End of the Spear

"My father lost his life at the end of a spear and it was at the end of a spear that I found mine." Steve Saint

I just finished reading a Jim Elliott biography to Mary and Lydia during our devotions and I cried like a baby through the last two chapters, even though this was the third time I've read it. Then I walked around in a state of mourning and weepy for the rest of the day. To make matters worse, we watched End of the Spear together the next day so they could weep with me. The story of the five men who lost their lives trying to reach a tribe in the jungles of Ecuador has been told many times and from many perspectives and it's compelling every time. It happened over fifty years ago and is so moving every time I hear it.

I've heard Elisabeth Elliott and others related to the five men in the story say how often people will approach them and tell how this single event was most influential to their being in missions. Just last week, I met one of those people. He grew up as a child of missionaries in Sweden and mentioned how he was influenced to evangelism by their story.

I would encourage you to dig into this story with your children. There are so many aspects of God's sovereignty displayed and examined over the course of events leading up to and following the massacre on an unknown stretch of beach in the Woudani territory. It was interesting the questions that were raised from the few details we learned from Elliott's biography that we read. Elisabeth Elliott also has some great books on her husband's life. A very interesting book on the events after the deaths is by Steve Saint, the pilot Nate Saint's son, who was the oldest of the children and remembers a lot of the story first hand. The book is the same title as the movie, End of the Spear. The theology of the book and movie is a little mystical, but who can say what the natives saw the day of the massacre?

The movie was a little too graphic for Mary and Lydia, but you can't make a movie about natives in the jungles in the 1950s without a lot of nearly naked men and women. And the spearing of entire families, yes- even babies, is the terrible truth of what happened before the gospel reached these people. So we spent a lot of time covering our eyes.