Through Gates of Splendor by Elisabeth Elliot

She grew up in Pennsylvania and New Jersey before enrolling in Wheaton College, where she majored in Greek and hoped to become a Bible translator.Īfter training for missionary work, she and Mr.

As a child she moved to Philadelphia, where her father edited The Sunday School Times. 21, 1926, the daughter of missionaries, Philip E. She was born Elisabeth Howard in Brussels on Dec. We look forward to the day when these savages will join us in Christian praise.” She expressed similar thoughts of understanding and forgiveness in “Through Gates of Splendor,” writing: “The prayers of the widows themselves are for the Aucas. In America, we decorate a man for defending his country.” “He believed the foreigners were a threat to that liberty, so he feels he had every right to kill them. “The Auca was trying to preserve his own way of life, his own liberty,” she explained in Life.

She came to understand why her husband was killed, she wrote. She ministered to them and remained in their settlement, in the foothills of the Andes, subsisting on barbecued monkey limbs and other local fare and living in rain-swept huts.īy her account they named her the Waorani word for woodpecker (or crane, by another account, because of her height). In 1958, accompanied by her 3-year-old daughter and the sister of one of the murdered missionaries, she moved in with the Waoranis, known to their neighbors as Aucas, or savages. Elliot renewed contact with the tribe over the next two years.

After the missionaries failed to make radio contact with a base station, searchers found their bodies pierced by wooden spears. Three tribe members made a friendly visit, but then there was apparently a miscommunication or a perceived threat. 2, 1956, he kept rehearsing a message of good will - “Biti miti punimupa,” meaning “I like you, I want to be your friend” - from a Waorani phrase book. Elliot and his colleagues landed by plane on Jan. “Her early adulthood as she told it,” Professor Long said in an email, “was the stuff of inspiration: an intensely spiritual and deeply romantic love story with her first husband her support for her husband and his friends when they decided to risk their lives to contact a violent and isolated tribal people in the rain forests of eastern Ecuador her commitment to telling their story as a story of faith and triumph after their deaths and her insistence that she and her daughter were called by God to live with their husband’s and father’s killers, which they did.”Īfter Mr. Elliot focused on her husband’s work a year later in “Shadow of the Almighty.”

Through Gates of Splendor by Elisabeth Elliot