Yesterday i saw this
stamp Ecuador released remembering the five missionaries. Was so encouraged to
see this. So i just went and read the story once again. it really encouraged
& inspired me...just read and get encouraged.
Scores of remarkable missionary stories in this century have
been full of drama. We wonder, while so many have laid down their lives in
China, Russia, the Congo and elsewhere, how is it that the muffled footsteps by
that stretch of sand on the Curaray River still reverberate around us. It
happened on the eastern side of the rugged Andes in Ecuador, in the expansive
rain forest beyond. There, on January 8, 1956, the most publicized missionary
massacre of this century occurred.
Nate Saint, jungle pilot, called that Sunday over the
plane’s radio, “We are hoping for visitors at about 2:30. I’ll call you again
at 4:35.” When his punctured body was pulled from the river, his wrist watch
read 3:12.
Missionaries endured staggering hardship in those rain
forests. Sometimes they could not fly and, in order to reach isolated groups,
had to travel over land by foot. They hazarded unpredictable rivers by canoe to
reach poorly mapped territories where fear-ridden tribal peoples lived. Knowing
what we know, our surprise is not that so many died, but that so many other
missionaries have survived.
In 1944, five missionaries working with New Tribes Missions
in Bolivia were killed trying to reach the fierce Ayores. The five were
probably murdered weeks before the search party even left to look for them.
Their bodies were never found, and the entire event received little notice by
the world press. After all, this news item was buried beneath the happenings of
World War II. Today, if someone mentions the five intrepid missionary martyrs
to the jungles of South America, few recall the names of Cecil and Bob Dye,
Dave Bacon, George Hosbach or Eldon Hunter.
Naturally speaking, we see several reasons why the deaths of
Jim Elliot, Peter Fleming, Ed McCully, Nate Saint, and Roger Youderian created
such a sensation. There was a lull in world news at that moment. The mystique
of the jungle savage excited curiosity. Careful records were available in the
journals of the missionaries. The public was informed in a blow-by-blow manner
as the facts of the massacre came to light. And here were five striking young
men, with intelligent wives and winsome children. These young men looked like
fellows we might meet in our own neighborhoods. What were they doing there?
Spiritually speaking, we also see reasons why God was
pleased to speak so clearly in that event on January 8, Here is a story that
inspires us more the more we know of it. The martyrs all were raised with the
gospel from youth. Each was considered a role model.
Jim Elliot was from Portland, Oregon. At Wheaton College, he
was president of the Student Foreign Missions Fellowship. A persuasive
communicator, he wrote in college: “O God, save me from a life of barrenness,
following a formal pattern of ethics, and give instead that vital contact of
soul with Thy divine life that fruit may be produced, and Life-abundant
living-may be known again as the final proof for Christ’s message and work.” He
married Elisabeth Howard from a prominent Christian publishing family in
Philadelphia. At the time of the murder, the Elliots had an infant daughter.
”’He makes His ministers a flame of fire.’ Am I ignitable?”
he wrote. “God deliver me from the dread asbestos of ‘other things.’ Saturate
me with the oil of the Spirit that I may be aflame. But a flame is transient,
often short-lived. Canst thou bear this, my soulshort life? In me there dwells
the Spirit of the Great Short-Lived, whose zeal for God’s house consumed Him.”
(Splendor, p. 18; journal entry summer of ‘47).
Peter Fleming was from Seattle, Washington. At 27, he was a
year younger than Jim Elliot. Pete had recently received his M.A. in
literature. He was married to his childhood sweetheart, Olive.
Peter wrote: “[The Lord] has been leading my meditation to
the stringent statements of Christ regarding discipleship specially those words
of Christ to His disciples before He sent them out…’He that findeth his life
shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for My sake shall find it.’ I have
been directed to these and similar passages again and again. I should like to
put these truths to the utmost test … Seemingly God delights in many instances
to place men in situations which magnify their weaknesses for the simple
delight of showing Himself strong to all observers” (Liefeld, p. 48, Aug., ‘51
to Jim Elliot.)
Ed McCully, from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was president of his
senior class at Wheaton. He won the National Hearst Oratorical Contest in San
Francisco in 1949 and went on to Marquette University Law School. He and his
wife, Marilou, had two sons and were expecting a third. “I have one desire
now-to live a life of reckless abandon for the Lord, putting all my energy and
strength into it,” Ed wrote in a letter to Jim Elliot immediately after leaving
law school on September 22,1950 (Splendor, pp. 5051).
Roger Youderian came off a Montana ranch. An airborn ranger
who was at the battle of the Bulge, he later went to Northwestern Schools in
Minneapolis, where he met his wife, Barbara. They joined the Gospel Missionary
Union and were evangelizing the headhunting Jivaros when the Elliots, Flemings,
and McCullys arrived.
Nate Saint had flown missionaries in and out of the
Ecuadorean jungle since 1948 for Missionary Aviation Fellowship. Builder,
inventor, and skilled pilot, Nate had devised a ingeniously simple back up fuel
system for single-engine planes. Nate was married to a nurse, Marj, whom he had
met in the service. They had three children.
In a message broadcast over HCJB in Quito, Nate said,
“During the last war we were taught to recognize that, in order to obtain our
objective, we had to be willing to be expendable … Yet, when the Lord Jesus
asks us to pay the price for world evangelization, we often answer … It costs
too much … God didn’t hold back His only Son…” (Splendor, p. 176: Dec. 18, in
Nate’s journals on Operation:Auca.)
The five couples did not come to Ecuador planning on
reaching the Waorani tribe. But in Ecuador they heard about these Indians
referred to as “Aucas” meaning savages. They had never been subjugated by
soldiers or won over by missionaries.
The missionaries often prayed and plotted about, how this
dreaded tribe could be reached. As they witnessed a series of events opening
the way, the five united their hearts to reach the Waorani. To read the
missionaries’ own account, we are compelled to agree with Nate Saint that “It's
the Lord’s Time.”
All volunteered. They planned carefully. All were aware of
the danger. As Jim Elliot said to his Betty: “If that’s the way God wants it to
be, I’m ready to die for the salvation of the Aucas.”
After a series of long-distance contacts, the next step was
to find a landing place close to the Waorani village. On the Curaray River they
found a landing site on a sand bar. They named it “Palm Beach.” On Tuesday,
January 3, a final prayer meeting was held at Arajuno, then the intrepid
couples sang Edith Gilling Cherry’s hymn to the tune Finlandia:
We rest on Thee, our Shield and our Defender,
Thine is the battle, Thine shall be the praise;
When passing through the gates of pearly splendor,
Victors, we rest with Thee through endless days.
On Friday, they had a visit from three Waorani. On Sunday,
Nate flew his plane over the area and spied a group of men walking toward the
beach. He radioed Marj. “A commission of ten is coming. Pray for us. This is
the day!” The next communication was scheduled for 4:30 PM. It would never
come.
As newspaper headlines read, Five Missionaries Missing in
Ecuador, a rescue party was moving overland. Missionary pilot Johnny Keenan
flew over Palm Beach and saw a body; on a second pass, he spied a second one in
the river.
By Thursday, two US Navy fliers went in with a helicopter.
They found four bodies in the river, speared and hacked by machetes. Jim, Nate,
Peter, and Roger were identified. It was speculated that the first body seen
from the air was Ed McCully’s and that it had been carried away in the river’s
current.
The January 23 Newsweek magazine ran the news. But it was
Life photographer Cornell Capa who was at Palm Beach via helicopter when the
last body was being lowered into the grave. His sensitive photography and the
account of the drama published in Life made this the missionary story of the
century. Readers Digest also published the story in 1956.
By Friday, Jan. 13, the Air Force flew the widows over the
common grave. As Olive Fleming looked down to see the scar of white sand, 2
Corinthians 5:1 sounded in her mind: “For we know that if our earthly house of
this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made
with hands, eternal in the heavens.”
Some church leaders responded to the massacre as did Judas
when the costly perfume was poured on the Lord Jesus, saying, “Why this waste.”
To such we can only say that God’s ways are not our ways (Isaiah 55:8-9). The
foolishness of God is wiser than men (1 Corinthians 1:25). In following months,
mission boards were deluged with offers to “take the place” of the martyrs.
Eternity magazine counted six hundred missionaries who credit the martyrdom as
influencing them to go overseas.
The work with the Waoranis was only beginning. The girl, Dayuma,
an escapee from Waorani territory who helped Rachel Saint learn Waorani, had
entrusted herself to the Lord Jesus Christ. To her amazed relatives she
returned to their village safe. They assumed she had been cannibalized by the
strangers. She explained that the missionaries had come peaceably. She also had
an object lesson to help them understand how the Lamb of God was led to
slaughter as a sacrifice for sin. “Just as you killed the foreigners on the
beach, Jesus was killed for you.”
In the fall of 1958 Rachel Saint and Betty Elliot and her
toddler, Valerie, hung their hammocks among the Waorani. While Valerie played
with the children of her father’s murderers, Rachel and Betty became acquainted
with the murderers themselves: Gikita, Kimo, Nimonga, Dyuwi, Minkayi, and Tona.
Nine years later, the first copies of the Gospel of Mark in
Waorani were dedicated at “God’s Speaking House.” Kimo prayed, “Father God, You
are alive. This is Your day and all of us have come to worship You. They
brought us copies of Your Carving, enough for everybody. We accept it, saying,
‘This is the truth.’ We want all of your carving.”
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