Jim Elliot

Jim Elliot was a wrestler and a Greek student at Wheaton College who decided while still a student that he would spend his life where the gospel had never been. He reached Ecuador in 1952 and married Elisabeth Howard the next year. With four other young men he began making contact with the Waorani, a people so feared by their neighbors that outsiders called them killers, lowering gifts to them from a small plane in a bucket on a line and shouting friendly phrases they had learned.

In January 1956 the five landed on a sandbar in the Curaray River. On January 8 a group of Waorani men speared all five to death. Elisabeth Elliot and Rachel Saint, sister of the pilot, later went to live among the same people; some of the men who did the killing became believers and helped carry the message onward. Elliot was twenty-eight. He had written at twenty-two: he is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.