Believing at Midnight

The day after Elisabeth Elliot's second husband, who was a professor at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, passed away, Lars Gren, a student at Gordon-Conwell, moved into her home as her second boarder. (See my first blog post for more details on that.) Lars lived there for 2 years, but after the first year, his feelings toward Elisabeth started to change. He told me, "I was eyeballing her a little bit differently than just as a landlady, and she didn't think I knew that she knew. But by the end of the second year, she knew that I knew that she knew!" So one morning as she was standing at the kitchen sink doing the dishes and he was making something to eat, backs to each other, she told him that he needed to find another place to live. He agreed—although he said his blood pressure sky-rocketed!—and then he went on about his day.

When Lars returned home later that night, he asked to see Elisabeth: "We sat down, and I said: 'You have every right to ask me to leave. There's no problem in that, but I don't appreciate the way you did it. ... I'm not some kid coming out of high school here. I've been around a little bit; I've been in business. We do things in a more gracious manner.' Well, she just listened nicely and politely and thanked me for what I had to say. That was the end of it—there was no discussion."*

Lars moved out, but he kept pursuing Elisabeth, and they ended up spending quite a bit of time together. When I asked Lars why Elisabeth spent so much time with him knowing his intentions toward her, he said it was because she was sure he couldn't possibly be serious about her. (Elisabeth was in her late 40s at this point and had already been married twice, and Lars was 9 years younger and had never been married.) But Lars stuck around, and the Lord started working on Elisabeth's heart.

Lars and Elisabeth in Ecuador in 1994. Used with permission from Lorrie Orr.

In the Family Life Today interview (see footnote*), Elisabeth said that she was absolutely closed off to the idea of a third marriage until Lars said something to her in the living room one day that changed her perception of him completely. According to Elisabeth (Lars doesn't remember this), he said, "I would like to be the one building the fences around you, and I want to stand on all sides."*

Shortly after Lars' bold declaration, God convicted Elisabeth. In her own words, she said,

“I was convicted by the fact that God was saying to me: ‘You have not asked Me one thing about this. You just made up your mind that you were going to stay single the rest of your life.’ Well, then I had to get down on my knees and repent and say: ‘Well, you know, Lord, I want to do what You want me to do,’ and ‘How could I possibly have failed to, at least, mention this in prayer?’ I then opened my Bible, and to my utter astonishment—

Well, I have to say, before I tell you that, that I was constantly comparing Jim Elliot to Addison Leach. Jim could do a lot of things Add couldn’t do; Add could do things Jim couldn’t do. Lars could do a lot of things that Add and Jim couldn’t do—I was making these odious comparisons. I opened my Bible and, lo and behold, it was staring me in the face: ‘Men have different gifts, but it is the same Lord who accomplishes His purposes through them all.’”

— *

Through prayer, Scripture, and the counsel of many trusted friends and advisers, Elisabeth opened her heart to Lars and a third marriage.

After four years of knowing each other, Lars and Elisabeth married. I asked Lars if he formally proposed to Elisabeth, getting down on one knee, pouring his heart out to her and so forth, and he started laughing and said, "No, no, it was horrible!" Come to find out, it wasn't that horrible, but he didn't ask her to marry him. Instead, he simply told her, "I want you to be my wife."* She told him she'd pray about it, and two weeks later she sent him a letter accepting his proposal. (A letter! I just can't get over how "Elisabeth Elliot" that feels!) She accepted his proposal in July, and they got married the following December.

Something else Lars told me that had the "Elisabeth Elliot feel" was that Elisabeth gave Lars her second husband's wedding ring to wear as his own! Lars explained, "It was a nice, flat ring on top with my initials on it—ELG. I thought it looked familiar, but I didn't think anything of it. I don't know how it came about—whether I asked her or not—but come to find out it was Add's ring. So it had had AHL on it." It turns out, Elisabeth had Add's initials shaved down and Lars' initials engraved over them. Lars told Elisabeth he wished she would have asked him before doing that, because he would have told her to leave Add's initials. "What a great conversation piece," he said to me, laughing. "If I'm sitting at a table and someone sees my ring and says, 'AHL—what does that stand for?' I could say, 'Oh, that's my wife's second husband.'"

Shortly after Lars and Elisabeth married, they moved to Atlanta so Lars could do a chaplaincy program in Milledgeville, Georgia. He was commuting to Milledgeville during the week, and she traveled on the weekends for speaking engagements. One weekend he decided to travel to one of her speaking engagements in Virginia, and he told her he'd bring some of her books to sell, which no one had ever done before. He wasn't prepared for how well it was going to go: "I had no idea what to expect," he told me. "I had some $5s, some $10s, and some change in my pockets, and I didn't have anything to put the money in, so I wound up putting it in 4 or 5 coffee cups in a box under the table!" When Lars saw how eager women were to buy her books, he talked with Elisabeth, and they decided that he would travel with her to all of her speaking engagements and sell her books. "It became my job," Lars said. "I couldn't think of anything I'd rather do." The rest is history!

Check back next week for the final post in the Elisabeth Elliot series!

*(Quotes from Family Life Today. To listen to the audio, click here for Part 1, and here for Part 2. It's absolutely hilarious!)

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Anyone who knows me knows that Elisabeth Elliot is my favorite author. I discovered her books in 2010, and I’ve been reading and re-reading them ever since. So, you can imagine how excited I was when Lars Gren, Elisabeth’s widower, called me in response to a letter I had written requesting to visit him in the house he and Elisabeth lived in until she died in 2015. He told me he’d be glad if I visited.

When I arrived at the quaint cul-de-sac of Strawberry Cove, Lars was outside hanging sheets on the clothesline. I was on time, down to the minute, and he commented that I must have been parked somewhere, waiting it out so I wouldn’t be early. In actuality, I left my hotel early but hit so much traffic I made it on time by the skin of my teeth. And thankfully I did; I would have been so embarrassed if I were late!

I was beyond excited to be able to see their house. Elisabeth often wrote about things she saw from her study window, which overlooks the sea. Lars told me that Elisabeth designed the house so that there are large windows all along the back of it. In the living room, hanging over the large window overlooking the sea, there’s a wooden plaque with Psalm 95:5 on it: “The sea is His, and He made it.”

As I walked around the living room, looking at all of the books and pictures, I noticed 2 triple-hinged frames on one of the bookshelves. In one of them was a picture of each of Elisabeth’s husbands — Jim Elliot (her first husband) on the left, Addison Leitch (her second husband) in the center, and Lars Gren (her third husband) on the right. In the other, was a picture of Elisabeth with each of her husbands in chronological order. I had never before seen a picture of her second husband, so I was thrilled to see what he looked like.

Elisabeth became well known when her first husband, Jim Elliot, and 4 other missionaries were speared to death by Auca Indians in the jungle of Ecuador in 1956. They had only been married 27 months (after waiting 5 years to get the green light from God to marry), and they had a 10-month-old daughter, Valerie. Elisabeth told the story of Jim’s and the other men’s martyrdom in her book Through Gates of Splendor, and she tells her and Jim’s love story in her book Passion for Purity.

Elisabeth stayed in Ecuador after Jim’s death, and 3 years later moved into Auca territory with Valerie to bring the gospel to the very people who killed her husband. Her experience there is recounted in her book The Savage, My Kinsman.

Elisabeth and Valerie moved back to the States in 1963. Thirteen years after Jim’s death, in 1969, she married a professor at Gordon Conwell, Addison Leitch, who was 18 years her senior. Three years after they married, he was diagnosed with cancer. He died less than a year later.

While Addison (whom Elisabeth called “Add”) was sick, she invited a seminary student to live with them in order to help her with Add’s care. Just days before her new boarder was supposed to move in, Add died. Well, she figured she could still use some help, so she invited him to come anyway, and called the seminary to let them know she could use another boarder, too. She got one. And in God’s unbelievable providence, one of her boarders married her daughter, and the other one married her. Lars Gren and Elisabeth were married from 1977 until June 2015, when Elisabeth passed away at the age of 88.

One thing I’ve always wondered was whether or not it bothered Lars that Elisabeth’s ministry was birthed out of her and Jim’s love story and his eventual martyrdom. When I asked him about it, and if it bothered him that she was married twice before, he burst out laughing and said, “Don’t be ridiculous! Why would it?” Then he said, “I used to encourage her to talk more about the second husband because he never got mentioned. Sometimes at the platform in between sessions [at one of her speaking events], I’d tell Elisabeth, ‘Why don’t you tell them something about Add? Poor guy doesn’t get mentioned’.”

Lars has a great sense of humor, and I had so much fun spending the afternoon with him. I can’t fit even a fraction of what we talked about in one blog post, so I’m going to write 2-3 (maybe even 4). Stay tuned!