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Podcast: The Life and Legacy of Elisabeth Elliot (Lucy S. R. Austen)

June 26, 2023 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Elisabeth Elliot’s Lasting Impact

In today’s episode, Lucy S. R. Austen shares insights into Elisabeth Elliot’s missionary work in Ecuador and how her writing in the years that followed impacted thousands of believers around the world.

Elisabeth Elliot

Elisabeth Elliot

Lucy S. R. Austen

This biography takes readers on an in-depth journey through the life of Elisabeth Elliot—her marriage to Jim Elliot, her years of international missions work, and her prolific career as a writer and speaker.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:09 - A Heart Set on Pilgrimage

Matt Tully
Lucy, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Lucy S. R. Austen
I’m really glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Matt Tully
Can you just describe very briefly who Elisabeth Elliot was?

Lucy S. R. Austen
Elisabeth Elliot was a foreign missionary in Ecuador in the 50s, and her husband was killed in the process of trying to reach a previously uncontacted people group. She wrote a book about it, and the rest is history.

Matt Tully
My understanding is that you had a chance to meet her before she died, and I think it was in 2015. Is that when she passed away?

Lucy S. R. Austen
Yes, in June of 2015.

Matt Tully
When did you get to talk with her and meet with her?

Lucy S. R. Austen
I was invited to be in her home and spend some time with her and Lars Gren, who was her third husband, in the fall of 2014, which was a neat opportunity.

Matt Tully
Yeah, I can imagine. What was that like? What kind of conversations were you able to have with her and her husband?

Lucy S. R. Austen
She was in the late stages by that point of dementia. And so she wasn’t able to really converse, or I wasn’t able to really understand her, but it was neat to spend time with her and to be in their home and to get to spend some time talking with Lars.

Matt Tully
That’s such an interesting, and in many ways sad, reality, just given how, as you mentioned already, how prolific she was as an author and as a speaker. Her voice was heard by many, many people on the radio for years. What was that like for her? Do we know anything about what that aging process was like as she got older and dealt with that dementia?

Lucy S. R. Austen
I’m sure it must have been really challenging and difficult to face. But as Lars has said, I think she approached it the way she had been approaching the hard things in her life for years, which was to accept it as something that God had allowed, and to walk with the Lord in it.

Matt Tully
What was it that first got you interested in her and her life, and how did that end up with you getting an invitation to visit them at their home?

Lucy S. R. Austen
When I was in high school, in my Easter basket my mom gave me a copy of Passion and Purity, and I know I was impressed with the sense of gravitas that the death of Jesus lends to our lives and our choices. We’re important and we’re loved, and so what we do matters. So, based on reading that book then, I noticed that my mother had No Graven Image on her shelves, which was the only novel that Elliot ever published. And so I picked that up and read it, and I had read, at that point as a high school girl, a lot of Christian fiction. And this book was different. It was very different. And I don’t know that I analyzed it at the time, but looking back on it now, the story doesn’t have the tidy, polished ending that you often see. And the female protagonist is not married at the end of the book, which is different. It had a very different view of what the key issues in life are. I don’t want to say anything else and spoil the story for people who haven’t read it, but that was the book, I think, that fixed her in my mind and ultimately led to me writing about her.

Matt Tully
When was that book published?

Lucy S. R. Austen
In the mid 60s.

Matt Tully
Did you explain how you actually got invited to their house?

Lucy S. R. Austen
I was actually writing another project for which I had to do a short, biographical sketch of Elisabeth Elliot. I was doing several biographical sketches and I would get all the biographies that existed from the library, read them and take notes, and then write my biographical sketch. And when I went to do that for Elliot, I discovered that there was no biography of Elisabeth Elliot. I thought, That doesn’t seem right! So I had to go to source material to write that sketch. She captured my imagination. I was very intrigued by some of the things that initially seemed contradictory in her views and her personality, and also just her accomplishments are impressive. And so I finished that project and put it to bed, and several months later I woke up in the middle of the night with an outline for a biography of Elisabeth Elliot in my head. And I thought, Oh, maybe I’d better see if I can work on this.

Matt Tully
You were going to fix that problem.

Lucy S. R. Austen
Yeah. So I started doing research and reaching out to contact people about interviews and those kinds of things. In that process, I was emailing back and forth with Lars and talking to him about a phone interview. At one point he said, Well, I really do better in person. You should just come see us.

Matt Tully
Was he reticent or skeptical at all of the idea of someone writing a biography on Elisabeth? You mentioned that he viewed himself as protecting her and guarding her, especially in that period of her struggling with dementia. Was that ever an issue?

Lucy S. R. Austen
I’m sure it was. We had corresponded for a bit by email, and I had had a chance to explain where I was coming from with the book. Elisabeth Elliot said in the intro to her biography of Amy Carmichael that she was presenting a picture of someone whose answer to the Lord’s call had made a difference in her life. And I had had the chance to share that that was where I was coming from. I think that that was—I hope, at least—that was helpful to know. Also, we had discussed she did not want biographies written of her while she was still alive, understandably. I wouldn’t either. And so we had also discussed waiting until she was with the Lord.

Matt Tully
Taking a step back and thinking about your whole life and your journey with Elliot over the years, how would you summarize the impact that she’s had on you personally?

Lucy S. R. Austen
I think one thing that I’ve really been observing is that I think that it’s easy to think of people as being static beings, particularly once we reach adulthood—we grow up and then that’s who we are. And looking at her life, the way we approach it in biography is childhood, teens, early adulthood, major life events, middle age, old age, and it’s really highlighted how multifaceted and always changing we all are. I’ve really appreciated Elliot’s emphasis on leaning into that growth and that change, and really actively pursuing God at every stage of her life. I don’t think she ever said I’m too young or I’m too old or I’ve arrived. Psalm 84 talks about people with their heart set on pilgrimage: “They go from strength to strength until each appears before God in Zion.” And I see that heart set on pilgrimage in her, and I want that heart set on pilgrimage.

Matt Tully
Part of that idea of pilgrimage is just that you’re not home; you’re not home yet. This isn’t your final destination. Do you think that was a big part of her own thinking about her life and what it meant to be a Christian?

Lucy S. R. Austen
Definitely.

Matt Tully
Where do you think that came from for her?

Lucy S. R. Austen
That’s a good question. I think she often felt different in childhood and in early adulthood from the people around her, and then particularly after Jim, her first husband, was killed. I think she felt very isolated by that experience in a lot of ways from other people who hadn’t shared that kind of experience. And I’m sure all of those things contributed.

09:32 - Early Life

Matt Tully
What was her childhood like? Was she raised in a Christian home with Christian parents?

Lucy S. R. Austen
She was. Her family was pretty well known in the evangelical world. Her father ran The Sunday School Times, which was a big deal back then.

Matt Tully
That would be hard to believe nowadays. Was that a newspaper or a magazine?

Lucy S. R. Austen
It was kind of a blend. It was articles and poems and lessons and just a whole bunch of stuff. You could have it in your home and read it, or Sunday school teachers could pull from it to design their own curriculum.

Matt Tully
Would you say her childhood was pretty normal?

Lucy S. R. Austen
Yeah. She had loving parents, a whole bunch of brothers and a sister, and family in the area that they visited. They played with friends in the neighborhood, and they had a dog.

Matt Tully
And then she eventually ended up at Wheaton College; is that correct?

Lucy S. R. Austen
Yes.

Matt Tully
And what did she study there?

Lucy S. R. Austen
She started as an English major, and then the summer between her junior and senior year she switched to being a Greek major. I believe she was the first woman to graduate from the Greek program at Wheaton.

Matt Tully
What was behind that decision?

Lucy S. R. Austen
She had been praying for over a year about what the Lord wanted her to do after she graduated, and she had come to the conclusion first that she was to go to the mission field, and then that she was supposed to major in translation. And so she cut out a lot of extracurriculars to make room for playing catch up with Greek so that she would have a basis for translation.

Matt Tully
You mentioned that she was the first woman to graduate from the Greek program at Wheaton at the time. Were there any pressures against doing that that she faced? How was that perceived by her peers and the teachers?

Lucy S. R. Austen
I’m not sure if there was a lot of peer response. There were other women in the program and she just graduated first, but it seems like she was welcomed with open arms by the professors because they kind of moved things around to let her stack her classes and get through them faster.

11:55 - Ecuador

Matt Tully
And so was her plan at that point to go to the mission field, or was it to stay on the home front and do Bible translation from the United States?

Lucy S. R. Austen
At that point her plan was already to go to the mission field.

Matt Tully
Wow. Paint a picture of what that would’ve been like at the time—the idea of a single woman going out by herself, or was the plan to go with a team or an agency? What was the goal there

Lucy S. R. Austen
At this point in her life, she had moved out of the denominational umbrella that she had grown up in and was part of the Plymouth Brethren, which was the same (not a denomination) that Jim Elliot had grown up in. And they had their own kind of process, which was that you had to be known by an assembly, and an assembly had to approve you going to the field. And they preferred, or I think perhaps required, that you go in a team of at least two. And so she, through connections with the Brethren, there was another single woman who felt called to Ecuador, and so they went as a team.

Matt Tully
When she took off for Ecuador, did she know Jim, who would go on to be her husband at the time, or did that happen afterwards?

Lucy S. R. Austen
Jim and Elisabeth’s younger brother Dave were really good friends at Wheaton, and he had been to their home for Christmas. And so they knew each other and had been in an on again, off again relationship for some time before he sailed for Ecuador around January, and then she sailed in April.

Matt Tully
Was that 1955?

Lucy S. R. Austen
1952.

Matt Tully
1952. When did they get married?

Lucy S. R. Austen
It was October 8th, because it was his birthday. It must have been 1954.

Matt Tully
And then, famously, I’m sure many of our listeners know this story, and it’s become, it seems to me at least, a little bit like evangelical myth, the tragic story of Jim’s death and the death of four other missionaries. Can you just walk us through what happened, how that happened, and the impact that that then had on Elisabeth and the others who were there?

Lucy S. R. Austen
I can try. It’s a big story. After Jim and Elisabeth were married, they were living on a station in the jungles of eastern Ecuador called Shandia, and they were working among the Kichwa people who were there. There were other missionaries on stations close by. Pete and Olive Fleming were in Puyupungu, which was a little ways away, and Nate and Marj Saint were nearby, and Ed and Marilou McCully were nearby, and then a friend of Nate’s, Roger Youderian and his family, were a little farther away yet.

Matt Tully
Were these all accessible via car? Could they take a quick drive?

Lucy S. R. Austen
Oh, no, no, no. Nate was the connecting point because it was his plane. By plane or by foot were the ways to get there.

Matt Tully Wow.

Lucy S. R. Austen
And it was hours of hiking, generally, if he didn’t have the plane.

Matt Tully
Is this a thick jungle? Is that what we should be picturing?

Lucy S. R. Austen
Yes. And steep hills and lots of mud.

Matt Tully
Yeah, lots of mud and bugs and animals.

Lucy S. R. Austen
Poisonous snakes.

Matt Tully
Keep going. What happened?

Lucy S. R. Austen
They had known about this uncontacted tribe since before leaving the US, and it was kind of a dream of Jims to do pioneer work and reach a completely uncontacted tribe, and some of the other missionaries as well. And so they kind of all had it in the back of their minds: Wouldn’t it be cool if we could do this? And then one day on a flight to do something else, Nate accidentally happened to spot the houses in the jungle of this tribe.

Matt Tully
Wow. So they knew their location but didn’t know exactly where they were camping.

Lucy S. R. Austen
They kind of knew the borders of their territory because the Kichwa people who lived along the borders of their territory said It’s not safe to go over there. But they had no idea within those borders where anybody was.

Matt Tully
Did the tribe have a reputation for anything at the time?

Lucy S. R. Austen
Yes. The Kichwa called them “auca,” which in their language meant “savage.” They had had a reputation, basically since the Spanish arrived, for killing people who came into their territory. They had been real badly mistreated first by the Spanish conquistadors and then by the rubber hunters who followed, and they were going to defend themselves.

Matt Tully
You said Nate, flying in this plane, happened to see some of their buildings, and then what next?

Lucy S. R. Austen
Different people remember different things about exactly how it went down, but basically Nate went to Jim and to Ed and said, Hey guys, guess what? And, of course, they were just gung-ho and very excited about this possibility. And so pretty much immediately they started planning for a way to make contact. They planned over a period of months, but various things that were happening—as far as settlers who wanted to move into the territory and so on—pushed them to feel like there was a sense of urgency to make a contact attempt now. And so they did gift drops every week for a few months, and then they struck out into the jungle and made a contact attempt.

Matt Tully
So they didn’t fly in and land. I think that’s the picture that maybe a lot of us have.

Lucy S. R. Austen
They did. Nate flew them in. He had a tiny little plane, and so they had a prefab tree house and a bunch of supplies, and so he flew flight after flight after flight to bring in the four other men and all of their supplies.

Matt Tully
And so they're there in the jungle trying to make conduct. What was that process like?

Lucy S. R. Austen
It involved a lot of eating hamburgers, putting on bug repellent, reading Time Magazine, sitting in the river. They had a few of what they thought or hoped might be phrases in the language that they had learned, and they would stand in the river and shout them into the jungle, hoping that someone would hear them and come.

Matt Tully
And so eventually they did make contact. What happened then? How long were they out there waiting?

Lucy S. R. Austen
It would’ve been a couple of days at least. I would have to double check and be sure. Two women and a man appeared out of the woods, and of course they couldn’t understand each other at all, but they offered hamburgers and shared their bug repellent and had what seemed to be—and it was—a peaceful contact for several hours.

Matt Tully
And then what happened?

Lucy S. R. Austen
One of the women got bored and left. The man followed her, and the third woman appeared to be going to spend the night by the fire but then disappeared at some point in the night. And so then it was just the missionaries on the beach again. But they were hopeful that they had gone to get more people and they would come back. And so Nate was flying (I think the next day) over where they knew the settlement was, looking to see if people were coming. Eventually, he saw that a group was headed their way.

Matt Tully
So he was flying in the plane and the other guys were still on the ground at the time. Did Nate land and tell them that there were people coming?

Lucy S. R. Austen
Yes. And so they waited for them to come and, of course, nobody knew this until years later, but the first group came out of the woods and appeared to be friendly, and then a second group ambushed them out of the woods.

Matt Tully
Did they ever consider taking weapons with them? Was that ever something that they were going to do?

Lucy S. R. Austen
They did go armed, yes. But their plan was really to use the guns to scare them off, not to actually fight back.

Matt Tully
And, of course, they didn’t think they were going to be ambushed like that. How then did the other missionaries—mostly their wives—how did they find out about what had happened?

Lucy S. R. Austen
Nate had scheduled radio contacts that he was supposed to be making. When he didn’t make the Sunday afternoon contact, his wife, Marj, contacted Elisabeth Elliot (who everybody called Betty at that point) and said that she hadn’t heard from him. But they decided to wait until the next morning before they contacted the other MAF (the Missionary Aviation Fellowship pilot) who was in the area. And so in the morning they contacted Johnny Keenan and said, They didn’t make radio contact. This is where they were. And so he went out to look for them, flew over the location, and he saw the plane on the beach and it had been pretty much stripped of fabric. And so then he came back and they initiated a full search party.

Matt Tully
What was the search party like? Did they send people in to recover the plane and look for the guys, or was that all just done by plane?

Lucy S. R. Austen
They had a combination. There was a ground search party, and both the Ecuadorian Air Force and the US Army Air Corps coordinated an air search.

Matt Tully
Did Elisabeth play any role in that search process?

Lucy S. R. Austen
No. The MAF pilots brought all of the wives so that they could be together in one place—at Nate and Marj Saint’s house—and they basically just had to wait, which was really hard.

Matt Tully
I can’t imagine what that would be like. What were the weeks and months immediately following Jim’s death like for Elisabeth and for the other women there?

Lucy S. R. Austen
I can’t speak to the other women’s experience for the most part, but I think for Elisabeth they were very much a whirlwind, or a blur, in a lot of ways. During the search itself they were feeding dozens and dozens and dozens of people who had come to commiserate or gawk or help or whatever. It was a really busy time, and they were just cooking and doing dishes and laundry over and over again from dawn until dusk. And then when all of the men were known to be dead, they had a memorial service. And then she packed up her baby and went back to her mission station and started trying to do the jobs that two people had been doing all by herself. And so she was just running off her feet for a long, long time.

Matt Tully
Was she by herself with her daughter?

Lucy S. R. Austen
Essentially, yeah. There weren’t other missionaries living there. Obviously, she lived in a community of Kichwa people.

Matt Tully
That’s one of the most amazing things about her story is that she stayed on in Ecuador after Jim’s death with her daughter. How old was her daughter at the time, roughly?

Lucy S. R. Austen
She would’ve been just shy of two I believe.

Matt Tully
What was the response to her decision to stay in the country with her daughter? Did she get pressure from anyone to leave in light of what had happened?

Lucy S. R. Austen
I don’t know how much direct pressure she got. I think she got a lot of surprised responses. I don’t know that she would’ve phrased it this way, but she had a little bit of trouble with male missionaries in the area who appeared to think that because Jim had been killed that their station was unoccupied by a missionary, and they were making plans for what to do with it without talking to her about it first.

Matt Tully
Do we know if that was a hard decision for her, or was she pretty set from the very beginning like, I’m going to stay here.

Lucy S. R. Austen
I think she was pretty set from the beginning. They had discussed before he left What do you want me to do if you don’t come back? And he said, Just keep teaching the believers, and close the school. That will be too much for you to worry about. And so I think she kind of felt like it was carrying out his wishes probably, as well as obedience to God’s call to her directly to stay.

Matt Tully
It gets more amazing in that she not only stayed in Ecuador, but then she eventually actually moved to the village of this tribe that had had killed her husband, along with Rachel Saint, the wife of another one of—

Lucy S. R. Austen
The sister.

Matt Tully
Oh, the sister. That’s right. And she moved there with her daughter and actually started living with them. How did that develop? How did she end up making that decision and actually having that contact with them again?

Lucy S. R. Austen
She had been still in Shandia, and then she had been asked to go and stay with another missionary couple who were living right on the edge of Waorani territory. The man was going to go on a trip, and so she was going to go and stay with the woman of the couple. And while she was there, three Waorani women came out of the jungle at a Kichwa settlement a little bit farther down the trail. That settlement sent a runner up to the missionaries to let them know, Oh, by the way, these women just came out of the jungle. And so she left Valerie with the family she was staying with and went back with the runner and met these women. By that point, one of the women had gone back into the jungle, but she met these two women and they ended up living with her for over a year.

Matt Tully
Wow. How about that decision? Was that something that she struggled with and wrestled with, especially having her young daughter with her? Or was that a pretty easy decision for her?

Lucy S. R. Austen
I think she wrestled with it a lot before she actually had to make it. She was wrestling with hypotheticals: If this happens, what will I do? What should I do? What will I do with Valerie? Those kinds of things. But it sounded like she felt like it was an easier choice when she actually had to make it, that there was somebody there to care for Valerie, that she had been praying for years for the chance to do this, and she felt like it was God’s direction to go.

Matt Tully
In 1957, I believe it was, she published Through Gates of Splendor, which was the book that told the story of her husband and the other missionaries there. That became a bestseller, and I believe it was actually listed by Christianity Today as one of the top fifty books that have shaped evangelicals. What do you think was so compelling about that book that led it to that level of success?

Lucy S. R. Austen
I think one thing was that there had previously been a lot of news coverage. Americans at the time were really interested in knowing about the rest of the world, and so when this happened and Life Magazine sent a photographer down to cover the story of the death of the five men, that Life Magazine article was read by a lot of people. And so people knew the story and wanted to know more when the book came out, which I’m sure helped with the initial sales and interest.

Matt Tully
Did she want to write that book herself, or did a publisher approach her and ask her about that? What was the history of that?

Lucy S. R. Austen
That’s a pretty amazing story. The widows had asked someone else to write a book, he had agreed to write it, and then he had gotten a contract with the publisher. Then, it started to look like it wasn’t going to work. And so the publisher initially sent someone to meet with Elliot and look at her source materials—Jim’s diaries and those kinds of things—and interview her to see if they could help with the book. And then they asked her to come to New York and consult on final revisions on this book. And when she got there, they sat her down and said, We actually don’t have a book. You’re going to write it.

Matt Tully
Wow. So she thought she was there to look at a manuscript and give feedback?

Lucy S. R. Austen
Yeah. They had her right cold—do a writing sample—and after they had looked at it they said, Okay, we want you to write it.

Matt Tully
And what was her response? Was she receptive to that from the very beginning?

Lucy S. R. Austen
I think she was probably pretty blown away. It had been a really hard decision for her to make even to go to New York to consult and leave her station and her work and so on. And this, of course, meant staying away longer and so on.

Matt Tully
Did she ever speak about what she hoped the book would accomplish? What was her goal with somebody writing a book, even if it wasn’t initially her?

Lucy S. R. Austen
As far as I can tell, she and the other wives really wanted something good to come out of something bad. Maybe a good way to kind of sum it up is the Life photographer who came to take the pictures after the men had been killed, he photographed the search party and the burial, and then he hung around the mission station for several days, taking pictures and asking questions. As he asked questions about why these families were here, what they were doing, and about their motivations, Elisabeth had shared with him excerpts from Jim’s journals to try to answer some of his questions. And some other people I think had given him some Christian books to read, and he had told her, You could never convince me with these books, but you might be able to convince me with the journals of these men. And so I think from the beginning she was very motivated to share the words of the men themselves and convey to the world why they were there and what they were trying to do.

Matt Tully
I’m struck by just the significance of those experiences and how the example that they set gave more weight to their words—Jim’s words and her words. Do you think that she understood early on the significance of their story and their legacy moving forward?

Lucy S. R. Austen
I don’t think so. I think she was recently widowed, had way too much work to do, was trying to do it while raising a very young child, and was just putting one foot in front of the other and trying to be obedient in the now.

Matt Tully
Eventually she did end up moving back to the United States and then eventually she got remarried. What was behind that decision to leave the mission field?

Lucy S. R. Austen
I think that she had been thinking for a long time about what to do as Valerie (her daughter) got older. It was difficult to homeschool her and do all of the other things that she was trying to do. And, of course, she wanted her to have birthday parties and museum visits and ballet lessons and those kinds of childhood things which were not available where they were living.

Matt Tully
Were there other children around them? Did her daughter have peers and friends?

Lucy S. R. Austen
Yes, there were peers and friends; they were indigenous. There weren’t other Anglo-kids around, and I think that made a difference in her mind, unfortunately.

Matt Tully
Could Valerie speak the indigenous languages?

Lucy S. R. Austen
Yes, much better than her mother.

Matt Tully
But Elisabeth did learn the languages and was able to interact?

Lucy S. R. Austen
Yes. As I understand it, she was fluent in Kichwa, which was the language that she used the most while she was there. And by the time she left the Waorani she was very conversant.

32:19 - Life and Ministry after Ecuador

Matt Tully
After returning to the US, she was married again to her husband Addison. But then he died I think just four years after they got married. That’s just kind of mind boggling to think about for someone who had already lost her first husband and then so soon losing a second. What was that like for her?

Lucy S. R. Austen
I think it was, again, really difficult. I don’t know that anybody could ever go through an experience like that and not have it be difficult. But it was kind of the same thing: she tried really hard to discipline her thinking to live in today, and to just take one day at a time and to do what she had to do to walk with the Lord and love other people in that day. And so that’s kind of how she walked through it I think.

Matt Tully
And then she married for a third time in 1977, and that was her husband, Lars, who was then with her until her death in 2015. And as we’ve mentioned already, she had this ten year struggle with dementia. What was that like for Lars? You spent some time with him, talking with him, and he’s still living today. What was their relationship like?

Lucy S. R. Austen
They were very private about their relationship. I do know that he was maybe more outgoing and gregarious, and she was maybe a little bit more naturally reserved. But I think, if I am understanding him correctly, that he kind of felt like it was his job to take care of her. And so when she started needing more care, he was faithful to provide that. She did not like, as I understand it, the idea of going into a care facility, and he made a way for her to live at home and be cared for.

Matt Tully
It’s amazing, too, to think that her popularity didn’t wane back in the 50s or 60s, and even in the 70s and 80s and 90s she had a pretty thriving ministry and wrote a lot and even hosted a radio show called “Gateway to Joy” for I think over a decade. And she opened every show with the same line: “You are loved with an everlasting love. That’s what the Bible says, and underneath are the everlasting arms. This is your friend, Elisabeth Elliot.” What do you think that that simple little opening line reveals about who she was and her character and her view of the Christian life?

Lucy S. R. Austen
I think from very early in her writing career it’s pretty clear that the key thing about the Christian life to her was the character of God. And so I think that that distills her understanding of the character of God—God is love. She calls him at one point “inexorably loving.” She was big on obedience, but to obey, she felt you had to trust; and to trust, she felt you had to know the character of God—a God who is love.

Matt Tully
What would you say were Elisabeth’s greatest strengths?

Lucy S. R. Austen
She had a phenomenal memory for what she read, and her letters and her diaries are just stuffed with quotations. She was pulling them from memory by and large.

Matt Tully
Was she an avid reader?

Lucy S. R. Austen
Yes. Oh, she loved to read.

Matt Tully
What kinds of books was she interested in?

Lucy S. R. Austen
Everything under the sun. When she was in Ecuador, her parents mailed her books, her siblings mailed her books, and friends mailed her books. And once she was being published by Harper’s, they mailed her books—boxes and boxes of them.

Matt Tully
Books to endorse?

Lucy S. R. Austen
No, just gifts. Just to read. She worked in the morning, in the afternoon, and again after supper, but during meals she would prop up a book and eat and read. And she would read Dickens, Kamoo, the medieval mystics, she was a big fan of Time Magazine, Freud, Tillich, Amy Carmichael, you name it.

Matt Tully
Anything and everything. What are some of her other strengths that you were going to mention?

Lucy S. R. Austen
I think another strength is just her commitment to waiting on God. Whatever happened, she just reminded herself of what she believed to be true.

Matt Tully
I can imagine for anyone just facing as much tragedy as she faced in her life and difficulty, there’s the temptation to feel bad for yourself and pity yourself and wallow in that sadness. Did she ever struggle with that, with the Why me? question?

Lucy S. R. Austen
I think she would’ve told you that she struggled with self-pity, but I don’t think she ever asked Why me? I think that she tried to watch out for self-pity and turn away from it.

Matt Tully
How about weaknesses? What would you say were her greatest weaknesses?

Lucy S. R. Austen
I think she was an introvert and I think she was a pretty reserved and private person naturally, and I think she could come across to people as being cold and standoffish. For some people who maybe had listened to the radio program and had heard her say, “This is your friend, Elisabeth Elliot,” meeting her in person at a speaking engagement or whatever and finding her not as warm and fuzzy as they had maybe expected her to be could be off putting.

Matt Tully
Did she do a lot of public speaking?

Lucy S. R. Austen
A lot of public speaking.

Matt Tully
What was the context for those events?

Lucy S. R. Austen
She started speaking almost immediately. The first time she was back in the US after Jim was killed was to write Through Gates of Splendor. She turned down all speaking engagements on that trip, but the next time she came back on a furlough she said in her letters to her family that she wasn’t going to take speaking engagements, but then they refer all through the the trip to “showed slides here,” “spoke twice here.” And it just snowballed from there. In the 60s she was getting five or six invitations to speak a day in the mail, and could barely keep up with replying to them all. So people just kept inviting her. She struggled with knowing how many to accept, but she did a lot of speaking.

Matt Tully
What do you think was behind the fascination that not just Americans generally, but now for a longer time that evangelical Christians have with her story?

Lucy S. R. Austen
I think that there’s a great temptation to want to be able to put a bow on hard things that happen. I think you can certainly read Through Gates of Splendor as a triumphant We can already see now how God is bringing good out of bad kind of a book. And I think we like to tell stories like that, because we like to understand. So I think maybe that is what’s behind the fact that we’re still telling that story.

Matt Tully
Do you think she viewed it that way, that her story and her life was this triumphant example?

Lucy S. R. Austen
I suspect not. I think certainly when she left Ecuador and left the mission field she felt it had been a series of losses and failures and that there wasn’t a lot of triumph there, and that it was too early to say, This is what God is doing. She believed that God was doing and that God was going to ultimately bring good out of bad, but I don’t think at that point that she thought that you could point to what the good was for sure.

Matt Tully
Do you have an interesting anecdote about her, or a story about her that you think listeners would be surprised to hear that would be unexpected?

Lucy S. R. Austen
In person, especially when she was with her family and was comfortable, it sounds like she was just hilariously funny. She was a good mimic. She had a good ear for people’s speech and a good memory, and so she had long comic pieces memorized and could give you a bit. The comedian Joyce Grenfell was one of her favorites, and she could do one of Grenfell’s set pieces. When she was with her siblings and her parents, they loved to do charades and swap funny stories and things that they had seen that day that had tickled their funny bones. And she and her mother particularly would lean back in their chairs at the table and just laugh until they cried. And so just that sense of humor. And I’ve got one other thing I could share, which is that I think she came across often as being very confident and certain. I think that she was certain of a few things—the character of God, for example. But I think a major theme throughout her life was a sense of uncertainty and not knowing what to do. And she really felt dependent on careful Bible study and prayer over a long period of time before making decisions. I think she was more of a seeker in that sense than she often appeared, because once, of course, she reached a conclusion and wrote it down, you didn’t see all of the hours of thought and prayer that had gone into it ahead of time.

Matt Tully
What did her personal daily walk with God look like? What was her Bible study, Bible reading routine, or her prayer life like?

Lucy S. R. Austen
She got up early to make sure that she got it in, and she would pray old hymns or written prayers that she had found and saved. And she just read through the Bible, I think, basically over and over and over again at a pretty phenomenal rate.

Matt Tully
Did she mark her Bible at all?

Lucy S. R. Austen
Yeah. She would note significant dates next to passages all through her Bibles—a date that she felt like that verse had been for her on that day. So her bibles are neat to look at.

Matt Tully
Lucy, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us about Elisabeth Elliot and share a little bit about her life and the impact that it’s had on you and you’re thinking about the Christian life.

Lucy S. R. Austen
Thanks for having me. I enjoyed it.

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