We conclude our series this week with Epilogue II from Elisabeth’s book, “Through Gates of Splendor,” sharing the continued redemptive aftermath of the spearing of the five American missionaries on January 8, 1956. We pray your faith has been encouraged and galvanized by their remarkable testimony.
JANUARY 1996
This time it’s not a leaf-thatched hut on the Tiwanu River but a small house with big glass windows and real walls high above the Atlantic Ocean on Massachusetts’ rockbound coast.
I sit at my desk looking out at a nearly pure white sea reflecting a white sky, with no horizon to divide them. A winter sun makes a pale, shimmering pathway on the calm water where two little boats idle as the lobstermen pull their pots. It is a long way from the jungle.
Although the pathway of my life has taken many unimagined turns since I wrote this (my first) book, I have not been allowed to forget the story. I would not have wanted to forget it, but there have been times when I have wondered if others might. Perhaps they have tired of it. Should I continue the retelling as I am so often asked to do? I spoke of my misgivings to Miss Corrie ten Boom who, as an old lady, indefatigably traveled the world to tell her own story over and over again, of her family’s providing refuge to Jews in Holland during World War II, of their being betrayed and imprisoned in a concentration camp, and of the deaths of her sister and aged father as a result. “Sometimes,” she told me, “I have said, ‘Lord, I must have something fresh. I cannot go on telling the old story.’ But the Lord said to me, ‘This is the story I gave you. You tell that one.'” So Corrie encouraged me to go on telling mine. . .
On January 8, 1996, my husband, Lars Gren, and I, along with my daughter, Valerie, her husband, Walt, and eldest son, Walter, were with the Waorani. Steve Saint, pilot and son of pilot Nate, and his wife, Ginny, kindly entertained us in their jungle home on the Curaray River. We sat in hammocks as the Waorani crowded in to see us, to laugh and shout about how much I (“Gikari”) and Valerie (“Mangari”) had aged. They did their best to pronounce “Lars,” “Walt,” and “Walter,” welcoming them with great glee, powerful handshakes, and deepest interest. Together we reminisced about the years 1958-1960 that Valerie and I had lived there. Minkayi and Kimo, two of those who had speared the five, talked and talked, telling me of events over the decades since I had seen them. They are Christians now. The New Testament has been translated into their language.
The name Auca is a Quichua word meaning “naked” or “savage.” It is no longer used. Waorani is what the people call themselves. Their story, at the time of the death of the men, later when I lived with the Indians themselves, and during all the years since as I have recounted it and reflected on it in the light of my own subsequent experience, has pointed to one thing: God is God. If He is God, He is worthy of my worship and my service. I will find rest nowhere but in His will, and that will is infinitely, immeasurably, unspeakably beyond my largest notions of what He is up to.
This is the context in which the story must be understood—as one incident in human history, an incident in certain ways and to certain people important, but only one incident. God is the God of human history, and He is at work continuously, mysteriously, accomplishing His eternal purposes in us, through us, for us, and in spite of us.
**Excerpt originally published in Through Gates of Splendor, pp. 261-263