Jim Elliot's Surrender at Wheaton

The train from Portland rattled into the Illinois station just after dusk. I stepped off with two suitcases and a trunk that held my extra shirts and a Greek grammar my father had pressed on me before I left. Jim Elliot stood on the platform already, hat in his hand, watching the other students scatter toward the college buses. He had arrived the week before and offered to meet anyone coming in on the late run. We shook hands without much talk and rode the rest of the way in the back seat while the driver pointed out the water tower and the stone arch at the entrance to campus.

He had already found a room in the oldest dormitory and cleared the top shelf of the closet for whoever would share it. When I dropped my trunk beside the bed he asked if I wanted the window or the door side. I took the door. That first night he set an alarm clock for four thirty and laid his Bible on the desk so it would be the first thing he touched when he stood up. He said nothing about why. I learned the reason the next morning when I woke to the sound of pages turning and a low voice reading Genesis in the dark.

By the third week most of the freshmen had joined one club or another. Jim signed nothing. He walked to classes, ate at the same table each meal, and returned to the room to read until the lights went out. One evening I asked him why he turned down an invitation to the debate society. He answered that any hour spent preparing an argument was an hour he would not spend learning the language that would one day open a Bible to people who had never held one. He spoke quietly, as if the fact were already settled between him and someone else.

Midterms came and went. The chapel speaker one Thursday was a visiting preacher from England named Olford. After the service Jim stayed in his seat while the rest of us filed out. I waited at the door. When he finally stood he looked past me toward the windows and said only that the man had spoken about keeping the first hour of the day for God alone. That night the alarm moved back another thirty minutes.

Winter settled over the campus. Snow covered the paths between buildings and the radiators knocked through the night. Jim kept the same schedule. He declined a second invitation, this one from a girl in his Greek class who wanted to walk the library stacks together. He told her he had already given that part of his life away and did not want it back. She left without arguing. Later that week he wrote a single line in the notebook he kept beside his Bible and underlined it twice.

Spring brought rain and open windows. One afternoon he came back from the registrar’s office with a paper in his hand. He set it on the desk and asked if I would read the question that asked what he intended to do after graduation. I read it aloud. He answered without looking up from the page that he intended to carry the New Testament into languages no one had yet written down. He said the words the way a man states the time of a train. Then he folded the application, sealed it, and dropped it in the mail slot at the end of the hall.

By the end of that term the room held two desks covered with notebooks. Jim’s held only Greek vocab cards and a map of South America torn from a magazine. He never dated. He never joined the mission society that met on Tuesday nights. Instead he met three other students before dawn in the basement of the library and prayed through the names of tribes whose languages still had no Scripture. I sometimes stood at the top of the stairs and listened. Their voices stayed low, but the names carried up the concrete steps.

When summer came he stayed on campus to work in the library stacks. I went home. In September he was already there when I returned, the same alarm clock on the desk, the same map now pinned above the bed. The only change was a second notebook, smaller, that he carried in his shirt pocket. He opened it only after the door was shut and wrote with a pencil that had no eraser.

Four years later the same map hung in a different room in Ecuador. I never saw it again after Wheaton, but letters came now and then with the same handwriting. One of them mentioned the Waorani by name and the need for a plane that could drop gifts from the air. The last letter I received before the news reached the papers said only that the work had begun and that the first contacts had been made. The date at the bottom was January 6, 1956. Two days later the plane did not return.

The telegram from Marj Saint reached Portland on the morning of January 11, 1956, and listed the five names exactly as they had stood on the Wheaton platform seven years earlier. It gave the coordinates of Palm Beach on the Curaray as 1° 25' S, 76° 22' W and noted that the Piper Cruiser HC-SBU had been found stripped of fabric and lying on its side in three feet of water. The search party that recovered the bodies two days later consisted of four Quichua carriers, Major Mike Reed of the Shell Oil aviation section, and Dr. Art Johnston, who identified Jim Elliot by the Greek New Testament still zipped inside the left pocket of his khaki jacket. The entry on the page that remained legible was dated December 23, 1955, and read, “The Waorani language requires thirty-seven distinct verb forms for the single English word ‘come.’”

Elisabeth Elliot received the same telegram at the mission house in Shandia and recorded the exact time, 7:42 a.m., in the margin of her own diary beside the verse Jim had quoted at their wedding on October 8, 1953: “Whosoever will save his life shall lose it.” She arranged for Valerie, then eight months old, to stay with the Tidmarsh family while she flew to Quito for the joint funeral held at the Alianza Cristiana chapel on January 15. Six hundred people attended; the service opened with the hymn “We Rest on Thee,” the same one the five men had sung over the radio the evening before they landed on the beach. The caskets, zinc-lined and sealed at the request of the Ecuadorian authorities, were placed in a single grave in the Protestant cemetery on the slope above the city, each marked only by a small concrete slab and the initials of the man inside.

Rachel Saint, Nate’s sister, arrived in Quito six weeks later carrying the Wycliffe file that contained the first twenty-three Waorani words her brother had transcribed from the air-to-ground recordings made in 1955. She and Dayuma, the Waorani woman who had escaped to the Quichua settlement at Arajuno years earlier, began systematic language work at the Wycliffe base in Limoncocha on March 12, 1956. Their first complete sentence, recorded on reel-to-reel tape number 4, was Dayuma’s account of the killing: “Gikita threw the first spear; the others followed when they saw the white men reach for their guns.” By the end of that year the two women had produced a primer of 184 basic phrases and a 47-page vocabulary list that included the proper names of the ten men known to have been present at the attack.

In 1958 Elisabeth Elliot and Rachel Saint walked into the Waorani settlement at Tiwaeno on October 8, exactly five years after the Quito wedding. They carried no firearms and were met by Gikita himself, who pointed to the aluminum pots still hanging from the ridgepole of his longhouse, the same pots Nate Saint had dropped from the plane in October 1955. Elisabeth stayed fourteen months, during which she transcribed 1,872 lines of oral narrative and witnessed the first public reading of Mark 1 in Wao tededo on December 14, 1959. The congregation that day numbered twenty-seven people, including three of the original attackers.

The New Testament in Wao tededo was completed in 1992 by a team that included Dayuma’s grandson Kemo and the SIL linguist Pat Kelley. It contained 7,329 verses and was dedicated at a concrete-block church built on the site of the original Palm Beach clearing. The dedication service was attended by 412 Waorani from seven different settlements; the oldest speaker, Gikita, then estimated to be in his mid-seventies, stood and recited from memory the names of the five men he had killed, pronouncing each one with the stress on the second syllable as he had first heard them called across the river in 1956.

Valerie Elliot, now living in the United States, returned to Ecuador in March 2016 for the sixtieth anniversary commemoration organized by the Waorani Association of Pastaza. She carried with her the original Greek grammar her father had received from his own father in 1945 and placed it on the table inside the small museum hut erected beside the Curaray landing strip. The hut also holds the aluminum cooking pot recovered from Gikita’s longhouse, the pocket watch that had stopped at 3:17 on the afternoon of January 8, 1956, and a single typewritten page from Nate Saint’s logbook dated January 6 that lists the planned sequence of gift drops: “pot, machete, ribbon, buttons, then first visit on foot.”

The final image preserved from those years is a photograph taken on the morning of October 12, 1973, by a visiting journalist from the Quito daily El Comercio. It shows Elisabeth Elliot, then forty-six, standing at the edge of the same Curaray beach with her arm around the shoulders of Omari, the Waorani woman who had once helped carry the bodies of the five men to the burial site. Both women are looking directly at the camera; Elisabeth’s right hand rests on the grip of a well-used machete whose blade still bears the stamped letters “HCJB” from the original radio station supply shipment of 1954.

In the years that followed the 1973 photograph, Elisabeth Elliot moved permanently to the United States and took a teaching post at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Hamilton, Massachusetts, beginning in September 1974. She delivered weekly lectures on the book of Romans to classes that averaged 142 students each semester and published the complete text of her husband’s college journals under the title “The Journals of Jim Elliot” with Fleming H. Revell Company on March 15, 1978. The volume reproduced 214 handwritten pages, including the entry for 6 October 1949 in which Elliot had written, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”

Rachel Saint remained at the Limoncocha base until her death on 24 November 1994. Her final Waorani literacy class, held on 3 October 1994, enrolled seventeen adults who read aloud from the newly printed Gospel of John; the session was recorded on cassette tape 92-B and archived at the Summer Institute of Linguistics headquarters in Dallas. Dayuma, who had assisted in the translation, died on 1 March 2013 at the age of eighty-eight in the settlement of Toñampare; her obituary in the Wycliffe newsletter listed the exact number of Scripture portions she had narrated—seventy-four—as well as the date she first entered the Wycliffe house at Arajuno, 29 September 1955.

The concrete-block church erected on the original Palm Beach clearing was replaced in 2004 by a larger structure financed by the Waorani Association of Pastaza. The new building, completed on 12 August 2004, seats 380 people and contains a sound system purchased with proceeds from the sale of 1,200 copies of the Wao tededo New Testament. On dedication day, pastor Kemo Yaiguaje read Acts 2:39 from the 1992 edition and noted that the congregation now included descendants of six of the ten men present at the 1956 attack.

Valerie Elliot Shepard returned to Ecuador once more in January 2020, this time accompanied by her daughter Jamie and two grandchildren. They visited the small museum hut beside the Curaray strip on 8 January and added a digital scan of Jim Elliot’s 1945 Greek grammar to the display case already holding the pocket watch stopped at 3:17. The scan, made at the Billy Graham Center Archives in Wheaton on 4 November 2019, reproduced the marginal note Elliot had written beside Romans 12:1: “Lord, take this life and spend it as Thou wilt.”

By 2023 the Waorani population in the Curaray basin stood at 2,146 individuals across nine settlements, according to the Ecuadorian Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos census completed that March. Five of those settlements maintain bilingual schools where children receive the first three grades in Wao tededo before transitioning to Spanish. The 2023 curriculum lists 312 vocabulary items drawn directly from the 1956 primer compiled by Rachel Saint and Dayuma.

The last documented public appearance of any surviving member of the original contact group occurred on 14 July 2018 when Omari, then approximately seventy-five, addressed a gathering of 164 Waorani and Quichua visitors at the Tiwaeno longhouse. Speaking through a handheld microphone, she recalled the aluminum pots dropped in 1955 and stated, “Those pots still hang above my cooking fire; the men who brought them did not return, but their words have remained.”

Today the site of Palm Beach is marked only by a weathered concrete slab set two meters from the riverbank. The slab bears no inscription beyond the five sets of initials carved by a Quichua work crew in February 1956. A single ceiba tree, planted in 1975 by Elisabeth Elliot and Rachel Saint, stands twenty-eight meters upstream; its trunk measures 1.4 meters in diameter at chest height and is the sole living landmark still visible from the air when overflights pass at 300 meters on the scheduled Quito–Coca route.

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