Being Elisabeth Elliot: Elisabeth’s Later Years

By Ellen Vaughn

Because Elisabeth Elliot was among many things a writer at heart, she left behind a lot of correspondence and journals along with the many articles and books she authored. Her biographer, Ellen Vaughn, had a treasure trove of resources available to her as she documented the life of Elisabeth Elliot. This book follows up on the earlier years of Elliot’s life which Vaughn also wrote about in Becoming Elisabeth Elliot. In this book the reader not only learns the rest of Elliot’s story, but also takes a deep dive into the challenges of being a biographer as experienced by both Elliot and Vaughn. In that role, as in all of her writings for a Christian audience, Elliot faced pressures from her readers, her editors, and her publishers to end each book with a happy ending in which someone came to salvation in Jesus. Her struggle as a missionary and then as a writer is that not every situation will end in such a way. She felt an imperative to share the truth even if it went against the wishes of her readers.

Elisabeth had a number of crossroad moments because she desired so passionately to make choices that aligned with the will of God and at the same time she wanted to be loved and cared for by a man, a husband. She wanted to “matter to someone.” Although she didn’t see herself as a very social person, she actually had a number of friends. The selection of male friends in her circle was limited—by age, availability, and suitability. Yet she continued to make decisions as she kept her eyes open for the man who could make her feel loved. Meanwhile, she traveled a lot as a speaker, continued to write, moved a few times, raised her daughter, took in boarders, and even considered returning to Ecuador as a missionary.

If you don’t know about her two marriages after she returned to the U.S., I won’t include spoilers except to say that she experienced the “best of times and the worst of times.” There is not a lot of documentation about her third marriage because that husband burned her journals from those years. Perhaps it is just as well. Elisabeth gradually lost her “voice” to Alzheimer’s passing away in 2015, but her message continues to impact new generations via her writing, recordings of her speeches, and through the Elisabeth Elliot Foundation. 

Rating: 4/5

Category: Biography, Nonfiction, Christian

Notes: Authorized Biography 

Publication: 2023—B&H Publishing

Memorable Lines: 

Few loved the Bible more than Elisabeth Elliot. But she was appalled when Christians used it as a weapon to clobber or distance themselves from people who were different from them. Or to distance themselves from suffering, mysteries, and difficult questions.

“My observations, it turned out, were ‘controversial,’ not because I had taken sides but because I had not taken sides.”… Again, as so many times in the past, she felt squelched by religious and commercial institutions that wanted her voice, but only if she parroted the party line.

Here in the core of her hideous loss, Elisabeth looked back again to the fundamental losses of her life. It was not hard—they were always, it seems, present in her mind, part of that which shaped her experience and her understanding of the mystery of faith in an inscrutable God.

Who was she? I would say she was a woman who lived imperfectly, as we all do, loved God and sought to serve Him with everything she had.