ON MISSIONARIES: A PERSONAL VIEW (2)

I am continuing this series on missionaries and my role as one, always an interesting topic.

The college I attended was in Delaware, and some distance from my hometown farm in northeastern Pennsylvania. A neighbor girl (not a girlfriend) was attending the college and told me about it. The catalogue showed pictures of baseball and soccer, which I played in high school. Armed with that information, I went to what I understood was a “Christian college” for an education that would help prepare me to be a “missionary.”

It was Christian and, in many ways, it complemented the teachings of the small village church I had attended in Pennsylvania. I had been taught that tobacco, alcohol, dancing, most movies, and playing baseball on Sundays were wrong. Some leaders even claimed that Jesus turned the water at the wedding of Cana into grape juice. My college and my church did not seem to dispute any of those legalistic concerns. 

Although I did not hold such views, I am not sorry in the least that I attended the college because it was there that I met Joice. We were going “steady” during our last two years of college and had attended classes on missions together. We were also required to take Bible classes each year. Joice majored in Christian Education, and I majored in Psychology. She was the class valedictorian, and I graduated.

To raise money for college, I spent summers boarding with college friends in Detroit and worked at the Borden’s dairy factory. I made enough money each summer to pay for my next year at college. I thought that missionaries should know something about medicine, so after graduation, I went west for a year to attend the Biola School of Missionary Medicine in Los Angeles. Joice worked at a foundation in Birmingham, Michigan. When I returned and lived in Michigan, we attended the Detroit Bible Institute three nights a week for a year. We were preparing ourselves to be real “missionaries.”

In July 1955, I proposed to Joice by one of the many lake sites near her home. She agreed to marry me, and life was, of course, never the same again. We both continued to work—Joice at the Cranbrook Foundation, and I at a pharmacy and for the GMC truck factory. We were married at Joice’s church in Pontiac, Michigan, on May 26, 1956. At the practice session, Joice’s pastor, knowing her well, asked if she wanted to leave “obey” in the clause “love, honor, and obey,” referring to me. She did, and it worked well for almost 65 years. I might say “pretty well” because there were times when she had no reason to “obey” me.

The Greek professor at our college had told us that we should attend the Summer Institute of Linguistics session at the University of Oklahoma. There, we would learn how to learn unwritten languages and be better prepared for the “mission field.” We attended the University and studied linguistics for two summers. The courses were at the graduate level, and they were hard, even for a valedictorian. 

During that first summer, we joined our mission, called the Wycliffe Bible Translators (WBT). At the same time, we also joined—not realizing what we were getting into—the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL). It would be our ‘field” organization. Both required that we get additional training at a “Jungle Camp” in southern Mexico.

The Jungle Camp (JC) was three months of training which would prepare us for “jungle living.” We studied and learned a bit of the Tzeltal language, hiked, built rafts, our own survival huts, and so forth. We were preparing to be “pioneer” missionaries. Following JC, we were assigned to join a missionary and his son, and we hiked to a high and remote village in Mexico. I was to help him build a house, and Joice was the cook and “housekeeper.”

It was a frustrating experience. Building materials did not arrive until it was time to leave, so we had to depart with a guide who knew as little Spanish as we did. The guide left after the first day, and we stayed in a small town with a retired missionary until the next day. Joice’s knee had gone out coming down the mountain (9000’ altitude) so I rented a horse for her to ride to the lonely road where we would wait for a bus that came once a day.

Before the bus arrived a truck with two men pulled up beside us. It was an avocado buyer and his driver. They were going to the town where the bus would end up. There was a problem—all four of us could not fit in the front. His solution was to put the driver outside in the back of the truck and have me drive. I somewhat foolishly accepted and found myself negotiating turns and hills while Joice and our benefactor sang one Spanish song (La Cucaracha) repeatedly. When the bus arrived later at the small town, we immediately got on it, and our avocado buyer was not pleased. He reasoned that I should drive him and their load back to Mitla. I wisely declined because it rained, and we (the men) had to push the bus up every hill while the women sat (anxiously) inside. It was the last vehicle out of the town for weeks.

We looked back on such events as God’s purpose to give us experience and patience in our journey to become “missionaries.” Of course, we were not always patient. We wanted to get to the “field” and begin “real” missionary work.

Karl Franklin