Elisabeth Elliot

Elisabeth Howard was born on December 21, 1926, in Brussels, Belgium, to missionary parents. Her father, Philip Howard, and her mother, Katharine, were serving in Belgium with the Plymouth Brethren. The family returned to the United States when she was a baby and settled in Pennsylvania, where she grew up in a strict Christian home. She was the second of six children. Her father later became editor of the Sunday School Times, and the home was full of books and discussion.

She attended Wheaton College in Illinois, where she studied classical Greek. She planned to be a Bible translator, and she was serious about her faith. At Wheaton she met Jim Elliot, a fellow student who was strong, funny and fully committed to missions. They were close friends but did not rush into marriage. Both felt that God had called them to work in Ecuador, though in different places, and they waited. They were finally married in 1953 in Quito, Ecuador, after both had spent time in the work.

They served among the Quichua people for a time. In 1955, their daughter Valerie was born. Jim felt a strong burden for the Waorani, a tribe that was known for its violence and had killed outsiders who entered its territory. In January 1956, he and four other men, including Nate Saint, tried to make contact with the tribe. After a series of friendly aerial exchanges of gifts, the five men landed on a sandbar by the Curaray River. They were speared to death by a group of Waorani warriors. Elisabeth was twenty-nine years old, with a ten-month-old daughter.

The world was shocked. Life magazine ran a long story on the event. In the face of grief, Elisabeth chose to continue. In 1958, she and Rachel Saint, Nate's sister, went to live among the Waorani with the help of Dayuma, a Waorani woman who had fled the tribe. Elisabeth took her three-year-old daughter with her. She lived in the jungle with the people who had killed her husband, and she shared the gospel with them. Within a few years, many of the Waorani had turned from killing and had become believers.

She wrote a number of books. Through Gates of Splendor, published in 1957, told the story of the five men. Shadow of the Almighty, published in 1958, was a biography of Jim from his diaries. She wrote many other books, among them Passion and Purity, a work on love and relationships that has been read by millions of young people. She also became a popular speaker and began a radio program, Gateway to Joy, that went on for many years.

Her life continued to be marked by loss. In 1969 she married Addison Leitch, a theologian, who died of cancer in 1973. In 1977 she married Lars Gren, a hospital chaplain. She taught at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. She was a straightforward woman with firm views, and she was sometimes criticized for her strictness and for her stress on submission and on the traditional roles of men and women. She did not apologize for her views and said that she wrote what she had learned in suffering.

In her later years she suffered from dementia, and she died on June 15, 2015, at the age of eighty-eight. Her life shows that faith can endure loss, and that a person can forgive those who have taken what was dearest. She went back to the tribe that killed her husband and was a witness of the gospel's power.