Few mission stories touch us as deeply as that of a young man who died trying to reach a people who had never heard of Jesus. Jim Elliot was not born a hero: he was a dedicated student, demanding of himself, who spent years deciding the course of his own life.
He was born in Portland, Oregon, on October 8, 1927, into a family with Plymouth Brethren roots. He heard of Christ early on at home, and the spiritual discipline of that household marked him for life.
At Wheaton College in Illinois, he graduated in Greek with highest honors in 1949 and met Elisabeth Howard, who would become his wife. His journals from that period show an intense young man, at times too hard on himself and on his classmates, demanding of everyone the same total surrender he demanded of himself. Those same journals record, in his own words, long periods of severe self-criticism and guilt over ordinary feelings and desires, a personal rigor that his own wife, when editing them years later, felt it necessary to trim in some passages for being too intimate.
In 1952 he set sail for Ecuador with his friend Pete Fleming, to live and work among the Quechua people in the Amazon, at the Shandia mission. He married Elisabeth in Quito on October 8, 1953, and the couple had a daughter, Valerie, born in February 1955, about eleven months before the outcome that would mark history.
Together with four other missionaries (Nate Saint, Ed McCully, Roger Youderian, and Pete Fleming), he planned Operation Auca: months of flyovers and gift exchanges to approach the Huaorani people, isolated and feared for their history of violence against outsiders. The five had decided, out of Christian conviction, not to use the weapons they carried, even if attacked.
On January 8, 1956, a group of Huaorani warriors ambushed the camp set up at Palm Beach, on the banks of the Curaray River, and killed the five missionaries with spear thrusts. The news spread around the world, with extensive press coverage, and moved churches of different traditions.
What came next was even more remarkable: his wife Elisabeth and the missionary Rachel Saint returned in 1958 to live among the Huaorani, forgave those responsible for the attack, and saw several of them convert and be baptized in the very waters where it had all happened. The words Elliot had written years earlier in his journal, about giving what he could not keep to gain what he could not lose, came to sum up his life for millions of readers.
