When Betty left the Waorani in 1962, Rachel Saint remained and continued to work among them. She stayed faithful to that calling until she died in 1994. When Steve Saint, Rachel’s nephew and Nate Saint’s son, went to Ecuador to attend his aunt’s funeral, the Waorani elders asked him to bring his family and come and live with them in the jungle.
At that stage of his life, Steve was a successful businessman with a wife and four teenage children. Nonetheless, he prayed about the invitation and concluded that it was what God wanted him to do next. The Saint family moved into the jungle of the Oriente to live with the Waorani. Now, the Elliot/Gren/Shepard family was on its way to visit them.
The memories flooded back as Betty peered out the airplane window. Memories of seeing the Andes for the first time on her way to do language study in Quito, of flying to Panama on her honeymoon with Jim, and then, as a young widow, flying “home” to a new life in the United States with blonde-haired Valerie bobbing up and down in the seat beside her on the plane.
Two days after setting out, Betty and the other members of her family were crowded into Steve and Ginny Saint’s house. The Saints lived in a small settlement among the Waorani. No sooner had Betty and her family arrived than a steady stream of people flowed through the house, laughing, singing, gawking, and reminiscing about old times with Betty and Valerie.
The men in the group set out on an all-day trek to visit Gikita, one of the men who had been responsible for the ambush of Jim Elliot and the other four missionaries at Palm Beach exactly forty years before.
Betty and Valerie stayed behind at the settlement to reminisce some more. They were shown around a Waorani school, where the children learned both Spanish and the Waorani language. They sang gospel songs and recited Bible verses from the Waorani translation of the New Testament, of which Betty had played an important part in the early stages, helping Rachel Saint to understand and write down the language. Now the New Testament translation into that language was complete. Betty was excited to see the progress that had been made among the Waorani.
On Sunday they attended church in the settlement. Again Betty’s mind went back to the time when Dayuma had first counted off seven days and insisted that her relatives gather and listen to her speak on the seventh day—God’s Day. No one knew at the time how to pray or even how to concentrate on a story about a foreigner born two thousand years before in a far-off country. Now many in the tribe embraced that Person as their Savior.
The week among the Waorani passed quickly, but by the time she left to return home, Betty had gathered a lot of updated information to pass on to her radio listeners and newsletter readers. But much more than that, she had the satisfaction of seeing some of the results of Jim’s sacrifice and her own years of effort spent in the jungle of the Oriente.
For Betty the trip was the completion of a circle. What a thrill it had been to see her grandson Walter trek seven hours through the jungle to greet his grandfather’s killer, now a Christian brother, and to see Valerie and Steve regaling each other with shared memories of life as children in the jungle. And finally, too, for Lars to experience so many things that had played such a key role in shaping Betty and her ministry.
When she returned to the United States, Betty continued her rigorous ministry schedule. In the two months after getting home from the visit to Ecuador, she spoke in Birmingham, Alabama; Rutland, Vermont; Jacksonville, Oregon; Montreal, Quebec; and many points in between.
On August 31, 2001, Betty ended her Gateway to Joy radio program. Indeed, it had been a gateway to joy for her. She thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to reach out to so many people in the widely syndicated show’s twelve years on the radio. Thousands of people had written to her with their problems and thanked her for being part of the solution.
Two years after the final radio show, The Elisabeth Elliot Newsletter ceased publication, after coming out six times a year continuously for twenty-one years. At times more than eighteen thousand people in over one hundred countries read the newsletter. When writing the newsletter, Betty had always sought to raise awareness of missionaries and their work, from Peru to Egypt. And in the last ten years of the newsletter’s existence, readers sent in nearly a quarter of a million dollars to help with the causes Betty had highlighted.
A month after the newsletter ceased publication, Betty turned seventy-seven years old. As hard as it was for her and Lars to admit, Betty was slipping into old age. She began to experience difficulty in saying some words and in recalling Bible verses and poems that she had quoted by heart since she was a child. Bit by bit, almost imperceptibly to others, Betty’s mind and body were becoming frail.
Betty finished her official speaking and traveling ministry in 2004. She still tried her best to get to a few favorite events, but her attendance took a different form than it previously had. More often than not, Lars would show the group a video recorded at a previous event when she was younger. Afterward, Betty would answer questions or add a few words.
In May 2009, Betty tripped and fell, breaking her leg. Just as she was recovering from that fall, she fell again, this time breaking five small bones in her foot. The injuries required a stay in a special care facility for the elderly. As Betty was wheeled around, fed, and bathed, she and Lars faced the reality of this final stage of life. No one can say how long it will be.
Betty was finally able to leave the special care facility and with part-time help remains in her cozy home in Magnolia, Massachusetts, to where she and Lars moved from Hamilton. Betty often relies on her old “friend” Amy Carmichael, who was bedridden for twenty years, to light the way for her. In the past when she spoke of suffering, Betty often quoted the last lines of Amy’s Carmichael’s poem “In Acceptance Lieth Peace”:
He said, “I will accept the breaking sorrow
Which God tomorrow
Will to His son explain.”
Then did the turmoil deep within him cease.
Not vain the word, not vain;
For in acceptance lieth peace.
In her long life, Elisabeth Elliot has accepted and embraced many sorrows without complaint, and without questioning her God. She had lived her own message—a message of joyful surrender—before passing it on to the world.
