Daily Inspiration Quote by Jim Elliot

“Ninety-five percent of our wool is going to China” is the kind of sentence that sounds like a trade briefing but lands, in a clergyman’s mouth, as a quiet moral alarm. Jim Elliot isn’t offering poetry; he’s weaponizing a statistic. The line’s bluntness does the work: no sermonizing, no flourishes, just a number so lopsided it implies dependency, vulnerability, and a loss of local agency. By choosing “our” he makes the supply chain intimate, communal, almost pastoral. This isn’t abstract commerce; it’s the flock’s livelihood.

The intent reads as admonition disguised as information. Elliot’s vocation primes him to talk about stewardship and responsibility, but here he speaks in the language of markets. That code-switch is the subtext: faith leaders often have to translate moral stakes into the vernacular people actually organize their lives around. Wool, a symbol of the rural and the ordinary, becomes a proxy for sovereignty. “Going to China” isn’t just a destination; it’s an implied shift in power, the sense that decisions affecting “us” are being made elsewhere.

Context matters. Elliot lived in an era when “China” functioned in Western discourse less as a specific, knowable place and more as a looming global other - distant, populous, ideologically charged. Dropping China into the sentence invites unease without stating it outright. The quote works because it’s a sermon hidden in logistics: a warning about interdependence, framed as a single, unsettling fact.