This month, we introduce “Passion and Purity” to perhaps a new generation of readers. It seems like a natural follow-up to the anniversary of Jim’s death, as Elisabeth and Jim’s relationship is forefront in the book. This first week we are featuring excerpts from her preface to serve as an appetizer, to stimulate your appetite for the main course, of which we pray you will want to partake.
We will, of course, only be able to offer small bites of this treasured classic, so we urge you to read it in its fullness.
In my day we would have called them love affairs or romances. Now they are called relationships. The word love has fallen on bad times. To many people it means nothing more nor less than going to bed with somebody, never mind what sex the other may belong to. Bumper stickers substitute a picture of a red heart for the word love and apply it to just about anything, anybody, or any place. No wonder people cast about for some other word to describe what they feel for an individual of the opposite sex. It’s new. It’s neat. It’s really neat. It’s special.
“What’s special?” I sometimes ask.
“Well, you know, this, like, relationship.”
“What relationship, exactly?”
“Well, I don’t know, you know, it’s like, I mean, it’s just really neat.”
A schoolteacher wrote to me recently about a “growing friendship” with a man she had been riding to work with. He had gone to a distant state, and she was feeling very lonely and uncertain about the future. She was not sure just what their relationship had been or was now or might turn out to be, but having picked up from my writings bits and pieces that refer to matters of the heart, she wanted to know more.
“I want to know a little of what you were thinking, if I may. What were your feelings? What was going through your mind? Did your emotions often conflict with your thinking? If you can spare a few minutes and write back, I would hold on to any words of wisdom you have.”
Of course I spared the few minutes. The letters keep coming, bombarding me with questions along these lines, suggesting that the experience of one from a different generation might still be a signpost. Here are snippets from other letters.
“I am writing to you as a young woman seeking as honestly as I know how to be obedient to God, to know wisdom and discernment, to be pleasing and faithful and to wait on Him. My walk with Christ is rather an alone one. I lack knowing the spiritual leadership of a woman who is older than I. I know that concerning some things it was intended that the older women instruct the younger. I know that you are a servant, and I hope that you might respond. . .”
“How shall I know that this woman is right for me?”
“How far can we go without a commitment to marriage? How far if we have that commitment?”
“What is our role as single women-waiting around?”
“You seem so strong and unswerving in your faith. Over and over I tell God I cannot go through this anymore. I quit. I tell Him I am mad. Don’t you ever falter and feel you cannot go on? Have you never had times of giving up?”
“Did you struggle with the desire to be with Jim all the years you were separated?”
“Did you struggle with being single if your heart yearned for Jim?” . . .
“How did you handle the impatience of wanting to be with the man you loved?”
I answer all the letters that come. I find myself trying to put into words, again and again, the lessons that came out of my own experience. I’ve been there where these men and women are. I know exactly what they mean.
I fear that my replies to them must often seem cut and dried. “Oh, she’s too opinionated. She’s got no sympathy. She’s the strong type anyway; she’s never agonized as I do. And the way she dishes out advice! Do this, don’t do that, trust God, period. I can’t handle that stuff.” I’ve heard the objections. I’ve overheard them, too . . .
I thought that if I put these things into a book, they would not seem so cut and dried as they must in a one-page letter. Perhaps I must tell enough of my own story to serve as evidence that I’ve been there. Could I tell it without stickiness? Without seeming to be at too many removes from people whose vocabulary is different, but whose cries wake clear echoes of my own? I hope I can.
But in order to do that I must run the risk of indecent exposure. I must put in my own cries and some of Jim’s, my own weaknesses, my falterings-not by any means all (if you knew how much I’ve left out!), but some samples.
So the book has grown. Letters written to me during the last five or ten years are quoted. My own journals of thirty to thirty-five years ago. Letters from Jim Elliot. Statements as to the principles that apply.
The framework of the book is the story of five and a half years of loving one man, Jim, and of learning the disciplines of longing, loneliness, uncertainty, hope, trust, and unconditional commitment to Christ-a commitment which required that, regardless of what passion we might feel, we must be pure.
It is, to be blunt; a book about virginity. It is possible to love passionately and to stay out of bed. I know. We did it. Have I nothing to say, then, to those who have already been in bed? I would have to have my head in the sand to imagine that my unmarried readers are all virgins. Those who have given away their virginity write to me, too, some of them in despair, feeling that they are forever banished from purity. I write to them to say that there is no purity in any of us apart from the blood of Jesus. All of us without exception are sinners and sinful, some in one way, some in another. If I can help some to avoid sin, I want to do that. If I can show others that the message of the Gospel is the possibility of a new birth and a new beginning and a new creation, I want to do that.
The love life of a Christian is a crucial battleground. There, if nowhere else, it will be determined as to who is Lord: the world, the self and the devil, or the Lord Christ.
**Excerpt originally published in Passion and Purity, pp. 7-12