November 1, 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 nations. Quito, its capital city is just below
the equator, nine thousand feet up in the Andes. This
is where the story began. At one time or another,
(01:58):
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 to jungle missionaries with everything from fresh beef
and fruits to screens and nails. Whenever Nate took off
(02:19):
with supplies, it was March 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):
We think.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Whether important you got them up.
Speaker 3 (02:41):
Playing over 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
(03:04):
had heard the words of the Lord Jesus from Raj
and others, and some had come to believe Nate was
very ingenious. 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
(03:25):
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 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
(03:49):
of Indians no one had ever visited and come out alive.
They were the aucas feared even by neighboring Indian tribes.
One day, when 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
(04:11):
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, 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. They didn't see any people,
(04:35):
but there was no question about it. It was an
Alka house. Long before this, Nate had devised an air
to ground exchange by means of a bucket suspended on
a long cord from the plane. Even dropped a telephone
so we could talk back and forth with the plane.
As the plane circled slowly in the air, the bucket
(04:57):
dropped to the vortex of the cone. 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
(05:18):
wounded or frightened by the lances they 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.
(05:40):
When the boys began to make 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
(06:02):
that the Alcas had accepted the 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 aucas 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, the day came
(06:25):
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 we had devised
(06:48):
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 aucas would
(07:10):
identify the men as those who had dropped gifts from
the air. Jim had prefabricated a treehouse with his electric
saw in Shandya. 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
(07:31):
was at home in Shandya, listening every chance I got
to the radio messages. Between Palm Beach and March Marche
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
(07:54):
been impossible. On Friday from January sixth, 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
(08:15):
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 a ride in the airplane.
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
(08:38):
plane's movement. Then late in the afternoon they left. The
men waited for them to return. On Sunday at noon,
Nate radioed, Marche, looks like they'll be here for the
afternoon's service. Pray for us. This is the day. We'll
(08:58):
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 Story, 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 March. Looks like they'll
be here for the afternoon's service. This is the day.
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 husband vans. 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
(11:19):
story 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
(11:41):
the faith 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
(12:15):
send somebody 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 that he
was worth trusting. 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
(12:37):
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 women came out of their tribe right into
a Quichua village. I met them and they came back
(12:59):
to Shannon to live with me. Dayuma, the Alka 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 used this as a basis and began
to study with Mintaka and Mangkamo, the two who were
(13:21):
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 the three of us, including my little girl Valerie,
to go and live there. We had prayed for this.
(13:44):
Others were praying for it too. We knew that this
was God's doing. We went. 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
(14:07):
to face with Alcas. The first one we saw was
Delilah Diyuma's younger sister, the very one who had been
friendly to the five men on the Kurai beach two
days before they died. I had to keep reminding myself
(14:27):
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 made them savage? They
were human beings. They laughed and played, they bathed, They
showed no hostility to us, And yet I learned they
(14:49):
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. 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 eat the Alcus, the obvious thing
(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. That 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. We won't need
to kill any more. 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
(15:54):
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 a whole house. They called it a
house to valery in Me. When the roof began to leak,
(16:15):
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 were very short ones. Rachel
(16:38):
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 W with your tongue flat in
the front of your mouth. They do it in a
(17:00):
word like women, 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 and taught them how to
hold a crayon and draw. This was the best kind
(17:23):
of language study, the attempt to understand and to be understood.
The Alcas rarely counted above three, but Diouma 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 sit down and be quiet. She
told them simple stories from the Old Testament or stories
(17:46):
of Jesus from the New Diuma told them 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
(18:08):
same ones who killed Jim and Nate, rog and Pete
and Ed. They had their reasons. 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
(18:29):
last morning, the hymn to the tune of Finlandia. We
rest on Thee, our shield and our defender. We go
not forth alone against the foe. Strong in thy strength,
safe in nigh, keeping tender, we rest on THEE, and
(18:51):
in Thy name we go. They succeeded 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 men being on that beach. They simply took them
(19:13):
as a threat to their own way of life and
speared them. But the men succeeded. 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
(19:36):
of God abideth forever.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
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's 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 commands
(20:02):
you 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 nations. Quito, its capital city is just below
the equator, nine thousand feet up in the Andes. This
is where the story began. At one time or another,
(01:58):
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 to jungle missionaries with everything from fresh beef
and fruits to screens and nails. Whenever Nate took off
(02:19):
with supplies, it was March 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):
We think.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Whether important you got them up.
Speaker 3 (02:41):
Playing over 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
(03:04):
had heard the words of the Lord Jesus from Raj
and others, and some had come to believe Nate was
very ingenious. 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
(03:25):
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 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
(03:49):
of Indians no one had ever visited and come out alive.
They were the aucas feared even by neighboring Indian tribes.
One day, when 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
(04:11):
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, 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. They didn't see any people,
(04:35):
but there was no question about it. It was an
Alka house. Long before this, Nate had devised an air
to ground exchange by means of a bucket suspended on
a long cord from the plane. Even dropped a telephone
so we could talk back and forth with the plane.
As the plane circled slowly in the air, the bucket
(04:57):
dropped to the vortex of the cone. 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
(05:18):
wounded or frightened by the lances they 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.
(05:40):
When the boys began to make 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
(06:02):
that the Alcas had accepted the 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 aucas 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, the day came
(06:25):
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 we had devised
(06:48):
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 aucas would
(07:10):
identify the men as those who had dropped gifts from
the air. Jim had prefabricated a treehouse with his electric
saw in Shandya. 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
(07:31):
was at home in Shandya, listening every chance I got
to the radio messages. Between Palm Beach and March Marche
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
(07:54):
been impossible. On Friday from January sixth, 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
(08:15):
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 a ride in the airplane.
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
(08:38):
plane's movement. Then late in the afternoon they left. The
men waited for them to return. On Sunday at noon,
Nate radioed, Marche, looks like they'll be here for the
afternoon's service. Pray for us. This is the day. We'll
(08:58):
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 Story, 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 March. Looks like they'll
be here for the afternoon's service. This is the day.
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 husband vans. 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
(11:19):
story 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
(11:41):
the faith 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
(12:15):
send somebody 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 that he
was worth trusting. 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
(12:37):
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 women came out of their tribe right into
a Quichua village. I met them and they came back
(12:59):
to Shannon to live with me. Dayuma, the Alka 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 used this as a basis and began
to study with Mintaka and Mangkamo, the two who were
(13:21):
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 the three of us, including my little girl Valerie,
to go and live there. We had prayed for this.
(13:44):
Others were praying for it too. We knew that this
was God's doing. We went. 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
(14:07):
to face with Alcas. The first one we saw was
Delilah Diyuma's younger sister, the very one who had been
friendly to the five men on the Kurai beach two
days before they died. I had to keep reminding myself
(14:27):
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 made them savage? They
were human beings. They laughed and played, they bathed, They
showed no hostility to us, And yet I learned they
(14:49):
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. 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 eat the Alcus, the obvious thing
(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. That 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. We won't need
to kill any more. 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
(15:54):
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 a whole house. They called it a
house to valery in Me. When the roof began to leak,
(16:15):
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 were very short ones. Rachel
(16:38):
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 W with your tongue flat in
the front of your mouth. They do it in a
(17:00):
word like women, 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 and taught them how to
hold a crayon and draw. This was the best kind
(17:23):
of language study, the attempt to understand and to be understood.
The Alcas rarely counted above three, but Diouma 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 sit down and be quiet. She
told them simple stories from the Old Testament or stories
(17:46):
of Jesus from the New Diuma told them 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
(18:08):
same ones who killed Jim and Nate, rog and Pete
and Ed. They had their reasons. 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
(18:29):
last morning, the hymn to the tune of Finlandia. We
rest on Thee, our shield and our defender. We go
not forth alone against the foe. Strong in thy strength,
safe in nigh, keeping tender, we rest on THEE, and
(18:51):
in Thy name we go. They succeeded 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 men being on that beach. They simply took them
(19:13):
as a threat to their own way of life and
speared them. But the men succeeded. 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
(19:36):
of God abideth forever.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
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's 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 commands
(20:02):
you 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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