RFTG Editor Zach Kendrick was given the opportunity to ask Lucy S. R. Austen a few questions about her new book Elisabeth Elliott: A Life (Crossway, 2023). What follows are the author’s responses to questions submitted by the editor.
Lucy S. R. Austen is a writer, editor, and teacher who has spent over a decade studying source materials on Elisabeth Elliot. She has served on the editorial staff of the Spring Hill Review, contributed to various publications, and developed two high school English textbooks on prominent Christian authors. S. R. Austen lives in the beautiful Pacific Northwest with her husband and children.
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For our readers who may not be familiar with your work, can you share a little about what you’ve written in the past? Have you written biography before or is this your first bio-project?
Sure! I’ve worked as a poetry editor and then general editor for a print-only literary journal, and as a freelance editor and writer. Some of my shorter writing is linked on my website at LucySRAusten.com. I’ve also worked as a high-school English instructor for a homeschool resource company and published two high-school English textbooks teaching composition through the study of literature. For those books I wrote sixteen author mini-biographies, but they largely relied on existing published biographies for information, so Elisabeth Elliot: A Life is my first biography with this level of research behind it.
A biography of this magnitude is not something that a biographer decides to write on a whim. How long has this project been in the works?
I started working on this book in 2012, so it was over a decade from “in process” to “in print.”
Was there one thing (or maybe a few) that compelled you to write a biography of Elisabeth Elliot?
Before starting on this project, I knew that Elliot had been a missionary in Ecuador, and was a writer. In 2009, as I was working on a textbook, I knew I wanted to include her novel, No Graven Image (which I recommend to everyone!) in the texts that students would read. But when I tried to find biographies of Elliot so that I could learn more about her in order to write her mini-biography, I was startled to find that there were no full-length biographies in existence.
I ended up having to go directly to source material to write about her, and I was intrigued by what I found. She didn’t fit neatly into any of the pre-existing boxes in my mind. The more I dug, the more I realized that Elliot’s life has been widely known but not deeply known. Her involvement in the missionary effort to contact the Waorani is known because of her book Through Gates of Splendor, and her role as a writer and speaker in 20th Century American evangelicalism are familiar to many, but the rest of her story has been less well known, or even unavailable. So Elisabeth Elliot: A Life grew out of that combination of my own growing interest in her and knowing that there was a gap in the scholarship on her life and teaching.
It comes across in the book that Elliott was quite a feisty and strong-willed person. Do you think that her temperament was an asset or hindrance (maybe even both) throughout her life?
I think you’re right, that it was both. Her strength and her zeal helped sustain her both through crisis times and through the long, hard, daily slog in things that were less visible to others but still very difficult to live through—and sometimes those same attributes seem to have contributed to getting her into difficulties in the first place. But I think that’s the case for all of us. Every character trait is like a coin with two sides, and gives us particular strengths and makes us more liable to certain weaknesses.
In the book you share that Elliott was not afraid of hard work, even sometimes to the point of over-stretching herself. What can we learn from the example of her work ethic?
It’s helpful for me in thinking about this question to differentiate between kinds of being overstretched. I think we can be overstretched by things that can legitimately be let go. Sometimes some tasks should be delegated or just plain left undone. And we can be overstretched by things where it would be wrong to back out. A nice clear-cut example of a responsibility that maxes us out but can’t be let go is feeding a new baby in the middle of the night, but of course in a lot of cases the line between the two is harder to discern, and will look different for different people or at different times in our lives.
So as we consider Elliot’s life, we can follow her example in just keeping on putting one foot in front of the other in those times when being overstretched came from circumstances outside her control. And at the same time we can be aware that because of cultural and theological influences and personality traits, Elliot may not have always made the right call about her workload, and we don’t have to be as busy as she was in order to be doing things right.
To follow up on the previous question, Elliott was not afraid to do the hard work of ministry, even doing mission work in rural Canada. What can young people today learn from this example?
So in this sense, I would say that Elliot was afraid. The intellectual tasks of language work, or the physical challenges of hauling water or grueling travel on foot through mountainous forests, for example, don’t really seem to have phased her, but what she would have called “personal work”—talking to people one-on-one about faith or about Jesus—was hard for her and she could be afraid of it. In the book you can see her nerving herself up to accept the job running Sunday schools in rural Canada because she thinks it’s what she should do, but worrying that she’s not not cut out for it because of all the personal contacts, and once she’s in it, worrying that she’s not doing an adequate job. You can see the same fears at different points throughout her life. But she prayed and listened for a long time about accepting those tasks, she felt called by God to her work, and although she knew she had weaknesses to work around, she also had strengths that she could play to. So I think it’s not that she wasn’t afraid, but that she didn’t see being afraid or hard work as things that in and of themselves should stop her from doing the work that was given to her to do, and I think that’s the takeaway.
Elliot is most known for her mission work among the Waodani people. Yet she only spent a relatively short part of her life on the mission field. Where would you say she made the greatest impact?
I think this is a question that’s impossible to answer, about Elliot or about any of us, until the Lord returns. And I’m not just saying that to get out of answering the question! We can try to quantify and qualify things: We can say, Elliot saw her work on the mission field as a series of failures and losses, but look at the reach she was able to have as a writer and speaker after she returned to the US. Or, the initial contact attempt in Ecuador ended in death but now there are Waorani Christians and that’s a result greater than anything else we might value.
But the human calculus is always more complicated than that. Elliot helped many people through her writing and speaking, but she also hurt some people very badly. Her medical work in Ecuador saved lives but wrote a piece for Eternity magazine in 1964 about a situation in which she believed that she had also caused a death that wouldn’t have occurred if she hadn’t been there. When each life is irreproducible and priceless I don’t know how to begin to decide how all of these things balance out.
In her book, These Strange Ashes, which is about her early experiences as a missionary, Elliot says that she can’t evaluate her time as a missionary in terms of its effect on others—that it’s up to the people she came into contact with to define that, and ultimately, up to God. Quoting Thomas Carlyle, she says, “‘The actual True is the sum of all these [past and present, time and place, human nature itself],’—but the adding up must be left until later. We know in part. We see through a glass darkly. But it is worth our looking.” So I think it’s well worth considering the influence of Elliot’s life and work, but that human beings are just too small to correctly judge all the effects of our actions even in our own lifetimes, let alone in the ripples that spread out across time and space. God knows.
How do you think that Elisabeth Elliot should be remembered in future generations?
This is such a hard question to answer because it’s hard to boil it down into few enough words to fit here. Flannery O’Connor told a friend that “You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story,” and that’s a bit how I feel about Elisabeth Elliot’s life—it took ~600 pages to say how I think she should be remembered!
But the best stab I can take at a short answer is this: I would love for her to be remembered as a regular person with strengths and weaknesses who devoted her whole life, at great personal cost, to trying to know God. This meant that she changed course through the years, and that she didn’t always get things right, but she loved Jesus with everything she had.
Elliot not only lost her first husband Jim on the mission field, she then lost her second husband Addison Leitch to cancer. How do you think these two tragedies made her the woman she was later in life?
When she was a teen, Elliot appears to have responded to the suffering she saw around her with a tendency toward a glib assurance that ‘God has a perfect plan’ and things would work out for the best. Even in the first months after Jim’s death she seems in some ways to have been operating out of this kind of framework and trying to live up to a kind of triumphal idea of a suffering Christian. But it does seem that gradually, over time, her own suffering helped make her more tender to the sufferings of others, and that she was able to share comfort with others out of her own grief in ways she hadn’t been able to when she was younger.
Some of our readers may not know that Elisabeth Elliot was a professor at Gordon-Conwell and made a huge impact on the late Tim Keller and his wife Kathy. How do you see her legacy living on in the lives of those she impacted as a professor?
The things the Kellers gleaned from her that changed them have certainly touched large numbers of people. She also taught the Reverend VaCountess Johnson, and many others whose work has touched a lot of lives. I’m sure different students took away different highlights from her teaching. I think Elliot and Tim Keller shared a love of stories and their power to communicate truth and show us reality, and I know the Reverend Johnson appreciated Elliot’s emphasis on conveying principles or beliefs in the way one behaves, and on waiting patiently on God in difficult situations.
What can a young person considering mission work draw from the life of Elisabeth Elliott that can be most useful on the mission field?
For a better answer to this question than I can give here, I would recommend a course of reading. Elliot was best known for Through Gates of Splendor, but her perspective changed so much after that book was published that I’d certainly recommend not only her biography (ha!) but her less well-known books related to missions: The Savage My Kinsman and These Strange Ashes, and most of all her novel No Graven Image. To round off the list, I also highly recommend Kathryn T. Long’s 2019 book God in the Rainforest, which helps bring Elliot’s missionary story up to the present day.
But two things have really stood out to me in learning more about her missionary work. First, the more closely Elliot lived with the people to whom she had come as a missionary, the more she was able to see value and strengths in their culture, and ways in which her own culture of origin was lacking. She began to see more complexity and shades of gray in the world and in the Bible than she had seen as she was growing up, and she began to see herself not only as having something to share but also as having much to learn. And I suspect that posture, which I think we could call humility, is helpful in any line of work but perhaps especially important in cross-cultural work.
And second, I’ve really been struck by Elliot’s ability—after ordering her entire life around foreign missions, committing herself to Ecuador as her home for the rest of her life, losing her husband on the mission field, having her memories of their life together bound up in the house and furniture he had built for her there, spending her prime years of adulthood in missionary work—to decide that God was calling her to other things, and to walk away. She wrote about it in her journal as a death to who she had been before, but she did it. I suspect she was able to do it because she managed (perhaps imperfectly, but still she managed) to keep knowing God as her end goal rather than being a missionary. The Apostle Paul writes in his first letter to Timothy that “the goal of our instruction is love,” and I think for every Christian a repeated reorienting toward that end goal can be life-saving when things don’t go according to plan.
Do you have any future books in progress currently?
Right now I’m catching my breath, doing some shorter writing, and working on tidying up some of my research materials to donate to the Billy Graham Center Archives at Wheaton College to be available to other scholars. We’ll see what comes after that!
Editor’s Note: RFTG would like to thank the author for generously taking the time to provide thoughtful answers to these questions.
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