This January 8th marks the 70th anniversary of the death of Jim Elliot in 1956. We will be featuring his story during the month of January. In today’s devotional, we bring you the final two entries from Jim’s journal in 1955, as well as the epiloguewritten by Elisabeth when the Journals were published. As we take our first steps into the New Year, may we likewise take hold of Elisabeth’s encouragement from Hebrews 12:1-2 to “run with endurance the race that we have to run with patience, our eyes fixed on Jesus, the source and the goal of our faith.”
NOVEMBER 26 Spent Friday and Saturday morning (for a day-late Thanksgiving) with Conns and Fullers in Pano. In the afternoon (Ed was in Quito), Nate and I made my second Auca flight. Flew down the river to the grass shack where there are fenced chagras but no people. Noted an increased amount of cutting down the forest and land clearing since my last visit.They seem to know what to do with machetes and axes. On the way up we dropped a pair of pants at the first house because a woman there had on a gray slip-or so it seemed from the air. The second house has a model airplane carved on the house ridge and there we dropped a machete, a pair of short pants, and I saw a thing that thrilled me. It seemed an old man stood beside the house and waved with both his arms as if to signal us to come down. Aucas waving at me to come! At the next house they have made a large clearing and built a bamboo platform on which one-a white-shirted one-stood and waved. Nate dropped a roll of T.P. and several streamered combs into the trees at the edge of the clearing to try and give them the idea that we want those cut down, too. Dropped a machete there, too, with streamers which they got. Dropped a pot and an axe head on the string and they tied something with a red ribbon on, but we lost it trailing it on the way home. Nate was in a hurry as it was late afternoon, and he stepped it up so we lost it. God send me soon to the Aucas.
DECEMBER 31 A month of temptation. Satan and the flesh have been on me hard. How God holds my soul in His life and permits one with such wretchedness to continue in His service I cannot tell. Oh, it has been hard . . . . I have been very low inside me struggling and casting myself hourly on Christ for help. Marriage is divorce from the privacy a man loves, but there is some privacy nothing can share. It is the knowledge of a sinful heart. These are the days of the New Year’s believers’ conference on the Sermon on the Mount. Yesterday I preached and was helped on “whoever looks on a woman … “! “Let spirit conquer though the flesh conspire.”
Epilogue
The diary ends on December 31, 1955. Two days later Jim and four other men, Pete Fleming, Ed McCully, Nate Saint, and Roger Youderian, went to a little sand spit on the Curaray River which they named “Palm Beach.” They set up a camp in hopes of establishing contact with the Auca Indians. On January 6, 1956, their hopes were realized when two women and a man appeared out of the jungle and spent several hours with the missionaries. Verbal communication was not possible, but there was every indication that the Indians were friendly and trusted the missionaries. The Auca man demonstrated complete confidence by accepting a ride in Nate Saint’s airplane. Two days later the five men were speared to death. The story is told in detail in Through Gates of Splendor. Jim’s biography, Shadow of the Almighty, traces the preparation of his own soul for this assignment, and The Savage My Kinsman is the story of how Nate Saint’s sister Rachel, my daughter Valerie, and I went to live with the Auca Indians in 1958. The names of the five missionaries–Ed, Pete, Nate, Roger, and Jim-may legitimately be added, it seems to me, to that list in Hebrews 11 of those who responded to God in faith without seeing their reward, for they are among those who “won a glowing testimony to their faith, but they did not then and there receive the fulfillment of the promise. God had something better planned for our day, and it was not his plan that they should reach perfection without us.” This leaves us with an awesome responsibility, surrounded as we are by “these serried ranks of witnesses.” So “let us run the race that we have to run with patience, our eyes fixed on Jesus, the source and the goal of our faith” (Heb. 12:1, 2 PHILLIPS).
** Excerpt originally published in The Journals of Jim Elliot, pp. 474-477