Elisabeth Elliot, who continued her ministry to the Auca tribe in Ecuador years after her first husband and four other missionaries were speared to death by the tribe in the 1950s, has passed away after battling dementia for the last decade.

Elliot was 88.

Elliot wrote about the loss of her husband when their daughter was only 10 months old.

“A year after I went to Ecuador, Jim Elliot, whom I had met at Wheaton, also entered tribal areas with the Quichua Indians. In 1953 we were married in the city of Quito and continued our work together. Jim had always hoped to have the opportunity to enter the territory of an unreached tribe. The Aucas were in that category — a fierce group whom no one had succeeded in meeting without being killed,” she wrote.

“After the discovery of their whereabouts, Jim and four other missionaries entered Auca territory. After a friendly contact with three of the tribe, they were speared to death.  Our daughter, Valerie, was 10 months old when Jim was killed. I continued working with the Quichua Indians when, through a remarkable providence, I met two Auca women who lived with me for one year. They were the key to my going in to live with the tribe that had killed the five missionaries. I remained there for two years.”

Tributes came in from around the evangelical world for Elliot, who authored the best selling book Through Gates of Splendor.

“Just like Jesus, and Jim Elliot, she called young people to come and die. Sacrifice and suffering were woven through her writing and speaking like a scarlet thread. She was not a romantic about missions. She disliked very much the sentimentalizing of discipleship,” said Pastor John Piper.  “The thread of suffering was not just woven through her words, but through her relationships. Not only did she lose her first husband to a violent death three years after they were married; she also lost her second husband, Addison Leitch, four years after her remarriage.”

“Other than my parents & Rick, no one has had a greater impact on my life than Elisabeth Elliott. Forever grateful,” Kay Warren noted in a tweet.

“On Earth, she married three times — her first two husbands preceded her in death — but from earliest childhood her deepest affections were for her Savior, and it was for Him that her soul yearned,” wrote Warren later in a tribute on her blog in which she talked about how she was first introduced to Elliot’s work as a teenager.