Elisabeth Elliot: Wife of Jim Elliot

Elisabeth Elliot: Wife of Jim Elliot
by Kendall Paige

Elisabeth Howard Elliot was born December 21, 1926 in Belgium. She was born to missionary parents and had four brothers and one sister. Her brothers Thomas Howard and David M. Howard came to become authors. Elisabeth and her family moved to Pennsylvania when she was a few months old. She lived in Franconia, New Hampshire, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Moorestown Township, New Jersey. She studied Koine Greek at Wheaton College, where she met her first husband, Jim Elliot. Prior to their marriage, Elisabeth took a post-graduate year of specialized studies at Prairie Bible Institute in Alberta, Canada, where a campus prayer chapel is named in her honor. Jim and Elisabeth were married on October 8, 1953 in the city of Quito, Ecuador. Their daughter, Valerie was born two years later in 1955. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ElisabethElliot)

In 1956, Jim Elliot and four other missionares were traveling to Ecuador to try to make contact with a tribe known as the Auca (now known as Huaorani. Valerie, her daughter, was 10 months old when her husband was killed. In October of 1958, Elisabeth went to live with the Huaorani with three-year-old Valerie and Rachel Saint. Rachel was the sister of Nate Saint, one of the four missionaries that Jim was with when he died. The Auca/Huaorani gave Elisabeth the tribal name Gikari, Huao for "Woodpecker." She later returned to the Quichua and worked with them until 1963, when she and Valerie returned to the US where they moved to Franconia, New Hampshire.

In 1969, Elisabeth married Addison Leitch, Professor of Theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. Leitch died in 1973. In 1977, she married Lars Gren, a seminary student who had been boarding at her house. Elisabeth and Lars worked and traveled together. In the mid-1970s she served as one of the stylistic consultants for the committee of the New International Version of the Bible. She appears on the NIV's list of contributors. (www.elisabethelliot.org)

From 1988-2001 Elisabeth could be heard on a daily radio program, Gateway to Joy, produced by the Good News Broadcasting Association of Lincoln, Nebraska. She almost always opened the program with the phrase, "'You are loved with an everlasting love'and underneath are the everlasting arms.” She says that this saying is from the Bible. “This is your friend, Elisabeth Elliot .” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisabeth_Elliot) In the past few years, Elisabeth and her current husband have stopped traveling but continue to keep in touch with the public through mail and their website.

Today, she lives north of Boston, Massachusetts, with her husband. Her daughter, Valerie, and her husband, Walter, and their eight children live in Simpsonville, SC. She is one of the few people who changed the way people looked at Christianity and taught tribes in the 1950s to look through the ways of God. She picked up where her husband and the four missionaries left off. Even through she is now retired, she still does her work from her home and she still recites the lord. She really does make a difference.