““Truly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains by itself. But if it dies, it produces much fruit.””
John 12:24 · CSB
Jim Elliot was a athlete, a scholar of Greek, and by every account a young man who might have done anything. He chose the one thing most people would call a waste: to carry the gospel to a small, violent, unreached people in the jungles of Ecuador, the Waorani (then called by outsiders the “Aucas”).
With four others — Nate Saint, Ed McCully, Peter Fleming, and Roger Youderian — he spent months making careful, friendly contact, dropping gifts from a small plane, learning words of the language. In January 1956 they landed on a sandbar they called Palm Beach to meet the people face to face.
On January 8, a group of Waorani men speared all five missionaries to death. The news went around the world. By every worldly measure it was a senseless loss — five young men, several of them fathers, dead on a beach.
But the story did not end there. Jim's widow Elisabeth and Nate's sister Rachel went to live among the very people who had killed their men. Over the years, many of the Waorani — including some of the killers — became Christians. The grain of wheat had fallen, and did not remain alone.
“He is no fool,” Elliot wrote in his journal years before he died, “who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” His life is not an argument that every risk pays off in this world; it is a witness that the things we cannot keep — our years, our safety, our very lives — were never the things worth clinging to.
The sending still costs everything — and is still worth it.
A note on sources
- Documented: well-recorded modern history (1956); the quote is from Elliot's own journal, published by Elisabeth Elliot.