Some might consider her to have been the female equivalent of Billy Graham (#11 FCAL), though she rarely spoke to large crowds and certainly didn’t travel the world on evangelical crusades. Instead, she engaged the power of the pen (and radio voice) to captivate her audience, and boy did she captivate them.
“There is nothing worth living for, unless it’s worth dying for.”
“The fact that I am a woman does not make me a different kind of Christian, but the fact that I am a Christian makes me a different kind of woman.”
Her quotes could fill volumes of books, and indeed she wrote volumes of books. We are talking about Elisabeth Elliot (#16 BCIL), a woman more widely known for being the wife of Jim Elliot, who was one of five missionaries killed in 1956 while participating in Operation Auca, an attempt to share the loving and sacrificial life of Christ with the Huaroani people of Ecuador. Unlike her outgoing husband, Elisabeth writes, “I was shy, I was a book worm, and when the rest of the students were screaming their heads off at the football game I was holed up in the library translating Thucydides.” Her brother eventually forced Elisabeth to attend one of his wrestling matches, and afterwards introduced her to his strapping competitor, Jim. Five years later he proposed. “This gorgeous man was now mine–my very own husband–for just twenty-seven months. Did I know what would soon take place? I did not. He and four other missionary men were killed in Ecuador, South America, in 1956 by a tribe then called Aucas who believed that all outsiders were cannibals.”
Throughout her lifetime, Elisabeth stayed true to her #16 design, giving her critiquing, frank opinion on matters pertaining to Christianity and the world. Regarding worship, she once wrote, “Worship is not an experience. Worship is an act, and this takes discipline. We are to worship in spirit and in truth. Never mind about the feelings. We are to worship in spite of them.” She also knew true Christianity would cause people to notice you, writing, “If your goal is purity of heart, be prepared to be thought very odd.”
Indeed, may we all heed Elisabeth’s wise advice and live (fixate on) for things worth dying for. Would you die for sports?Television? Movies? If not, then it would likely be prudent to focus on matters that have lasting, eternal value!
Written by: Staff
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