Jim Elliot | US Missionary

January 8. Jim Elliot. From the time he was a boy, Jim wanted to go abroad and tell people about Jesus.

Now, you know learning languages was going to be high on his to-do list.

So when he was about twenty, with a friend, Jim hitchhiked to Mexico and studied Spanish. Three years later, he joined Camp Wycliffe to study linguistics and learned to break down native languages into written symbols.

After a couple more years, he made it to Ecuador and spent three years learning the Shandia language. But Jim wanted to reach the Waodani tribe, who lived in the deep jungles too, so he learned their language from a woman who had left the tribe. On this date in 1957, members of Waodani tribe ambushed Jim and his fellow missionaries and speared them to death. Jim had a gun, but he refused to shoot the natives. Here’s what happened.