He Is No Fool

In the middle of the twentieth century there was a young American who wrote a sentence that would outlive him by a hundred years. His name was Jim Elliot. He was a athlete and a scholar, a man with sharp wit and stronger faith, and from his student days he had one driving question. Not how to be safe, but how to spend his life well. He filled his journals with that hunger. And one day, in a quiet line that he never meant for fame, he wrote words that the church has not stopped repeating since. He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.

Now hold that sentence, because the man who wrote it meant to live it.

In the early 1950s Jim Elliot went to Ecuador. He had come to believe that the gospel was for every people, including those the wider world had barely touched. He learned languages. He laboured among the Quichua. And his heart turned toward a people then called the Auca, the Waodani, a community deep in the rainforest who had killed strangers who came near. Elliot and four other young missionaries dreamed of reaching them. They were Nate Saint the pilot, Ed McCully, Roger Youderian, and Pete Fleming. They planned carefully. They dropped gifts from a small plane, week after week. They learned a few words. And the gifts came back up to them, a sign, they hoped, of welcome.

In January 1956 they landed on a sandbar on the Curaray river. They called it Palm Beach. For a few days there was contact, even friendliness. They waited, full of hope, for the moment they had prayed years to see.

Then, on the eighth of January, the hope ran out. A group of Waodani men came to the sandbar, and the five missionaries were speared and killed. Jim Elliot was twenty eight years old. The men carried weapons of their own and, by most accounts, had agreed they would not use them to take a life to save their own. The plane sat empty. The bodies were found in the river days later. Five wives became widows. Several small children, including Jim's daughter Valerie, lost their fathers.

That is the grief that the famous sentence sits inside. It was not a romance of dying young. It was a young man who had counted the cost long before the cost came due, and had decided, on paper, in private, what he would let go of and what he would hold.

Pull back now, and see what this life came to mean. The story did not end on the sandbar. Jim's widow, Elisabeth Elliot, and Nate Saint's sister Rachel went back to the very people who had killed their family. They lived among the Waodani. They learned the language. And in time many of those same men came to faith in Christ, including some who had been there that day. It was not a tidy triumph and it should not be told as one. There are honest questions still asked about the risks the men took and the choices they made. The history is real, and so are the people in it, who were never scenery for a hero.

But the witness endures. Jim Elliot held his comforts and his safety with an open hand because he was sure of what could not be taken from him. He was not careless with his life. He was certain about its owner. And the sentence he scribbled as a young man still presses the same quiet question into every reader who finds it: what are you clutching that you cannot keep, and what are you refusing that you cannot lose? He is no fool, he wrote. And then, with everything he had, he tried to prove it true.