January 25, 2024 • 20 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Elisabeth Elliot was a missionary who returned to Ecuador with her toddler daughter to preach the Gospel to the Indian tribe that had killed her husband. Here's Elisabeth Elliot to tell us her story.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:11):
And we continue here on our American stories, and we
love to tell stories about every facet of American life,
and periodically those are faith stories, because we know that
faith animates so many Americans in their walk and in
their day to day lives. Elizabeth Elliott has been described
as one of the most influential Christian women of the
(00:32):
twentieth century. Let's get right into the story. Here's Greg Henglo.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Through Gates of Splendor is a nineteen fifty seven best
selling book written by Elizabeth Elliott. Upon release, the book
was so popular that it competed with John F. Kennedy's
Profiles and Courage in terms of sales. Through Gates of
Splendor tells the story of Operation Alca, an attempt by
(00:57):
five American missionaries Im Elliott, the author's husband, Pete Fleming,
Ed McCully, pilot, Nate Saint, and Roger Euderian, a participant
at the Battle of the Bulge in World War Two,
to reach the Alca tribe of eastern Ecuador. All five
men were killed by the tribe. In nineteen sixty seven,
(01:20):
a documentary film, also titled Through Gates of Splendor, was
narrated by Elizabeth Elliott herself Thanks to the folks at
Vision Video, we are about to hear this story. Here's
Elizabeth Elliott.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
The Republic of Ecuador, three thousand air miles due south
of New York City, is one of our friendly South
American neighbor.
Speaker 4 (01:45):
Nations, Pito.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Its capital city is just below the equator, nine thousand
feet up in the Andes.
Speaker 4 (01:53):
This is where the story began.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
At one time or another, all of us Jungle missionaries
stayed with Nate and Marge Saint in their rustic and
thoroughly functional house. Marge managed to find time to take
care of her three children and supply the Jungle missionaries
with everything from fresh beef and fruits to screens and nails.
(02:18):
Whenever Nate took off with supplies, it was Marche who bought, stored, packed,
weighed and even helped Nate load them into the plane.
She kept his ground log, knew his position in the air,
and stood by at all times with shortwave radio.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
Where we think whether important you got them.
Speaker 4 (02:40):
Coming and to grow up land over.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
The friendly Keach was with whom Jim, Pete and Ed worked.
All knew Nate's little yellow plane and weren't afraid of it.
They even begged for rides. Even some of the well
known tribe of headshrinkers called Hivaos had heard the words
of the Lord Jesus from Raj and others, and some
had come.
Speaker 4 (03:08):
To believe Nate was very ingenious.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
He invented a sort of pod on the wing struts
which would release a parachute with supplies. When Jim and
I were just married, we opened a new station at
a place called Puyopungu. For five months, we had no airstrip,
and Nate dropped some of our supplies to us by parachute.
When the airstrip at Puyupungu finally passed Nate's testing procedure
(03:37):
and he made his first landing with us, we were
as excited as the Indians. It gave us hopes of
opening more stations, of getting around more often to visit
the Indians. There was one group of Indians no one
had ever visited and come out alive. They were the
aucas feared even by neighboring Indian tribes. One day, when
(04:00):
Nate had flown into Arajuno, where ed Marylou lived, they
decided to make another search. Everyone knew they were there
somewhere in the jungle Alkas had killed a Quichua Indian
near Ed's station only a few months before. The five
Fellows had talked and prayed a lot about reaching these people,
(04:21):
but it seemed a very remote possibility until that day
in September nineteen fifty five, Ed and Nate were just
about to turn around and fly for home when they
saw the house.
Speaker 4 (04:33):
They didn't see any people.
Speaker 3 (04:35):
But there was no question about it. It was an
Alca house. Long before this, Nate had devised an air
to ground exchange by means of a bucket suspended on
a long cord.
Speaker 4 (04:48):
From the plane.
Speaker 3 (04:50):
Even dropped a telephone so we could talk back and
forth with the plane. As the plane circled slowly in
the air, the bucket dropped to the vortex.
Speaker 4 (04:58):
Of the cone.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
Don't ask how he figured it out. Aviation experts are
still trying this. The boys decided was just what they
would use to try and contact the Aucas. Years before,
when the shell plane had dropped gifts, the Alcus thought
they had fallen from the stomach of the plane because
it had been wounded or frightened by the lances they
(05:21):
had thrown. So it was important that the Indians see
that the new visitors had the power to give or
withhold the gift right up to the moment of delivery.
For fifteen weeks, they made regular flights over the village,
dropping gifts free fall, with streamers attached so the Indians
could find them easily.
Speaker 4 (05:40):
When the boys began to make.
Speaker 3 (05:41):
Bucket drops, the Alcas even built a platform so they
could get up nearer the plane. You can imagine the
excitement when one day the Indians sent back a roasted
monkey in the bucket. Subsequent flights brought feathers, combs, even
a live parrot. Encouraged that the Alcus had accepted the
(06:03):
gifts and returned offerings of their own, the men searched
constantly for some clearing where the plane might land and
they could carry out their mission of meeting the Alcas
face to face. Each trip, the men planned and prayed,
and each trip contributed something to their meager store of
knowledge as to the habits and attitude of these primitive people. Finally,
(06:25):
the day came when they believed God's time had come
for them to go and meet the Alcas. Nate had
explored the Kuradai River and discovered a patch of beach
on which he could land. They called it Palm Beach.
Back at Shelmeta, Marge had regular contact with the party
on the beach, taking down the messages in a code
(06:47):
we had devised because we wanted to keep the operation
quiet until the men had made the first successful contact.
While so far they had seen no alcas, they believed
they were in the area were probably watching them every move.
As the missionary party made camp on the beach, a
shaft with ribbons was stuck in the ground so the
(07:09):
alcas would identify the men as those who had dropped.
Speaker 4 (07:12):
Gifts from the air.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
Jim had prefabricated a treehouse with his electric saw in Shandia.
Nate had flown it in piece by piece, and they
worked all day getting it up so that they would
have a defensible position in case of sudden attack. While
Jim and the fellows were on the beach, I was
at home in Shandya, listening every chance I got to
the radio messages between Palm.
Speaker 4 (07:35):
Beach and March.
Speaker 3 (07:37):
Marge was indispensable whenever Nate was away. She knew where
he was every hour, she knew how much gas he
had on board. She'd run outside, take a look at
the sky and let him know just what kind of
weather he could expect for landing. Without radio, the flying
program would have been impossible. On Friday from January sixth,
(08:02):
nineteen fifty six, after three days of waiting on the beach,
three Alcas appeared. The fellows called the young man George.
Of course, neither party understood the other, except for a
few words that Jim had learned from an Alca girl
who had left her tribe. George seemed completely at ease,
loved our insect repellent, and even asked by signs for
(08:24):
a ride.
Speaker 4 (08:25):
In the airplane.
Speaker 3 (08:27):
The younger girl, promptly nicknamed Delilah, was fascinated with the
texture of the plane, rubbing her body against the fabric
and imitating with her hands when she wasn't scratching the
plane's movement. Then late in the afternoon they left. The
men waited for them to return on Sunday at noon,
(08:49):
Nate radio'd, Marge, looks like they'll be here for the
afternoon's service.
Speaker 4 (08:54):
Pray for us. This is the day.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
We'll contact you at four thirty. But at four thirty
there was only silence.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
And when we come back, we continue with this remarkable story,
and you're listening to Elizabeth Elliott herself. And we love
it when we can find material pulled from archives and
hear directly from voices that are from the past. Elizabeth
Elliott's story continues here on our American Stories, and we
(09:39):
return to our American stories and to Elizabeth Elliott, and
again we're going to go back to her storytelling and
hear her concluding words from our last segment.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
On Sunday at noon, Nate radioed, Marge, looks like they'll
be here for the afternoon's service.
Speaker 4 (10:01):
This is the day.
Speaker 3 (10:03):
We'll contact you at four thirty. But at four thirty
there was only silence.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
That is until the January thirtieth, nineteen fifty six issue
of Life magazine hit the news stands. The magazine costs
twenty cents. Life Magazine circulated to eight and a half
million American homes every week. But on page ten of
this issue, there's a stark, black and white photo of
(10:34):
five young women sitting around a kitchen table. It takes
up almost the entire width of the oversized two page spread.
There are half eaten sandwiches on the plates in front
of them, and toddlers are wiggling in their laps and
on their shoulders. They're listening to a man with his
back to the camera. The man is telling them about
(10:56):
the search party that found the dead bodies of their
five husbandmans. The alca had speared them, all of them
to death. The man has just told them that they
are now widows. The headline reads, go ye and preach
the Gospel, five do and die. Within days, the story
(11:19):
of their sacrifice had circulated around the world. People were amazed,
in an era of peace and prosperity, that Christians were
still willing to pursue something bigger than money or the
American dream. The story of sacrifice and surrender for the
sake of reaching a remote tribe with the Gospel was
compelling even to those who questioned or mocked the faith
(11:42):
of the missionaries, and they weren't done, most notably Elizabeth
Eliot and Nate Saint, Sister Rachel Saint. Here again is
Elizabeth Eliot.
Speaker 3 (11:54):
I went back to Shandia, where Jim and I had lived,
and continued to work with the Quichuas. People all over
the world began to pray for the Alkas. I prayed too,
but it seemed a faithless prayer at times. I asked
God to open a door somehow, but I had no
idea what to suggest. I asked him to send somebody
(12:15):
in there. Somebody could tell them what the five men
had wanted, to tell them that the God who made
them actually cared about them, and.
Speaker 4 (12:25):
That he was worth trusting.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
I told the Lord I was willing to go if
he wanted me to, but that seemed absurd too. If
five men had been killed, who would ever succeed. I
knew that God could do it if he wanted to,
and that was the reason for prayer. Prayer is not
a vain thing. In November nineteen fifty eight, two Alca
(12:52):
women came out of their tribe right into a Quichua village.
I met them, and they came back to Shannon to
live with me. Dayuma, the Alca girl who had given
Jim some help on the language, had been with Rachel's
Saint Nate's sister for several years now, and Rachel had
some valuable language data which she shared with me. I
(13:15):
used this as a basis and began to study with
Mintaka and mang Gamo, the two who were with me.
One day, when the three got together, Dayuma, Mintaka, and Mankamo.
They said, we're going home. So they went, and Rachel
and I waited for them. When they returned, they invited
(13:37):
the three of us, including my little girl Valerie, to
go and live there. We had prayed for this. Others
were praying for it too. We knew that this was
God's doing.
Speaker 4 (13:51):
We went.
Speaker 3 (13:53):
It took us three days by foot over jungle trails
and streams, by canoe down the Kuradai and up the
Onion jungle rivers, and then by foot again to the Tiuenno.
Here we came face to face with Alcas. The first
(14:16):
one we saw was Delilah Diyuma's younger sister, the very
one who had been friendly to the five men on
the Kuraai beach two days before they died. I had
to keep reminding myself that these these very people were
the ones who had killed the men. They were called
one of the most savage tribes in the world. What
(14:38):
made them savage? They were human beings. They laughed and played,
they bathed, They showed no hostility to us, And yet
I learned they had their own strict ideas about right
and wrong, even if they were different from ours. They
believed it was wrong to kill people, except under certain conditions.
(15:01):
Some of them said they thought the five men were cannibals.
All outsiders were cannibals in fact, and so of course,
if they were coming to.
Speaker 4 (15:09):
Eat the Alcus, the obvious thing.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
To do, the noble and right thing to do, was
to kill them. But now Mintaka and Mankamo and Dayuma
had succeeded in convincing them that there were outsiders who
were quite all right. But these foreigners would come and
live in the village and tell them stories about a
man named Jesus. He was a good man. They should
(15:31):
listen to these stories and learn to talk to Jesus
to pray. So, just as Mankamo had promised me months before,
her people said, yes, let them come.
Speaker 4 (15:43):
We won't need to kill any more.
Speaker 3 (15:46):
And so I took up life for the Alcus. We
decided that the best we could do was simply to
live as much like them as we could, to share
what they ate and the things they did. They were
kind to valery in Me. They gave Rachel a place
to sleep in one of their shelters. They turned over
(16:08):
a whole house. They called it a house to.
Speaker 4 (16:11):
Valery in Me.
Speaker 3 (16:13):
When the roof began to leak, they mended it for me.
None of the houses was any more than a roof.
There were no walls, no floors, no doors, and no privacy.
The problem of communication was a constant one. I couldn't
put together more than a sentence or two, and those
(16:36):
were very short ones. Rachel and I never ceased trying
to analyze and classify the language data, trying to reproduce
it verbally with the proper into a nations and nasalizations,
and all the other things which make a foreign language,
and especially an unwritten language difficult. Just try pronouncing a
(16:56):
W with your tongue flat in the front of your mouth.
They do it in a word like men, and both
the vowels are nasalized. Besides, Valerie had no trouble. She
did better with a three year old's memory and mimicking
ability than I did with all my language files, tape
recorder and systems of mnemonics. She showed them picture books
(17:19):
and taught them how to hold a crayon and draw.
This was the best kind of language study, the attempt
to understand and to be understood. The Alcas rarely counted
above three, but Dioma explained that one day in seven
was God's day, and on that day she was going
to talk about him. Everyone was told to come and
(17:40):
sit down and be quiet. She told them simple stories
from the Old Testament or stories of Jesus from the New.
Speaker 4 (17:49):
Dioma told them.
Speaker 3 (17:50):
That Jesus says we must not kill. So right away
some of the men stopped making spears. There were occasions
when they needed to spare a wild pig. Careful explanation
to us about what they were for. They made new ones.
These men received us as their own relatives. They were
the same ones who killed Jim and Nate, rog and
(18:13):
Pete and Ed.
Speaker 4 (18:15):
They had their reasons.
Speaker 3 (18:17):
God had his for allowing it to happen when five
men had asked Him to guide them and had trusted
him for this guidance and protection. They had sung before
they left home that last morning, the hymn to the
tune of Finlandia. We rest on Thee, our shield and
(18:37):
our defender. We go not forth alone against the foe.
Strong in thy strength, safe in thy keeping, tender we
rest on Thee, and.
Speaker 4 (18:51):
In Thy name we go. They succeeded.
Speaker 3 (18:57):
Not in converting the Alcas, not even in speaking to
them of the name of Jesus, which the Alcas had
never heard. The Indians could not have imagined the real
reason for these white.
Speaker 4 (19:10):
Men being on that beach.
Speaker 3 (19:12):
They simply took them as a threat to their own
way of life and speared them.
Speaker 4 (19:18):
But the men succeeded.
Speaker 3 (19:20):
They did the thing they had set out to do.
They had obeyed God, they had taken literally his words.
The world passeth away, and the lust thereof But he
that doeth the will of God abideth forever.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
And great job catching that and snagging it. That's Greg
Hangler catching that peace. And you were listening to Elizabeth Elliott,
And what a faith story indeed, And the end. So
much of a faith walk, if you've had one, or
taking one, or thinking about taking one, has to do
merely with obedience and doing what your God demands you
(20:02):
to do. And sometimes those are hard things. Terrific storytelling
indeed about faith. Elizabeth Elliott's story here on our American
Stories
And we continue here on our American stories, and we
love to tell stories about every facet of American life,
and periodically those are faith stories, because we know that
faith animates so many Americans in their walk and in
their day to day lives. Elizabeth Elliott has been described
as one of the most influential Christian women of the
(00:32):
twentieth century. Let's get right into the story. Here's Greg Henglo.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Through Gates of Splendor is a nineteen fifty seven best
selling book written by Elizabeth Elliott. Upon release, the book
was so popular that it competed with John F. Kennedy's
Profiles and Courage in terms of sales. Through Gates of
Splendor tells the story of Operation Alca, an attempt by
(00:57):
five American missionaries Im Elliott, the author's husband, Pete Fleming,
Ed McCully, pilot, Nate Saint, and Roger Euderian, a participant
at the Battle of the Bulge in World War Two,
to reach the Alca tribe of eastern Ecuador. All five
men were killed by the tribe. In nineteen sixty seven,
(01:20):
a documentary film, also titled Through Gates of Splendor, was
narrated by Elizabeth Elliott herself Thanks to the folks at
Vision Video, we are about to hear this story. Here's
Elizabeth Elliott.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
The Republic of Ecuador, three thousand air miles due south
of New York City, is one of our friendly South
American neighbor.
Speaker 4 (01:45):
Nations, Pito.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Its capital city is just below the equator, nine thousand
feet up in the Andes.
Speaker 4 (01:53):
This is where the story began.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
At one time or another, all of us Jungle missionaries
stayed with Nate and Marge Saint in their rustic and
thoroughly functional house. Marge managed to find time to take
care of her three children and supply the Jungle missionaries
with everything from fresh beef and fruits to screens and nails.
(02:18):
Whenever Nate took off with supplies, it was Marche who bought, stored, packed,
weighed and even helped Nate load them into the plane.
She kept his ground log, knew his position in the air,
and stood by at all times with shortwave radio.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
Where we think whether important you got them.
Speaker 4 (02:40):
Coming and to grow up land over.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
The friendly Keach was with whom Jim, Pete and Ed worked.
All knew Nate's little yellow plane and weren't afraid of it.
They even begged for rides. Even some of the well
known tribe of headshrinkers called Hivaos had heard the words
of the Lord Jesus from Raj and others, and some
had come.
Speaker 4 (03:08):
To believe Nate was very ingenious.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
He invented a sort of pod on the wing struts
which would release a parachute with supplies. When Jim and
I were just married, we opened a new station at
a place called Puyopungu. For five months, we had no airstrip,
and Nate dropped some of our supplies to us by parachute.
When the airstrip at Puyupungu finally passed Nate's testing procedure
(03:37):
and he made his first landing with us, we were
as excited as the Indians. It gave us hopes of
opening more stations, of getting around more often to visit
the Indians. There was one group of Indians no one
had ever visited and come out alive. They were the
aucas feared even by neighboring Indian tribes. One day, when
(04:00):
Nate had flown into Arajuno, where ed Marylou lived, they
decided to make another search. Everyone knew they were there
somewhere in the jungle Alkas had killed a Quichua Indian
near Ed's station only a few months before. The five
Fellows had talked and prayed a lot about reaching these people,
(04:21):
but it seemed a very remote possibility until that day
in September nineteen fifty five, Ed and Nate were just
about to turn around and fly for home when they
saw the house.
Speaker 4 (04:33):
They didn't see any people.
Speaker 3 (04:35):
But there was no question about it. It was an
Alca house. Long before this, Nate had devised an air
to ground exchange by means of a bucket suspended on
a long cord.
Speaker 4 (04:48):
From the plane.
Speaker 3 (04:50):
Even dropped a telephone so we could talk back and
forth with the plane. As the plane circled slowly in
the air, the bucket dropped to the vortex.
Speaker 4 (04:58):
Of the cone.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
Don't ask how he figured it out. Aviation experts are
still trying this. The boys decided was just what they
would use to try and contact the Aucas. Years before,
when the shell plane had dropped gifts, the Alcus thought
they had fallen from the stomach of the plane because
it had been wounded or frightened by the lances they
(05:21):
had thrown. So it was important that the Indians see
that the new visitors had the power to give or
withhold the gift right up to the moment of delivery.
For fifteen weeks, they made regular flights over the village,
dropping gifts free fall, with streamers attached so the Indians
could find them easily.
Speaker 4 (05:40):
When the boys began to make.
Speaker 3 (05:41):
Bucket drops, the Alcas even built a platform so they
could get up nearer the plane. You can imagine the
excitement when one day the Indians sent back a roasted
monkey in the bucket. Subsequent flights brought feathers, combs, even
a live parrot. Encouraged that the Alcus had accepted the
(06:03):
gifts and returned offerings of their own, the men searched
constantly for some clearing where the plane might land and
they could carry out their mission of meeting the Alcas
face to face. Each trip, the men planned and prayed,
and each trip contributed something to their meager store of
knowledge as to the habits and attitude of these primitive people. Finally,
(06:25):
the day came when they believed God's time had come
for them to go and meet the Alcas. Nate had
explored the Kuradai River and discovered a patch of beach
on which he could land. They called it Palm Beach.
Back at Shelmeta, Marge had regular contact with the party
on the beach, taking down the messages in a code
(06:47):
we had devised because we wanted to keep the operation
quiet until the men had made the first successful contact.
While so far they had seen no alcas, they believed
they were in the area were probably watching them every move.
As the missionary party made camp on the beach, a
shaft with ribbons was stuck in the ground so the
(07:09):
alcas would identify the men as those who had dropped.
Speaker 4 (07:12):
Gifts from the air.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
Jim had prefabricated a treehouse with his electric saw in Shandia.
Nate had flown it in piece by piece, and they
worked all day getting it up so that they would
have a defensible position in case of sudden attack. While
Jim and the fellows were on the beach, I was
at home in Shandya, listening every chance I got to
the radio messages between Palm.
Speaker 4 (07:35):
Beach and March.
Speaker 3 (07:37):
Marge was indispensable whenever Nate was away. She knew where
he was every hour, she knew how much gas he
had on board. She'd run outside, take a look at
the sky and let him know just what kind of
weather he could expect for landing. Without radio, the flying
program would have been impossible. On Friday from January sixth,
(08:02):
nineteen fifty six, after three days of waiting on the beach,
three Alcas appeared. The fellows called the young man George.
Of course, neither party understood the other, except for a
few words that Jim had learned from an Alca girl
who had left her tribe. George seemed completely at ease,
loved our insect repellent, and even asked by signs for
(08:24):
a ride.
Speaker 4 (08:25):
In the airplane.
Speaker 3 (08:27):
The younger girl, promptly nicknamed Delilah, was fascinated with the
texture of the plane, rubbing her body against the fabric
and imitating with her hands when she wasn't scratching the
plane's movement. Then late in the afternoon they left. The
men waited for them to return on Sunday at noon,
(08:49):
Nate radio'd, Marge, looks like they'll be here for the
afternoon's service.
Speaker 4 (08:54):
Pray for us. This is the day.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
We'll contact you at four thirty. But at four thirty
there was only silence.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
And when we come back, we continue with this remarkable story,
and you're listening to Elizabeth Elliott herself. And we love
it when we can find material pulled from archives and
hear directly from voices that are from the past. Elizabeth
Elliott's story continues here on our American Stories, and we
(09:39):
return to our American stories and to Elizabeth Elliott, and
again we're going to go back to her storytelling and
hear her concluding words from our last segment.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
On Sunday at noon, Nate radioed, Marge, looks like they'll
be here for the afternoon's service.
Speaker 4 (10:01):
This is the day.
Speaker 3 (10:03):
We'll contact you at four thirty. But at four thirty
there was only silence.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
That is until the January thirtieth, nineteen fifty six issue
of Life magazine hit the news stands. The magazine costs
twenty cents. Life Magazine circulated to eight and a half
million American homes every week. But on page ten of
this issue, there's a stark, black and white photo of
(10:34):
five young women sitting around a kitchen table. It takes
up almost the entire width of the oversized two page spread.
There are half eaten sandwiches on the plates in front
of them, and toddlers are wiggling in their laps and
on their shoulders. They're listening to a man with his
back to the camera. The man is telling them about
(10:56):
the search party that found the dead bodies of their
five husbandmans. The alca had speared them, all of them
to death. The man has just told them that they
are now widows. The headline reads, go ye and preach
the Gospel, five do and die. Within days, the story
(11:19):
of their sacrifice had circulated around the world. People were amazed,
in an era of peace and prosperity, that Christians were
still willing to pursue something bigger than money or the
American dream. The story of sacrifice and surrender for the
sake of reaching a remote tribe with the Gospel was
compelling even to those who questioned or mocked the faith
(11:42):
of the missionaries, and they weren't done, most notably Elizabeth
Eliot and Nate Saint, Sister Rachel Saint. Here again is
Elizabeth Eliot.
Speaker 3 (11:54):
I went back to Shandia, where Jim and I had lived,
and continued to work with the Quichuas. People all over
the world began to pray for the Alkas. I prayed too,
but it seemed a faithless prayer at times. I asked
God to open a door somehow, but I had no
idea what to suggest. I asked him to send somebody
(12:15):
in there. Somebody could tell them what the five men
had wanted, to tell them that the God who made
them actually cared about them, and.
Speaker 4 (12:25):
That he was worth trusting.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
I told the Lord I was willing to go if
he wanted me to, but that seemed absurd too. If
five men had been killed, who would ever succeed. I
knew that God could do it if he wanted to,
and that was the reason for prayer. Prayer is not
a vain thing. In November nineteen fifty eight, two Alca
(12:52):
women came out of their tribe right into a Quichua village.
I met them, and they came back to Shannon to
live with me. Dayuma, the Alca girl who had given
Jim some help on the language, had been with Rachel's
Saint Nate's sister for several years now, and Rachel had
some valuable language data which she shared with me. I
(13:15):
used this as a basis and began to study with
Mintaka and mang Gamo, the two who were with me.
One day, when the three got together, Dayuma, Mintaka, and Mankamo.
They said, we're going home. So they went, and Rachel
and I waited for them. When they returned, they invited
(13:37):
the three of us, including my little girl Valerie, to
go and live there. We had prayed for this. Others
were praying for it too. We knew that this was
God's doing.
Speaker 4 (13:51):
We went.
Speaker 3 (13:53):
It took us three days by foot over jungle trails
and streams, by canoe down the Kuradai and up the
Onion jungle rivers, and then by foot again to the Tiuenno.
Here we came face to face with Alcas. The first
(14:16):
one we saw was Delilah Diyuma's younger sister, the very
one who had been friendly to the five men on
the Kuraai beach two days before they died. I had
to keep reminding myself that these these very people were
the ones who had killed the men. They were called
one of the most savage tribes in the world. What
(14:38):
made them savage? They were human beings. They laughed and played,
they bathed, They showed no hostility to us, And yet
I learned they had their own strict ideas about right
and wrong, even if they were different from ours. They
believed it was wrong to kill people, except under certain conditions.
(15:01):
Some of them said they thought the five men were cannibals.
All outsiders were cannibals in fact, and so of course,
if they were coming to.
Speaker 4 (15:09):
Eat the Alcus, the obvious thing.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
To do, the noble and right thing to do, was
to kill them. But now Mintaka and Mankamo and Dayuma
had succeeded in convincing them that there were outsiders who
were quite all right. But these foreigners would come and
live in the village and tell them stories about a
man named Jesus. He was a good man. They should
(15:31):
listen to these stories and learn to talk to Jesus
to pray. So, just as Mankamo had promised me months before,
her people said, yes, let them come.
Speaker 4 (15:43):
We won't need to kill any more.
Speaker 3 (15:46):
And so I took up life for the Alcus. We
decided that the best we could do was simply to
live as much like them as we could, to share
what they ate and the things they did. They were
kind to valery in Me. They gave Rachel a place
to sleep in one of their shelters. They turned over
(16:08):
a whole house. They called it a house to.
Speaker 4 (16:11):
Valery in Me.
Speaker 3 (16:13):
When the roof began to leak, they mended it for me.
None of the houses was any more than a roof.
There were no walls, no floors, no doors, and no privacy.
The problem of communication was a constant one. I couldn't
put together more than a sentence or two, and those
(16:36):
were very short ones. Rachel and I never ceased trying
to analyze and classify the language data, trying to reproduce
it verbally with the proper into a nations and nasalizations,
and all the other things which make a foreign language,
and especially an unwritten language difficult. Just try pronouncing a
(16:56):
W with your tongue flat in the front of your mouth.
They do it in a word like men, and both
the vowels are nasalized. Besides, Valerie had no trouble. She
did better with a three year old's memory and mimicking
ability than I did with all my language files, tape
recorder and systems of mnemonics. She showed them picture books
(17:19):
and taught them how to hold a crayon and draw.
This was the best kind of language study, the attempt
to understand and to be understood. The Alcas rarely counted
above three, but Dioma explained that one day in seven
was God's day, and on that day she was going
to talk about him. Everyone was told to come and
(17:40):
sit down and be quiet. She told them simple stories
from the Old Testament or stories of Jesus from the New.
Speaker 4 (17:49):
Dioma told them.
Speaker 3 (17:50):
That Jesus says we must not kill. So right away
some of the men stopped making spears. There were occasions
when they needed to spare a wild pig. Careful explanation
to us about what they were for. They made new ones.
These men received us as their own relatives. They were
the same ones who killed Jim and Nate, rog and
(18:13):
Pete and Ed.
Speaker 4 (18:15):
They had their reasons.
Speaker 3 (18:17):
God had his for allowing it to happen when five
men had asked Him to guide them and had trusted
him for this guidance and protection. They had sung before
they left home that last morning, the hymn to the
tune of Finlandia. We rest on Thee, our shield and
(18:37):
our defender. We go not forth alone against the foe.
Strong in thy strength, safe in thy keeping, tender we
rest on Thee, and.
Speaker 4 (18:51):
In Thy name we go. They succeeded.
Speaker 3 (18:57):
Not in converting the Alcas, not even in speaking to
them of the name of Jesus, which the Alcas had
never heard. The Indians could not have imagined the real
reason for these white.
Speaker 4 (19:10):
Men being on that beach.
Speaker 3 (19:12):
They simply took them as a threat to their own
way of life and speared them.
Speaker 4 (19:18):
But the men succeeded.
Speaker 3 (19:20):
They did the thing they had set out to do.
They had obeyed God, they had taken literally his words.
The world passeth away, and the lust thereof But he
that doeth the will of God abideth forever.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
And great job catching that and snagging it. That's Greg
Hangler catching that peace. And you were listening to Elizabeth Elliott,
And what a faith story indeed, And the end. So
much of a faith walk, if you've had one, or
taking one, or thinking about taking one, has to do
merely with obedience and doing what your God demands you
(20:02):
to do. And sometimes those are hard things. Terrific storytelling
indeed about faith. Elizabeth Elliott's story here on our American
Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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