What Can One Person Do?
page 1 of 5by Elisabeth Elliot
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"Witnessing conquers the world. But it doesn't exempt you from suffering."
Before most of you were born I was living in a small thatch-roofed house in a small jungle clearing on a small river called the Tiwaenu in the small country of Ecuador. An ordinary day would begin anywhere from three o'clock till five or so in the morning. The low crooning of an Auca song would often fit into my dreams for a while before I wakened and then, gradually, I would come to, and hear the Indians, still in their hammocks in the houses around the clearing, singing their strange two or at most three-note songs: "Waenoni baronki inunae ..."
I have counted as many as seventy repetitions of verse one, but then, before I would lose my mind, they would go on to verse two: "MiH baronanai aemumae ..."
While they were singing that verse sixty or seventy times I would hear the pat-pat of feather fans as the women fanned the fires and then the soft cracking sound as they tapped manioc with a stick. This was a starchy tuber they cultivated, the principal food of Amazonian people. They peeled and split it and steamed it in big clay pots with leaves for lids. They would push the glowing log-tips together, set the pots on top, and I would hear the pfff-pfff as they blew on the fire. Roosters would crow, the fanning and the songs would go on, and as dawn broke behind the tall trees I would give up pretending to be asleep. I'd open my eyes to see the two teen-age boys who slept in the house next door. Our houses had no walls, and they had built a platform from which they could watch what went on in our house and keep everybody informed. The first announcement of the day would be "Baru! Nani omaemunamba!" which means "She's awake!"
I was a freak to these people. They were the Auca Indians of the Ecuadorian rain forest, a people so isolated that most of them had never laid eyes on anybody they didn't know, so primitive they still made fire with two sticks. They wore no clothes at all, only a piece of cotton string around the hips. When I asked what the string was for they looked at me horrified. "Well, you certainly wouldn't expect us to go around naked, would you?"
They had a notion from way back - nobody could tell me where they got it - that everybody in the world who wasn't an Auca was a cannibal; so when they met up with strangers, they usually dispatched them as quickly as possible with eight-foot wooden spears in order to avoid ending up in the stranger's cooking pot.
One day, two years before I lived there, the Aucas had found five strange white men on a little strip of sand on the Curaray River, men who had been dropping gifts to them from a yellow airplane for several months. The Indians called the plane ibu meaning "bumblebee" because the sound it made was almost identical. They had argued among themselves for a long time about whether these men might be as friendly as they appeared to be, shouting and gesticulating from the plane, or whether they were just masters of treachery and deception. They couldn't possibly know that they were missionaries bent only on giving them some very good news.
When they finally found themselves face to face on the sandstrip, the Indians hesitated, uncertain as to what to do. At least, the oldest of the six men, a man whom I later got to know as Gikita, said, "Well, I brought my spear - butu Wati! taenumu waeninani yaeae - I'm going to spear them to death." With that he lunged across the river that separated them and sank his weapon into the back of one of the missionaries. A long fight ensued, but ended with all five of the Americans dead.
That's a twentieth-century story. Maybe it seems unusual in the twentieth century, maybe it seems strange that the God whom the five served should allow them to be defeated by a handful of utterly misled, totally ignorant Indians to whom spearing was all in a day's work. But in Christian history the story is neither unusual nor strange, for the history of Christianity is a story of witnesses - men and women who have stood up and testified to what they know about God. Sometimes they've done it in words and sometimes in deeds.
There's a long list of such people in Hebrews, chapter 11: Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Samuel and the prophets - even a harlot named Rahab. There were those not named who conquered kingdoms, shut the mouths of lions, quenched the furious blaze of fire and escaped from death. They were the successful ones - the winners, you'd say. But do you remember the list at the end of the chapter? You never saw any pictures of them in your Sunday school papers. They were the ones who were tortured, mocked, flogged, chained or stoned to death. There were some, the story says, who were sawn in two. They are in the same list, remember, right in there with the winners. We could add the names of the five missionaries in Ecuador - Jim Elliot and his friends, Pete, Nate, Roj and Ed. Some people call them martyrs. You know what the Bible calls them? Witnesses. I'm sure there are some Greek students in the audience this morning who know it's the same word. The word for witness is marturia. So in God's categories it really doesn't matter whether, humanly speaking, you win or lose, whether you're a victim or a victor. You're a witness.
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