September 2019
If you have young children then probably you will have spent
the summer holidays encouraging them to have a great time – but wanting them to
stay safe. What do you make, then, of a
mother who deliberately took her 3-year-old daughter into the Amazon rainforest
to live among a fierce tribal people who had already killed her husband and
four others?
This summer I had the privilege of meeting that daughter,
Val Shephard. She is now in her 60s and
we had invited her to be a speaker at the families’ camp that Julie and I
organise each year. Her father, Jim
Elliot, had been attempting to bring the good news about Jesus Christ to the Waorani
tribe in Ecuador when, in January 1956, he and his four friends were brutally
speared to death. Val has spoken about
her father’s death in a four minute BBC programme which you can find here: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04tl78m
Two years after her father’s death two women from the Waorani
came and asked Val’s mother, Elisabeth Elliot, to come to the tribe and tell
them about God. And so 3-year-old Val
found herself riding in a back-pack chair as her mother and a sister of another
of the murdered men trekked into the rainforest to meet with and to live among
the Waorani tribe. Val still vividly
remembers those years in the jungle as she saw her mother sharing the love of
Christ with these isolated people. She would
have liked to have known her father but she is so grateful for her parents’
example of loving self-sacrifice and costly devotion to Jesus Christ.
Her father kept a diary and is known around the world as the
author of these words: “He is no fool
who gives what he cannot keep, to gain what he cannot lose.” Jim Elliot was re-phrasing what Jesus himself
had said, “For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses
his life for me will save it” (Luke 9:24).
If we make safety our number one priority we will never be truly safe,
but if we are willing to live wholeheartedly for Jesus Christ and give our
lives to his service then we receive as a gift from him life in all its
fulness, a gift that is eternally secure.
Sincerely
Graham Burrows
