Jim Elliot

What He Did

Jim Elliot was 21 years old, a senior at Wheaton College, when he wrote a sentence in his journal that would, after his death, be read by millions of people.

He was thinking, at the time, about how to live the rest of his life. He was a serious athlete, an academically capable man, marriage-ready and gospel-driven. He could have done many things. He chose foreign missions, specifically the hardest version of it he could find.

The hardest version, by 1955, was the Waodani. They lived in the deep Ecuadorian Amazon. They had killed every outsider who had entered their territory in living memory. The Quichua tribes downriver called them Auca — “savage” — and avoided them.

Elliot and four other missionaries decided to attempt contact. Their preparation was slow and careful. Nate Saint, the team's pilot, devised a method of lowering gifts on a long line from a small plane circling in tight spirals, so that the gift could be lowered into a Waodani clearing without the plane having to land. They did this for months. Eventually they began including phrases in the Waodani language. The Waodani sent gifts back up the line: a bird, a small handwoven crown.

On 3 January 1956, Saint flew the team to a sandbar on the Curaray River, within range of a Waodani settlement. The men called it “Palm Beach.” They built a small treehouse for sleeping. They waited.

On 6 January, three Waodani — one man, two women — came to the riverbank. The contact was peaceful. The man, whom the missionaries nicknamed “George,” was given a ride in the airplane. He went home delighted.

On 8 January 1956, around 3:00 in the afternoon, a larger group of Waodani warriors emerged from the jungle. They speared all five missionaries to death. The bodies were found three days later by a search party flown in by U.S. military.

Elliot's body was identified by his wedding ring and his wristwatch. He was 28. He left a 29-year-old widow and a ten-month-old daughter.

What Happened Next

This is the part most people do not know.

Within two years, Elisabeth Elliot — Jim's widow — was living in a Waodani settlement with her young daughter Valerie. Rachel Saint, Nate's sister, was living there too. Together they learned the language. Together they explained who Jesus was. Together they translated Scripture into Waodani.

The men who killed the five missionaries were among the first Waodani Christians. Mincaye, one of the killers, became a beloved elder in the church. Decades later, he and another of the killers baptized Steve Saint, the eight-year-old son who had lost his father on Palm Beach.

The Waodani church exists to this day.

What appeared, in January 1956, to be a complete waste — five strong men dead, nine children fatherless, a tribe untouched — turned out to be the seed of one of the most documented gospel transformations in twentieth-century missions.

Why It Belongs Here

Most Christian men, at some point in their lives, hit a moment when the obedience God seems to be asking would cost them everything they have built. Their career. Their reputation. Their savings. Their marriage. Their kids' futures. Their life expectancy.

The voice in their heads at that moment is reasonable. It says: you have a family to think of. You have responsibilities. God would not actually require you to do this.

Jim Elliot wrote his most famous sentence at age 22, in advance of any test, as a settled philosophical commitment. He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.

He could not keep his life. None of us can. The actuarial tables agree on this. The only question is what we are buying with the years.

He bought the Waodani church.

“Whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it. What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?” Matthew 16:25-26

Elliot believed Christ's arithmetic was more reliable than his own. So when the calculation came — live a respectable Christian life in America with a wife and a child, or risk everything on a tribe that might kill him — he ran the numbers Christ's way.

The numbers came out. Jim Elliot lost what he could not keep. He gained what he could not lose. Most Christian men spend a lifetime trying to keep what they cannot keep, and gain what they cannot keep, and end up empty in both directions.

He is no fool who trades what cannot be kept for what cannot be lost.