As a boy, I dreamed of being a missionary pilot, inspired by the story of Nate Saint and the other four missionaries speared on an Ecuador riverbank. Their “stranger than fiction” story stirs our imagination. What must it be like to have that zeal for evangelism, to make that selfless sacrifice, to choose that dangerous quest? Yet we tend to overlook the story of the widows, like Elisabeth Elliot, who had to pick up the pieces, go on living, and search for meaning in it all. Many of us know about Elisabeth Elliot from her books or her work in Ecuador, but Ellen Vaughn, in her two-volume biography, shows us the real person behind the scenes through the pages of Elisabeth’s personal letters and lifelong diary.
Part of what we like about the Waodani story is the happy ending. The five missionaries were killed, but it opened the door for Elisabeth Elliot and Rachel Saint to take the gospel to the tribe. Yet as Vaughn shows, things were not quite so simple. Elisabeth’s path to the Waodani was marked by setbacks, mission agency squabbles, and irreconcilable relational conflict between her and Rachel that eventually led her to return to the United States.
Back home, Elisabeth found a new role as a writer and speaker. Yet the hard lessons she had learned were not always palatable to her audience. She chafed at oversimplified notions of missionary “success” and trite theological explanations for why God does what he does. Her experience in Ecuador had been marked, not by quantifiable kingdom growth, but by loss after bewildering loss. She arrived an idealist recruit, ready to throw herself into the battle for the kingdom; she departed a scarred veteran, clinging to the God who had stripped away all she thought she knew.
Elisabeth read voraciously, but often felt more comfortable with non-Christian authors, who did not feel the need to put a positive spin on hardship or tidy up the loose ends of human experience. Elisabeth’s own story reflects that complexity. Thirteen years after Jim’s death, after forging a new life and raising her daughter alone, Elisabeth married a theologian named Addison Leach. They were happy together, but in less than five years cancer took Add’s life. Once again, Elisabeth grappled with unexplained loss and with going on alone.
Eventually she married again. This time to a former boarder named Lars Gren and this time for 40 years instead of a handful. By outward appearances, this too was a happy marriage, but sadly it was not. Vaughn treads carefully here, but she gives us the picture of a deeply flawed man—one who cared for Elisabeth until her death, but also controlled her. He was prone to angry outbursts; he pushed her to keep writing and speaking long after her mind was fading; he burned her diaries; he checked her odometer whenever she returned home.
Vaughn strips away the accumulated gloss of legend from Elisabeth’s story, but what remains is better for being true. Not Elisabeth Elliot the unstoppable missionary or Super-Christian; but Elisabeth who sometimes sinned, took wrong turns, and struggled with the meaning of loss. In the end, we’re left with the story of a flawed person learning to trust a perfect God even when “his ways are past finding out.”