Elisabeth Elliot - Passion and Purity: Learning to Bring Your Love Life Under Christs Control

This book made available by the Internet Archive.

Introduction

On the stack of mail awaiting my return home lay a note saying Lars Gren had called and would I please return the call.

Now, Lars is one of my favorite people, married to another favorite, Elisabeth Elliot. So I called. Elisabeth answered, surprised that Lars had called me, not knowing what it was about.

"Are you working on another book?" I asked Elisabeth. She replied that she just finished one, Passion and Purity.

I felt it couldn't be more timely, more on target, and told her I was looking forward to reading it.

When Lars called backI chuckled to learn, without saying anything to Elisabethhe wondered if I would be willing to read the manuscript, saying he would understand if I was too busy. When you're that interested in a subject, you feel privileged to get a preview, and I told Lars as much.

Today the manuscript came and I sat down to glance through it.

From the very first it gripped my attention. This wasn't what I expected. Oh, I knew whatever Elisabeth had written would be worth reading and readable, but this is a book about bringing one's love life under the authority and Lord

Introduction

ship of Jesus Christ. Elisabeth has made it warmly personal, supporting her theme from memories, journals, and old love letters to Jim Elliot. She writes with poignancy and restraint. Interspersed through it are rich, right words from the Bible, beautiful old hymns, quotations from favorite authorseach so appropriate because they had met a living need. I didn't put it down until I had finished it.

I thought of the confusion of today's young people (and older, alike), Christians as well as non-Christians, and wished everyone could share in Elisabeth and Jim Elliot's love storya successful (though brief) "orbit into space," because they followed God's guidelines explicitly. "The best way to show up a crooked stick," someone has said, "is to lay a straight one beside it."

So amid today's too-crooked thinking, Elisabeth Elliot Gren has come up with a straight stick. And a beautifully unforgettable one at that.

Ruth Bell Graham

Me, Lord? Single?

There was not much of a view from the window. The central feature was the garbage cans behind the dining hall. The closed windows shut out neither the tremendous crash and clatter of early morning collections nor the noisome effluvium of the day's cooking. Nevertheless I was tickled pink to have that little room. It was a single one, what I had been wanting and finally got when I was a senior in college. It had a bed, a bureau, a bookcase, and in the corner by the window, a desk with a straight chair and a lamp. A place for solitude and silence, a "closet" of the sort Jesus said we should go into to pray.

I did my studying and some of my praying at the desk. There were maple trees and an old elm behind the garbage cans, and I was often distracted by the crowd (the flock? the skitter?) of squirrels that lived there. I watched them getting ready for winter, tearing up and down, frantically transporting provisions, scolding, chattering, flicking their tails. I watched the maple leaves change color and fall,

Passion and Purity

watched the rain paste them to the black driveway. I watched snow fall on those trees and cans.

It isn't hard at all to put myself back in the chair at that desk. When I sit at a different desk now and read letters from puzzled young people, I become that girl again who gazed out at the snow. What I wore was not very different from what they wear nowstyles easily come full circle in thirty-five years. I had two skirts, three sweaters, and a few blouses, which I did my best to mix and match so that it looked as though I was wearing different outfits. Wednesdays were easy. Everybody in the senior class wore the same blue wool blazer with a college emblem sewn over the breast pocket.

My hair gave me an awful time. It was blond, hadn't a hint of a bend in it, and grew about an inch a month. How easy it would have been to wear it hanging long and straight, but that was unthinkable then. My curls were all a "put-up job." I could afford only one permanent a year. In between times I relied on the old pin-curl system, twirling strands of hair around my finger every night before I went to bed, securing them with a bobby pin.

If I couldn't do much with my hair, I could do less with my face. Like most girls, I wished I were pretty, but it seemed futile to tamper much with what I had been given, beyond using a cautious touch of pale lipstick (something called Tangee, which cost ten cents) and a pat of powder on my nose.

I needed that tiny, cozy room that year, perhaps more than ever before. Some issues that would set the sail of my life were to be dealt with. During the preceding summer I had finished praying about whether or not I was to be a missionary. I was. After what my Plymouth Brethren friends would call an exercise and what people now would call a struggle, it was clear at last. The struggle was not over any unwillingness to cross an ocean or live under a thatched roof, but over whether this was my idea or God's

Me, Lord? Single?

and whether I was meant to be a surgeon (I loved dissecting things) or a linguist. I came to the conclusion it was God who called and the call was to linguistics. I asked for assurance from the Lord and got it, so that was that.

But there was another matter of business not by any means finished. That was the one for which God knew I would need a "closet." It was about being alonefor the rest of my life. I was saying "Me, Lord? Single?" It seemed to come up between me and my Greek textbooks when I sat at the desk, between me and my Bible when I tried to hear God speaking. It was an obstruction to my prayers and the subject of recurrent dreams.

I talked often about this to God. I don't remember mentioning it to anybody else for many months. The two who shared the suite of which my room was one-third were not the wildly popular sort of whom I would have been envious. They were quiet, sensible girls a few years older than Ione a music major who spent most of her time practicing the organ in the conservatory, the other a former WAVE (the women's branch of the Navy) who was an expert at knitting argyle socks. Both of them, in fact, turned out countless pairs of socks and mittens and sent them off somewhere by parcel post. "When you get a needle in your hand," Jean said to me one day, "you are just lost, aren't you?" Compared to those two, I was.

After college Jean married. Barbara is still single. I have no memory of any discussions with them on love and marriage (though we must have had some), but I am perfectly sure that for all three of us singleness meant one thing: virginity. If you were single, you had not been in bed with any man. If you were to be permanently single, you were never going to be in bed with any man.