Once upon a time there were two young women, just out of college, who decided to give their lives in missionary service to the Lord in Africa. When they told their parents of their plans, the response was:

“Now dears, how wonderful. You’ve had a religious experience. This is wonderful, we’re very happy for you, and we think it’s a great thing, but, before you go running off into the blue, don’t you think you ought to go off and get your masters degrees or something, so you have some security, something to fall back on”…Just think about this. We’re all on – every single one of us is on – a little piece of rock called Earth, which is spinning through space at millions and billions of miles an hour, and if for some reason, by some chance, it doesn’t run into anything, it doesn’t matter because underneath every single one of us there’s is a trap door and after a while, eventually every one of us will have that trap door open and we’ll fall off and underneath are the everlasting arms of God – or – absolutely nothing, and maybe we need a masters degree for some security.

~ In a lecture by Addison Leitch, as retold by Tim Keller in a sermon on “the pearl of great price” (Matthew 13:45-46). Addison Leitch, by the way, was dying of cancer while he continued to teach at Gordon-Conwell Seminary as long as he still had breath. His wife, Elisabeth Elliot, would then be a widow twice over, her first husband Jim being killed years earlier by the people he was trying to reach out to in the jungles of Ecuador. Before Jim Elliot was speared to death, he penned a few words of wisdom along these lines as well:

He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.

Elisabeth apparently knew about this pearl of great price as well. Shortly after Jim was killed, and long before she met Addison, she went back to the jungles of Ecuador with her fatherless toddler in tow to continue the work that she and Jim had started.