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.