An invitation to speak for Missions in Focus Week at Wheaton College (Illinois) last April gave me an opportunity to live over again in vivid memory some important crises in my own student life. Edman Chapel is new since my time, but there were the same eager, earnest, hopeful, uncertain, longing, dubious, shy faces turned up to me that we turned up to chapel speakers in the 1940s.
How strange to be on the platform of Pierce Chapel in the evenings, saying the same things I heard when mine was one of the hopeful, uncertain faces. Strange to look up to the balcony where Jim Elliot always sat; to visit my old room in Williston Hall (the one described in the opening chapter of Passion and Purity) where I prayed and dreamed of Jim; to go to Alumni Gym where he used to wrestle; to walk the sidewalks we walked from dorm to class to chapel. Strange- and wonderful- today, to receive a letter from a sophomore at Wheaton, a young man: "Mrs. Elliot, I sit here in my dorm room with books and papers strewn around me, buttressed by the challenge you left with us-'If you're a student, the will of God for you is to study. Have you ever thought of that?' Ha! Yes, I had thought of it I am prompted to lay down my books for a few minutes, though, to do something I think is important: thank you, thank God, for something else you said while here." He refers then to my talks on bringing one's love life under Christ's control (the theme of the above-mentioned book). "I don't really care if what you said is 'old-fashioned,' I'm convinced that it is right on target.... The principles make sense to me. I can't help but feel that if we had let ourselves hunger without being fed we would be much happier, and much more mature in Christ I thank you for bearing a message that was heard and is being heeded (by God's grace) as well as possible by at least one Wheaton student In as small a way as it may be, for me this is 'fellowship in His sufferings: Paul's words in 2 Corinthians 16:13, 14, and 2 Corinthians 5:7 have special significance to me now. Thank the Lord Elisabeth Elliot is old-fashioned!"
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