“I guess I did notice that you spent a lot of time with me,” Betty said. “But I told myself you were just being a Christian brother, that you couldn’t possibly be interested in me, much less in love with me!”
“I don’t think we should go back yet,” Jim said. “How about we go back to the Lagoon and do some serious talking.”
And serious talking it was. Betty was reeling from the fact that Jim said he loved her, and she was equally floored by his admission that God was calling him to the life of a single missionary.
As they talked, it seemed that they were both wrestling with the same problem: was married life for either of them, or was God requiring them to be single and serve Him that way?
Betty’s mind raced to the instructions that she had often heard her father give to her brothers: “Son, never tell a woman that you love her unless you ask to marry her in the next sentence.” For whatever reason, Betty mused, Jim did not appear to have gotten that message from his own father. And now where would it lead them?
Jim and Betty agreed they loved each other. They also agreed that they felt God was calling them to be single missionaries.
That night, as Betty tried to pray about the matter, she felt elation one moment and despair the next. Why was it so difficult to figure out the right thing to do? Why would God let her love someone—someone as godly as Jim Elliot—and then not lead them both to get married soon?
Betty’s parents asked her the same thing when they came for graduation. Family finances were low, and her mother had had to sell a silver rose bowl—a Gillingham family heirloom—for travel expenses to Wheaton. When they arrived, Betty’s parents expressed their concerns about Betty and Jim. “God is not the author of confusion,” Philip Howard said to his daughter. “Keep praying. God will make it clear what you are to do next.”
But clarity did not come quickly.
Chapter 7
Turmoil
Steam billowed out from under the engine of the Texas Chief. Betty and Jim clasped hands. She waited for him to crush her in an embrace, to say they would get married soon, that they would never have to say goodbye again, but it did not happen. Instead Jim smiled at Betty, squeezed her hand, and let it go.
Betty turned, lifted her suitcase, walked the length of the Chicago train station platform, and climbed aboard the train. Tears streamed down her face as she found a seat, stowed her bag, and sat down. She stared out the window thinking, One more train ride. One more time I have to trust God that He knows what He is doing—that He sees the full picture, even though I don’t.
Betty tried to center her thoughts on God’s will, but it was difficult. As the Texas Chief rolled by each station—Springfield, Kansas City, Wichita—her heart ached for Jim, and her thoughts were filled with him. What was he doing right now? Would he write to her this summer? Should she plan to visit him at Wheaton College next year, or would she wait for him to invite her? What had he meant by that final squeeze of her hand? Had he meant anything?
As she often did, Betty quietly recited a poem to help her make sense of her feelings. The poem was by Alice Meynell:
Let this goodbye of ours, this last goodbye
Be still and splendid like a forest tree…
Let there be one grand look within our eyes,
Built of the wonderment of the past years,
Too vast a thing of beauty to be lost
In quivering lips and burning floods of tears.
The poem did not comfort her much. Too many questions remained. Would this be their last goodbye? Was their love for each other something too beautiful to be lost? Or was it something God wanted Betty to sacrifice to her larger goal of following Him? Betty did not know, and she realized that was the way it was going to have to be until further notice from Jim.
Red-eyed and exhausted, Betty disembarked the train in Norman, Oklahoma. A pickup truck was waiting at the station to take her to the University of Oklahoma, where she would stay for the summer.
The next morning classes began, and Betty recognized a handful of students from Wheaton College among the other students. Betty was excited to be a part of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, or SIL, as everyone called it. She was there to learn cutting-edge linguistic techniques that would enable her to go to a tribal group, learn all there was to know about their language—from speaking it to how the grammar and syntax held together—and then begin translating portions of Scripture into that language. Cameron Townsend and L. L. Legters had started the Summer Institute of Linguistics in 1934. L. L. Legters had stayed at the Howard house on various occasions, and Betty fondly remembered him.
SIL estimated that there were at least a thousand unwritten languages in the world, but as Betty soon learned, that number was increasing almost daily as new languages were discovered. The whole purpose of SIL was to train linguists who could write down these languages so that Bible translation could begin. Betty listened carefully to lectures about the structure of the languages and how to go about the initial task of learning them. But the program was not just classroom bound. The participants in the institute had fieldwork to do. Six or seven of the students were assigned to an Indian, referred to as an informant, who spoke a language that the students did not know. It was the students’ job to learn the language, write it down, and then translate something into that language. The program was challenging for Betty but also fulfilling as she learned important principles of linguistics—principles she hoped to one day put to work in Africa.
In the evening the students had time off, and during this time Betty often chose to take walks alone. The huge football stadium was one of her favorite destinations. She would climb up to the top row of bleachers, often just in time to catch a spectacular sunset. Most of the time, however, it was not the sunset but thoughts of Jim Elliot that captured her attention. Jim invaded all aspects of her life. When she tried to pray, she ended up praying for Jim; when she studied morphology or syntax or phonetics, her mind was cast back to the study hall at Wheaton College with her and Jim sitting elbow to elbow learning Greek.
Each day Betty secretly hoped for some sign from Jim—a letter, a postcard, even a phone call—but none ever came. She wrote in her journal, “Silence begins to drag on my soul. It is a kind of waiting which hears no voice, no footstep, sees no sign. I feel that I could wait ten years, if it were not for this waiting, this silence.”
The eleven-week Summer Institute of Linguistics came to an end, but Betty decided to continue with her linguistic studies. She enrolled in the Prairie Bible Institute in Alberta, Canada, the same institution her brother Phil had attended for high school.
Even so, Betty was shocked when she saw the place. It had an old wooden farmhouse, some outbuildings, and a few newer buildings, low-slung and dark. It was more barren and remote than Phil had described. She hated to think how sparse the landscape would be in winter under three feet of snow.
Betty was used to the strictures of boarding school and the social rules at Wheaton College, but nothing compared to the discipline required to stay at the Prairie Bible Institute. On the day she arrived, Betty was handed a thirty-two-page rule book. “Learn them all,” the admissions officer told her. “We expect all sixteen hundred students to be compliant with them tomorrow morning.”
As soon as Betty was shown her dorm room, she unpacked her few belongings and flipped open the rule book. There were rules for everything: the sleeves on girls’ dresses and blouses had to extend at least three inches below the elbow, and skirt hems were to be no more than an inch off the floor when kneeling. Girls were to have long hair or, if they had just enrolled, commit themselves to growing their hair long. All meal and chapel times were to be strictly adhered to.
The book had a whole section titled “Water Usage.” The school was seven miles from the nearest water supply, and all of the water had to be trucked in. There was a central water spigot, and at certain times a student could collect a bucket of water for his or her room. A second bucket was to be used for the collection of used water, which had another complicated set of instructions as to how and where it was to be disposed of.
As Betty read through all the rules relating to “boys and girls,” she could hardly believe what she was reading. Students were allowed to walk off campus and onto the prairie on Sunday afternoons, but when they did, girls were to head north while the boys went south. Outside of school hours, boys and girls were forbidden to talk to each other.
At twenty-one years of age, Betty felt these rules were excessive. Even at Hampden DuBose Academy in Orlando, boys and girls worked side by side, and at Wheaton College she and Jim had studied together. But no such activities would be tolerated at the Prairie Bible Institute. However, Betty soon decided that it didn’t really matter whether she was forbidden to talk to boys. The only boy she wanted to talk to was Jim Elliot, and he wasn’t there.
Betty settled into life and study at the Prairie Bible Institute and tried to live by all of the rules, though she was lonely and homesick much of the time. She prayed for help, and it came in the form of a small, plump Scottish woman who knocked on Betty’s door one Saturday morning. “Are you Betty Howard?” the woman asked.
“Yes,” Betty said.
“Well, then, Betty dear,” the woman said in a strong Scottish brogue, “you don’t know me, but I have been praying for you since you got here. I thought perhaps it was time we got to know each other. Would you care to come down to my apartment? I’m about to make a pot of tea.”
Betty followed the woman—who said her name was Mrs. Cunningham—to her basement apartment, where she was welcomed into a tiny living room.
“Now you just sit down right there, lass,” Mrs. Cunningham said, pointing to a well-worn tapestry chair, “and I’ll bring tea and scones. You do like scones and jam, don’t you?”
Betty smiled and nodded. It felt good to be in a cozy home.
As she sipped the tea that was poured for her from a steaming teapot, Betty found herself pouring her heart out to Mrs. Cunningham. She told her about how she loved Jim Elliot and he loved her, but that they were putting God first and did not even know whether they were supposed to be on the mission field together or to be living single lives. Betty confided that she felt called to mission work in Africa, while Jim seemed certain that he would be going to South America.
Mrs. Cunningham nodded, and Betty could see compassion in the woman’s bright blue eyes.
“It seems to me that we need prayer,” Mrs. Cunningham said when Betty had finished. “Let’s go to the Lord.” With that she opened her Bible and read Romans 15, verse 13: “‘May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing.’ That’s what’s important, Betty,” she said, her eyes shining. “You can have peace anytime, anywhere, dear, if you allow God to fill you with the joy of believing in Him and the immense wonder of being His child. Let’s pray.”
The two women sat in silence a minute or so, and then Mrs. Cunningham prayed. Betty left the apartment feeling unburdened, buoyed with the knowledge that she had a prayer partner and a friend.
Only days later Betty heard a set of footsteps outside her door. It was the mail delivery. The footsteps stopped, and she heard the sound of a letter being slipped under the door. Betty’s heart skipped a beat. Was it a letter from Jim Elliot at last? Betty jumped up to get the letter. Sure enough, there was an envelope with Jim’s distinctive handwriting on it. Her hands shook as she picked up the envelope, tore it open, and began to read:
Beloved,
…I wish I had a “feel-o-meter” to transcribe what has been going on inside for the last few days. It began with that word I think I spoke to you of when we were together in the chapel that last morning; trembling.
Betty read on. Jim wrote how he trembled at the thought that he had made her life more difficult by declaring his love for her, trembled at the thought that he might have made it more difficult to understand what God’s will was for her, and trembled at the thought that he might find himself loving her more than he loved God and willing to compromise God’s work for his own desires.
