Few mission stories carry a twist as hard to accept as Elisabeth Elliot’s. She lost her husband to the spears of a people she barely knew, and years later chose to live alongside that very people. Her life invites the question of what to do when pain seems to contradict the calling.
Born in Brussels, Belgium, on December 21, 1926, the daughter of missionaries, Elisabeth Howard studied classical Greek at Wheaton College, determined to one day translate the Scriptures for peoples without a Bible. She graduated in 1948, trained in linguistics, and went to Ecuador to work among the Colorado and Quichua peoples.
In Quito, she married missionary Jim Elliot on October 8, 1953. In January 1956, Jim and four companions were speared to death by Huaorani warriors while attempting the first peaceful contact with the people, an episode that became known as Operation Auca.
In October 1958, Elisabeth entered the Huaorani village with her young daughter, Valerie, and missionary Rachel Saint, sister of another victim. They learned the language and saw many come to faith, but differences in method and conviction with Rachel led her to leave the joint work in 1961.
She told the story of her husband and his companions in Through Gates of Splendor (1957) and Shadow of the Almighty (1958), books that became bestsellers and launched her career as a writer. She returned to the United States in 1963 and, over five decades, published more than two dozen books.
She remarried in 1969, to professor Addison Leitch, and was widowed when he died in 1973. In 1977 she married a third time, to Lars Gren. Recent biographers, such as Lucy S. R. Austen and Ellen Vaughn, document that this was the most difficult of her three marriages: Gren controlled aspects of Elisabeth’s daily life and, in the advanced stage of her dementia, went so far as to seat her beside the stage at speaking engagements while playing recordings of her earlier talks; the same biographers record that he destroyed part of the diaries she kept throughout the marriage. Her teaching on gender roles, in Passion and Purity and Let Me Be a Woman, though highly influential, generated debate within evangelicalism itself.
Between 1988 and 2001, she hosted the daily radio program Gateway to Joy, bringing biblical teaching and practical counsel to a national audience in the United States. She became one of the most listened to voices in American evangelical Christianity at the turn from the twentieth to the twenty-first century.
In her last ten years of life, she lived with dementia and stopped speaking in public after 2004. Elisabeth Elliot died on June 15, 2015, in Magnolia, Massachusetts. Her choice to return to the people who killed her husband is still cited in missions training as a living illustration of John 12:24: the grain that dies and, by dying, bears much fruit.