We continue this week with excerpts from Passion and Purity. We conclude our series next week.
A settled commitment to the Lord Christ and a longed-for commitment to Jim Elliot seemed to be in conflict. Discipleship usually brings us into the necessity of choice between duty and desire. They are not always mutually exclusive, however. When our hearts are set on obedience, we can be sure of the needed wisdom to tell the difference between a conflict and a harmony. It may be a slow and painful process.
On Memorial Day the missions fellowship had a picnic breakfast at a place called the Lagoon. When it was over, I was one of those helping to clean up. Jim was another, and of course I kept him somewhere in the corner of my eye. When everything was finished, I looked up to see him sitting on a picnic table, with two friends. Bill and Van were talking; Jim was swinging his legs and gazing at me. Everybody else had gone. He jumped off the table and ran over to where I was dumping the last load into a trash barrel.
“Walk you home?”
“Okay. Bill and Van coming?”
“They’re deep into something. Let’s leave ’em alone.”
We walked half a block in silence. Then, suddenly, “We’ve got to get squared away on how we feel about each other,” Jim said. I was dumbfounded. No preliminaries, nothing. Just like that. Bang. The revelation I’d been hoping for-he had some feelings. And he was assuming that I had some. I was a little piqued at this assumption. It seemed presumption, since I thought I had done quite well at concealing my interest. The last thing I wanted was to hint in any way that I had thought twice about him—until, that is, he hinted that he was interested in me. Now what was I to say?
“Feel about each other? You mean—”
“Come on, Bett. Don’t tell me you didn’t know I was in love with you?”
“I had no idea.”
“Really? But you must have! If you didn’t-then all I can say is you must have thought I was a pretty nice guy. I’ve been knocking myself out to be near you, be nice to you, show you how I felt without actually saying anything. You mean you didn’t notice?”
“I noticed. I was afraid to believe my eyes. I told myself you couldn’t possibly be interested, let alone—””In love. That’s what I’m telling you. Hey, we’re not going to campus now. Let’s go back to the Lagoon and talk this thing out.”
Seven hours later, sunburned, floating in a rainbow haze, we said good-bye on the front steps of my dormitory. I went up to my room, glad for that little “closet” to think in.
Rainbows are made of sunlight and rain. The sunlight, which turned my world into a radiance of color, was the knowledge of Jim Elliot’s love. The rain was the other fact he explained to me as we sat on the grass by the Lagoon—that God was calling him to remain single. Perhaps for life, perhaps only until he had had first hand experience in the place where he was to work as a jungle missionary. Older missionaries had told him that single men were needed to do jobs married ones could never do. There were some areas where women could not go. Jim took their word for it and committed himself to bachelorhood for as long as the will of God required.
**Excerpt originally published in Passion and Purity, pp. 47-49