How Stephen Olford influenced Jim and Elisabeth Elliot

In January 1948, 20-year-old Jim Elliot (1927-1956) and 21-year-old Elisabeth Howard (1926-2015), both students at Wheaton College, sat in a week of chapel meetings led by a 29-year-old Stephen Olford (1918-2004). On Friday, January 16, he preached on journaling and quiet time. Here's what each one had to say about the experience.

Jim

January 17, 1948

What is written in these pages I suppose will someday be read by others than myself. For this reason I cannot hope to be absolutely honest in what is herein recorded, for the hypocrisy of this shamming heart will ever be putting on a front and dares not to have written what is actually found in its abysmal depths. 

Yet, I pray, Lord, that You will make these notations to be as nearly true to fact as is possible so that I may know my own heart and be able to definitely pray regarding my gross, though often unviewed, inconsistencies. 

I do this at the suggestion of Stephen Olford... whose chapel message of yesterday morning convicted me that my quiet time with God is not what it should be. These remarks are to be written from fresh, daily thoughts given from God in meditation on His Word. 

- Jim Elliot, (Elisabeth Elliot, ed.), The Journals of Jim Elliot.

Elisabeth

A young British preacher named Stephen Olford spoke in our college chapel for a week. Two things he said stayed with me: He quoted from the Song of Solomon, “I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, that ye stir not up, nor awake love until it please.” He interpreted this to mean that no one, man or woman, should be agitated about the choice of a mate, but should be “asleep” as it were, in the will of God, until it should please Him to “awake” him. The other thing he urged was that we should keep a spiritual journal. I determined to follow his advice on both counts.

I bought a small, brown looseleaf notebook, almost exactly the size of my small, brown leather-bound Bible, given to me by my parents for Christmas in 1940. These I kept together at all times. 

- Elisabeth Elliot, Passion and Purity.

Jim and Elisabeth began a romance that year that eventually ended in marriage in 1953. Jim was eventually speared to death along with four other missionaries in Ecuador as they tried to reach the Waodani tribe in 1956. 

It is my contention that the reason we know about Jim and Elisabeth today is not only because of Jim's martyrdom, but also because Elisabeth wrote so many books about their lives, such as Through Gates of Splendor, The Savage My Kinsman, and Passion and Purity, along with her edited version of The Journals of Jim Elliot. She would not have been able to do so to the level of detail and emotional depth that she did without the evidence from these journals, which they started after hearing Stephen Olford's message. 

And I'm sure that the writing and processing each of them did as they kept the journals helped them make the life decisions they did. So in a way, we know about Jim and Elisabeth Elliot today because Stephen Olford encouraged them to journal.

Journaling as confession

Between last night and this morning, I read Maria Boulding's introduction to Augustine's Confessions. I was impressed by one section called "What is Confession?", where she outlines three "layers of meaning" to the Latin words confessio (a noun) and confiteri (a verb), denoting three types of activity that Augustine engaged in as he wrote. 

First, he confessed his sin. Second, he confessed God's glory. Third, he asks God to give him words, and then he uses words and ideas he has learned in Scripture and uttered in prayer to speak back to God and for his readers.

This last type of confession "is a creative process", Boulding says. Just as the Holy Spirit "prays in us" when we don't have words (see Romans 8:6), so we co-create ourselves along with God as we make his creative word part of our spoken and written thoughts.

"Words... are essentially signs; and they reach their fullest meaning as servants of self-transcendence."

This has important implications for journaling as a spiritual exercise, which I have been learning to practice for the past two years I've been part of a men's group called Intercept.

Journaling lets us capture and process our floating thoughts, and rein and run with our angry, driving ones. In a sense it is a conversation between ourselves and God, through which we create meaning out of the sense impressions running past our ears and eyes and tongues and fingertips. Through which we turn ideas over and under until they fit into the shape of our life, and in very special cases, fill and expand and reshape that life.

Confessing didn't calm every one of Augustine's storms, but the process made him a more interesting person, and the writing of it brought that process to us so we could join the chorus, from whatever little cell we might be in.

(All quotes are from Maria Boulding, Introduction in Augustine, The Confessions, 2nd edition. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, pp.24-25.)