between peru and ecuador which is always chancy never know what's going to happen at the borders he got to meet us right at the airport in quito and he got to be with us as we went to visit the kichwas as well as going to visit the wyodani it was a wonderful trip and a very unusual thing happened i think i still have a few more minutes to say this we were visiting the kichwa indians in the house that my dad built some quiches had decided it had been empty all these years they might as well move in and it unfortunately had broken up any harmony that was in the tribe of teachers in that little village called shandia one family felt it was their right to move into the house the other family said well we helped build it we helped mr jim jaime elliot build it too so we should be able to move in so there was a huge rift between those two families and so when we got to shandy it was very sad to see that the quiche was were it was all about who was living in my father's house and so we are we go up to the house and of course everything's overgrown nothing looks quite the same the house little dilapidated but we sit down to sit with the kichwas and of course my mother could still speak quichewa and they brought us boiled eggs and chicha that manioc drink that i mentioned and so my mother lars my husband my son walter our oldest we're all sitting there eating when a blonde leather-clad young man walks through the jungle to the house and my mother said to him in spanish thinking he might be spanish um he actually asked first he said is this the house of jim elliott and he asked that in spanish and my mother answered him in spanish and he was just overcome because my mother said and i happen to be jim elliott's wife and this is her our daughter and this is her husband and this is their son and uh he just said well i read through gates of splendor while i was in germany and i decided to go visit ecuador and thought i might start learning spanish and do some mission work in in ecuador and i thought i'd come see jim elliott's house and it just happened that we were there on that very day so my mother was thrilled that somebody was coming to see it and we just had a nice visit of course because she could still speak kichwa she explained that to the kichwa indians and she could still speak spanish so that was a huge gift from the lord that day did i answer the question i can't remember what that's going on i think you did yes yes your experience with ecuador um yeah it's a beautiful country and i would love to go back i've never had any notion or desire that we should go work among the indians my husband and i had three years in africa and we just felt that we should be in the states because of my mother's dementia and also one our our son our seventh child had just been diagnosed with something called charcot marie tooth which is a degenerative neuromuscular disease and so in in 2008 we came back and felt like we needed to deal with him as well as seeing my mother more often thank you we've not been able to do any more mission work but we're doing mission work wherever we are speaking of which um what's next for you valerie you mentioned um or we actually i think i may have mentioned that you are planning to uh write two more books some people would like to know what they are going to be about and and just in general um where is god leading you um do you know where your next adventure might be oh well my husband being retired loves where we are right now so we hope to stay here at least 10 years he will be 84 when 10 years are up and we are going to an evangelical presbyterian church which to me is wonderful we had really struggled finding the church that we were supposed to go to and i feel that we can both serve there so i'm excited about that and writing is of course it's in in the cards for me but as i said it's not an easy thing and carl has been a huge encouragement to me to to work on this amy carmichael devotional and i hope that i can put out at least a little pamphlet for parents um i love i want to tell you parents this to find it it's online i'm quite sure it's a little pamphlet called used to be called children fun or friend frenzy by al and pat fabrizio it is now called children under loving command and it is simply about using the rod and teaching obedience it's a very clear simple explanation of how to train a little toddler to obey and it really was a godsend to me with our oldest son was quite easy to train but i knew i needed that pamphlet just as my mother had had taught me and my grandmother too children must obey from an early age once you get that habit into them they're going to be much happier children so children under loving command by al and pat fabrizio so i'd love to write something maybe a little fuller um their main thing is just saying one command and using the rod for punishment and as i said it's a little pamphlet i'd love to write something a little more than just teaching obedience but i do write very irregularly a letter to younger moms and trying to encourage them just giving them hints i know that i'm not an expert my husband says we cannot go out doing parenting seminars we are very thankful for the way our children have grown up and they all went to college we homeschooled them at least through part of high school but i was not a fantastic homeschooler i just know the grace of god covers a lot of mistakes and uh so we we want to focus more on his grace my husband likes to say our children were homed not necessarily homeschooled they were homed so we taught them lots about responsibility and they're all good workers so we're very thankful about that and they all got to learn to read and write and do arithmetic but beyond that in the sciences we were a little weak anyway um i don't know i do speak some i would love for my husband to go with me wherever i speak uh he doesn't really want to sell books as my mother's husband did regularly but he's a great encouragement to me and our next place we will be trusting that the lord will get us there because of covid and vaccines and all that washington at the end of march we plan to be at a homeschool conference in washington um i have a couple of other possible speaking engagements all of my engagements were canceled last year because of kovid so that's fine i was glad to be home and of course worked a little more on that book that i was working on um i think just being a servant right here in my neighborhood is really really a strong call to me i love rosaria butterfield's book have you seen it sashko um i've seen a lot of her books but this particular one is called the gospel comes with a house key yes crossfit it is wonderful and it's very challenging she definitely has a special gift to have people over every day but it was very convicting to both walt and me as we live in a kind of spread out neighborhood so we're not right next to each other in other houses but i feel very strongly that we should be opening our home to our neighbors soon i hope sooner rather than later because of this pandemic but um that was a very convicting and strong helpful book for us because we did we we were very hospitable as far as at least once a week having people in our home when our children were growing up but um want to continue that right here so i don't i don't have any aspirations for doing bigger greater things just we're to be servants right where we are valerie before we wrap up just one last question from me uh i'm in my early 30s my wife and i we don't have children yet but we see more and more um young parents uh going for this stress free i'm not sure what what you call that in english but uh the raising of your children where you're not supposed to be stressing them you're not supposed to be saying no and then they will be learning for themselves um what's your take on that how do you uh even talk to people like this what do you say um and in general what's your approach well the sad thing is they're not most young couples are not open to asking older parents their advice and even when my husband and i were wanting his parents advice we lived only two and a half hours from then when we lived in louisiana they were very reluctant to give us a whole lot of advice they were clear on yes you teach them obedience and respect and you love them and they're both very gracious gracious people and so when younger people don't want to ask older people advice but rather look on the internet for their next bit of advice i i don't know what to say except to pray for them pray that the lord will give them a desire to ask people who have raised broken i'm very i'm just very thankful that my mother was so clear in how it should be done i think she was right but i can't i can't argue with my own children if they choose not to spank um it's it's it is what they choose to do as well as we pray my husband and i pray i don't know that i've answered your question i don't i don't agree with permissiveness i don't agree that their their little spirits will be broken and hurt if they're taught with with strictness and i don't mean strictness in a mean way at all i mean firmness i think parents must be loving and they must be kind and they must mean what they say they cannot give vain threats um and and a punishment has to be real it has to be serious and it doesn't have to be long doesn't have to be days even grounding my mother i don't think i was ever grounded though i did do some foolish things and she probably maybe one time i was grounded but just uh a punishment is is better to be quick it needs to be quick and serious and then it's done because then you show your kids your grace again the lord's grace and i don't know what to say to young people who don't are not interested you know what i'm saying yeah i suppose pray prayer is a good good answer good solution for that uh valerie we're mindful of time and we know you have further arrangements for for the rest of the day um just a big big thank you for for your time today um huge thank you uh we have received a couple of appreciation notes uh that i'm going to pass on to you um after after the meeting um and your your ministry your your parents ministry has been uh impacting um people for for decades and and it's just such a such a great blessing to to be able to um just hear from you today and just soak in all this all this wisdom so big big thank you thank you for having me and i i would just say the wisdom is in the bible and we've got to keep focusing on reading what god's word says it's the truth it's the absolute truth we cannot get away from it though everybody tries to get away from it um we're just uh meditating on his word is may be hard but it's also it brings wisdom and discernment so i'm very thankful that you asked me to talk i again don't feel you know anything like uh the the huge perseverance and determination that my parents have i'm still trying to learn that still trying to be more persevering than i have been thank you valerie um for those of you uh for our participants who uh have been asking about this um the recording of this um webinar will be available uh we will send you the link uh within the next couple of days hopefully this us we'll be able to do that still this weekend um uh elizabeth elliot's books um and valerie's are available and listed on elizabeth elliot's foundation's website um they are available for for purchasing they are available for licensing should someone want to translate them into a foreign language um before we wrap up uh kathy kathy reach are you are you with us here her name is there i i i am i am sorry i i've not wanted to distract from valerie so i stayed blank that's okay that's okay thank you kathy um kathy could you just briefly let us know uh what are some of the resources we could be coming for to elizabeth elliot's um foundation website um is there anything any announcements that we should be aware of well we are so thrilled to be able to steward this legacy and valerie's support and encouragement in this and serving on the board with us we are going to be bringing more and more resources we keep unearthing all of these talks of elizabeth's so we have just really hit the surface so just keep watching and and waiting and register um sign up for the newsletters and announcements and you'll see uh soon there will be more and more videos more and more uh for talks and even even books coming about so it's exciting exciting days ahead yes and if i may say the the website for uh is elizabeth elliott.org correct yes it is and also you may want to go to the uh facebook page yes elizabeth foundation correct exactly there's instagram there's facebook uh there's twitter even and also um there is a place to sign up for a devotional which we send out weekly which are excerpts from some of her books or her newsletters of the past and great wisdom great encouragement i just encourage you to just continue to follow us sashko will send out uh a uh as as he mentioned a link to the recording and also the links to the facebook the web the web page i mean the website and uh that will help uh everyone to keep tabs on what will come and hopefully god willing will have other events like uh like like this including hopefully uh val we'll give val a little rest she's been speaking for such a long time and then perhaps uh later this year invite her uh once again to speak on uh on on relevant topics um sashko over to you yes thank you uh if you have uh any any questions please write uh to this email address info at goodwillrites.com info at goodwillrites.com and we'll be happy to answer uh any of your questions uh you can also follow us on facebook and instagram and that's where we uh uh publish uh some of the daily quotes and um quite a few of those have actually been taken from elizabeth elliot's books so that's that's another channel to uh to stay tuned and uh just to be reminded about um about the the titles that elizabeth uh produced and uh that's just another way to uh to stay stay in touch as well um before we go uh once again big thank you to everybody who who participated and uh let's just bow our heads uh and and pray before we go brother we thank you so much for um valerie's um ministry for the life for her life for the life of her parents for uh all this legacy um as indeed as kathy mentioned that we are still unpacking and then discovering lord we pray that um all that wisdom and legacy would be uh distributed among young people that young people would want to to listen and that the books would be translated into even more uh languages and that this just would still be alive decades decades from now and centuries from now or we pray that um your name would be glorified through uh valerie's ministry and uh we just we're so grateful for um for her talk today and for what she was sharing with us and we're so thankful to you and and uh for you for your word that uh contains uh all the all the wisdom that we need for for godly living lord we pray that you would bless us uh today and tonight uh with um everyone every participant with um whatever we have left uh or planned for for this day and for this weekend and tomorrow as we as we worship with uh our congregations whether it's live or um online we pray that you would receive all the glory that belongs to you only lord we pray about all these things in the name of our savior amen amen once again thank you everyone for your participation and uh you can expect an email from us within the next couple of days thank you god bless everyone

Channel: The Elisabeth Elliot Foundation

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Id: PQNVnQhfT3o

Length: 109min 13sec (6553 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 01 2021