"My goal is to be faithful to the end of my life, faithful to God, to my family. That was my wife's goal, too. That was her prayer."
"I had to give up the idea of being nationalistic... I had to become cross-cultural and respect other people's values and opinions. I had to show love to people who didn't think as I do."
"The hardest thing to live with were the cockroaches and the rats. There were a lot of rats. They got up in the ceiling of our four-room timber house and ran around, nibbling on our food. "
Dozens of natives held up their new Bibles and a loud voice from one of the celebration d leaders shouted the question: "Will you take the will of God and use it?" Tribal voices roared back, "Yes we will!" Days earlier, at least a dozen Kewa had waited patiently in line to make confessions of sins before an American pastor.
A Report by Robert R.
Schwarz
( retired newspaper editor
and
former leadership development
manager for Lions
Clubs International )
1. Meet Karl and Joice Franklin
2. Trekking to a Kewa
Village with Thoughts of Missionary Heroes
3. The Challenge of Using Innovative "Missionary"
Language
4. Intimate Life Details of Karl The Missionary
5. Setbacks , Then Conversions (a link to a
UTUBE Documentary )
6. Celebration !
7. Honoring Some Missionaries
and Their Legacies
8. Wit 'n' Wisdom from Karl about
'Little Things', 'Grief', 'Death '
Scanning notes
for this report about an amazing foreign
missionary I interviewed 2021, I
gradually realized that many American citizens of goodwill might need a missionary or two like Karl
Franklin. Like the New Guinea natives he
and his wife Joice lived with, some them might gain needed wisdom from a daily relationship with Karl, who has been called home by the Lord. In stats
tallied for 2017 by website Missionary Portal, the Franklins were
among the 430,000 foreign
missionaries worldwide who had been bringing the Christian faith to natives and pagan worshippers for the last
six centuries.
Karl and Joice devoted 32 years to missionary work, at least
l6 of it while living in semi-primitive conditions in two Kewa villages in the
wild highlands of New Guinea. A goodly portion
of all these years were spent in
hard labor of translating the Bible's
New Testament into the Kewa language. There
were intervals of related mission work by the Franklins in America, Australia, New Zealand, and England.
The 88-year-old Karl leads an active retired life in a Waco,
Texas townhouse. He wrote a weekly
column for his Baptist church; a column
was about "friends and friendships."
His chief enjoyment then was being with his daughter and her husband and their
three children, who were a six-minute
drive away. With them Karl watched television,
played games and dined at restaurants with them.
He loved to walk, "feeling the sunshine and seeing everything that
God made in nature, " he told me . Now and then he me with five couples of varied
occupations who called themselves "Life Together". Joice died on March 22, 2021, four months prior to our
interview.
Karl wore glasses, had thinning white
hair and, stood five-foot- eight and weighed maybe 165 pounds. He succinctly articulated his
thoughts with transparency and a diminished ego—a man fully alive, I thought.
word meanings are radically different
from all other languages
"I had read a lot of missionary biographies, their accounts, and all
of them encouraged me," Karl said.
His most admired, Adoniram Judson, an American Baptist who served in Burma (Myanmar)
for almost 40 years and translated
the Bible into Burmese. According to the online Christianity Stock Exchange, Judson and his wife together spent 12 hours a
day studying the language; it took them more than three years to speak it.
And there were the celebrated Stanley
and Livingston. Martin Dugard in his
book (Into Africa ) describes a scene lived out by one of these
two famous jungle trekkers: The first
months of the journey were a slog through claustrophobic jungle,
where the thick, dank air pressed down
on their shoulders and poured into their lungs. The porters deserted into ones
and twos, in the dead of night, stealing precious supplies before fleeing back
to the coast. A morass of palm trees, strangler figs, leopard orchids, black
mambas, green mambas, cobras, monkeys,
mosquitoes, and tsetse flies defined the expedition's days. The going was slow.
Malaria and sleeping sickness afflicted those porters who didn't desert.
Listening to Karl, I just had to tell
him of the amateurish expedition I joined (circa
1954) to
observe a Lacadon Indian in a
Guatemalan jungle . He was a member of a disappearing tribe that had descended
from the Aztecs.
***
The
Franklins’ trek from the airplane landing to the Kewa Village
took five hours. They and their porters hiked through elephant grass, crossed a few rivers, and now and then had to
pick themselves up after slipping on swampy
ground made worse by a recent rain. But no mambas, just hawks always circling above.
The village that the Franklin
expedition finally entered was settled
at a 6,000 foot altitude with a l4,000
foot -high mountain in view. "Often there was lots of rain here," Karl said. "It
was moldy and wet." He and his wife moved into a village dwelling built by
an American Lutheran carpenter with grass and bark. They stayed there until
Mrs. Franklin became pregnant six months later. When their family returned a year later, they moved into a village house with a generator and one outhouse.
Joice and Karl would eventually—and amazingly—
learn the Kewa language. Joice wrote Kewa language primers. For years ahead,
the Franklins' missionary work would continue to be sponsored by friends and
several churches.
Karl's long term goal here, of course,
was to communicate sacred scripture to
the Kewa people; often his prayers asked that the Kewa would eventually be converted to the Christian
faith. This he knew would require enormous patience, perseverance, and a willing spirit from
people who were steeped in demonic
superstitions and mistrust of anyone outside their tribe, particularly those with white skin.
But as Joice and Karl now sat down for
their first mission-spirited interaction with a native, an old compelling question resurfaced: How do we communicate with a human who does not know a
word of English, nor we, beyond a word
or two of his language—when neither
translator nor dictionary exists here?
The fact that Karl had a Ph.D. in linguistics from the Australian
National University would eventually
help. Maybe.
Karl began to learn the Kewa
language by pointing, mimicking and guessing what a native was saying. What he heard he wrote down in a phonetic script. "This
is the key," he explained. "Then you note all the features this native uses with his
mouth, how he shapes a word with his mouth, uses his tongue, lips
and vocal chords. Then you repeat the
word to the native. You teach him a word
in English, for example, by picking up a stone and showing it to the native
while saying 'stone'. Abstract words are more difficult. For example, you
communicate the word love by actually doing something that
shows love. For the word repentance, you might turn your body
around and point it in the opposite direction. Then, finally, you start composing your Kewa dictionary."
"Some words are extremely
difficult to teach," Karl said. "You have to connect a word or concept or principle to
an emotional center in the
native." Karl explained how he eventually was able to get a native to understand the
concept of religious faith by relating the word faith not to the native's heart but to his stomach! And for the native to meaningfully grasp the phrase, I believe in Jesus— words as foreign in both thought and language to the
Kewa—Karl first had to communicate clearly to the native, You need
to have this Jesus man solidly in your body.
In his scholarly book, How the Word Is Made Flesh (Princeton Theological Seminary, 1950), Eugene A. Nida wrote: "The Popolucas of Mexico do not speak of loving God with their hearts. Rather, they say they love him with their livers. For them, the heart is only a physical organ and represents no emotional or psychological feature [in their life].... The Word of God must be translated into life if it is to be truly the Book of Life, and in order that it may be translated into life....people must understand it in words which come from their living experience."
One can only wonder how evangelizing
giants like Billy Graham, Fulton Sheen, and today's David Jeremiah would have succeeded
as foreign missionaries. Karl himself had to wonder at times if he and his wife would ever see a bona
fide Christian Kewa in this village.
"What shaped your life the most?"
I had asked Karl in our interview.
"When I was a senior in high school,"
he replied. "I made a commitment to
become a Christian and follow the Lord; that made my whole life after that. To
trust God, especially when things seem very difficult, like when my wife had
become very ill in New Guinea. To trust
God in all circumstances, I think that's
been the hardest to learn."
And what motivated you to commit
to a tough, self-sacrificing life of a foreign missionary?
"My love for the Bible and the fact that most of the
world's more than 7,000 languages did not have a Biblical word in them. My wife had the same motivation."
And your goals, Karl?
"My goal is to be faithful to the end
of my life, faithful to God, to my family. That was my wife's goal, too. That
was her prayer."
Care to say what makes you sad?
"The
way our country is going. The hatred, accusing each other of lying, and the
politics. Also the lack of concern for our country's resources. People dump stuff along the road. All of that makes
me unhappy."
His saddest day, he later added, was
when his wife almost died on March 22,2021 when her pregnancy became ectopic (i.e., her
birth egg was growing in her fallopian tube instead of in the
placenta canal).
And happy ?
"When
I think about my 65 years of marriage."
How did your marriage weather all the sacrifices you and your wife had to make as missionaries? [Karl and Joice first met at King's College in Delaware ]
"I had to give up the idea of being nationalistic. I had to become cross-cultural and respect other people's values and opinions. I had to show love to people who didn't think as I do. My wife and I were pretty much into the same thing. We worked together. Every day that we could, we prayed together. And we read God's word together. There were times naturally when we got on each other’s nerves, but we always went back to our original calling of what God wanted us to do."
Karl was also a writer. He has had
published a collection of five books of short stories, a text book on storytelling, and
books related to the learning of the Kewa language.
Setbacks of Fatigue, Hepatitis, Rats and Cockroaches,
And Then that Big Day Finally Came
Except
for an occasional trip to Australia, New Zealand, England, and America to learn
innovative missionary skills to teach to other missionaries, Karl and Joice
spent half of the next 32 years in two Kewa
villages. Several of those years they
parented their son, Kirk, born in 1959 ,and home-schooled him in the Franklin village home
through the fifth grade; and Karol, was born
in 1965. For several years she attended classes at an island missionary center,
a 75-minute flight away.
Karl's constant goal was to see the Kewa willingly
become joyful Christians. But to achieve this, Karl and Joice had to accept the seemingly impossible task of translating the Bible into
the Kewa language. Trials, of course, were inevitable. Their own Christian faith was at times tested.
still rats, cockroaches, and crickets !
Karl spoke about the setbacks: "Well, Joice and I got hepatitis, (infection of the liver); and yes, we had high goals, and when some weren't met, it was disheartening. The hardest thing to live with were the cockroaches and the rats. There were a lot of rats. They got up in the ceiling of our four-room timber house and ran around, nibbling on our food. And crickets came through the walls. I think one evening we killed nearly a hundred of them."
When asked about fatigue, Karl softly chuckled. "We had a few very lethargic days, when
we just didn't feel like doing anything." I asked about hostilities
among the natives: "Except
for a few arguments about not paying them enough for this and that,"
Karl replied, "they looked after us and were very hospitable on the whole. We were pretty
well accepted."
I wanted some details about conversions of the natives
to the Christian faith. "I can't do
that very well," Karl admitted, "because we didn't keep track. We
prayed with them, we read scripture to them. But we didn't ask, as some evangelists might in our culture, have you accepted Jesus Christ as your lord and savior? I had to ask, "Karl, then how do you really know that
your Gospel message to the Kewa brought them closer to God, or
to Jesus for that matter?"
"One of the ways," Karl
replied seriously, "was observing
how the men were now treating their wives. The husbands stopped beating them
and started to treat them with respect and love."
Karl's words left me believing that
behavioral change in the male Kewa, as well as
other signs of Christian-like behavior and speech, had not been gradually developed by some weekly missionary
curriculum but rather had bloomed one day
like a young budding rose bush after a
good rain .
[Note: a filmed documentary of "New Testament Dedication for West Kewa People of Papua New Guinea can be viewed at https://youtu.be/5VJZ9uWzgUo . ]
The Big Day Arrives !
Karl and Joice never ceased to pray
daily for more conversions and a Kewa- translated New Testament
Bible.
Their prayers were dramatically answered
on Aug. 13, 2004 when several hundred Kewa natives shook the surrounding jungle with
rhythmic shouting, chanting, and singing. It was the day when porters entered their village carrying box after box of newly printed Old Testament
Bibles translated in the Kewa language! It was the celebration of completion of 15 years of studious labor by the Frankins. The
Bible had been printed in New Guinea
from a manuscript typed on a manual
typewriter. "It was one of the very most happy days of my life
and Joice's," Karl exclaimed.
Kirapeasi the Kewa Bible, which was
translated primarily by him and typed on an ordinary typewriter .
New Guinea native Wopa Eka , who
was the primary translator of the New Testament 2004 revision,
would in time translate nearly half of the Old Testament before his death at age 47 ( Sadly, it was unknown in 2021 if anyone had taken up the unfinished
task that Wopa labored on so faithfully
for years. ) Wopa used to play with the Franklin's two children in the village. Commented Karl, "He, a Kewa, was a real evangelist among the Kewa, a Lutheran who interacted strongly with churches of different denominations. When
reading letters and emails he sent me before his death, I often had to lay down my pen to grieve, pray, and rejoice."
No doubt Karl and Joice's faces beamed when they observed a brief skit performed by the natives to dramatize that day decades ago when Karl and Joice arrived in their village. The tribe that day became ecstatic when natives held up signs in English reading, We Kewa have learned the Gospel and have abandoned our animistic practices and burned our fetishes! The skit's climax came as dozens of natives held up their new Bibles and a loud voice from one of the celebration d leaders shouted the question: "Will you take the will of God and use it?" Tribal voices roared back, "Yes we will!" Days earlier, at least a dozen Kewa had waited patiently in line to make confessions of sins before an American pastor.
In writing this report, I once asked myself if
the concept of an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient God might be sparked in a Kewa child while
eating a meal of grains. Might he be prompted
to ask his parent, where did these tiny grain things come from? Who made
them? And perhaps Mom or Dad's answer began to shape the concept of God in their child’s mind, even
his heart.
Soon after this bit of reverie, I became convinced that many missionaries have learned that the
seeds of some conversions are sown when a youth or adult repeatedly observes
someone showing Christ-like love to
another.
In
the village on that momentous day, with Kewa jubilation showing no sign
of lessening, the missionary and his wife boarded a helicopter and were quickly
flown out of sight.
***
Later, back in Texas
Karl then back in Texas, received letters
from Kewa natives written in both
their language and English. I asked him,
"What can we today in America learn
from your missionary efforts and those of others? How can we honor them more?" I had assumed that Karl had a lot to say
about this. Instead, he paused in deep thought and said no more than, "Bob,
I'll have to think about that."
Later that week, I thought about a close friend of my wife since their high school days, Sr. Loraine Ryan, a Medical Missions Sister. "Lani", as my wife and I call her, for 15 years (1969-1985 ) worked as a public health nurse and midwife in the tribal community of Madhya Pradesh in central India. "When I first arrived," Lani, now age 86, recently told me, (on the telephone from her Mother House in Philadelphia) "so many were dying there of cerebral malaria. But when I left that area, hardly anyone was dying anymore.
"Living in a village close to these indigenous people," Lani continued " I felt they
touched me more than I touched them.
Upon entering their home in a village after walking a distance in the
heat, we were welcomed and asked to sit, while they washed our feet (as Jesus
had done) and then said 'Jai, Jesu'
Praise Jesus! The people during
those years had their faith deepened when they saw how their prayers and hard work had changed people so much."
After returning to America, our friend
continued her apostolate as the primary
caregiver for her parents, both stricken fatally at the same time, one with
Alzheimer's, and the other with Parkinson's disease.
I did not ask Sr. Loraine nor Karl how we should continue to honor our foreign missionaries. African missionary Mary W. Tyler Gray has done that with the conclusion to her book, " Stories of the Early American Missionaries in South Africa" (Mary W. Gray. P. C. Westwood, Printer, 1935, 71 pages. )
The harvest is abundant but the laborers
are few; so ask the master of the harvest
to
send out laborers for his harvest.
( Matthew 9-32-38 )
Wit 'n' Wisdom from Karl on Little Things...and
Losing His Wife to Heaven
[ Original length has been slightly shortened
]
A painting by 88-year-old Karl , a nature lover
"About Little Things... Joice has always loved birds, and there were plenty in Papua New Guinea. On one occasion when we were on a trip and visiting another mission station, Joice heard birds calling and watched a flock of the Bird of Paradise nest in a nearby tree. She was able to walk near the tree and observe them in all their beauty for some time. A little thing, but one never forgotten.
" Returning after one of our visits following Joice’s proton radiation [with her doctor ], we stopped at a rest area. While I went inside, Joice waited in the car. Suddenly a blue bird, one of her favorite birds, landed close to her, and they seemed to be aware of each other. It was an experience that she viewed as a sign of God’s hope for her. It was just “a little thing”, but the hope and joy it gave her and me was immense.
" Sometimes on April Fool’s Day, I would
try to do something unusual to fool Joice. Once I found a tree branch that I
fashioned into what could resemble a bird, if you had a good imagination... I planted it some distance from the house and
then called Joice to come and identify the "bird". She examined it
for some time, then ...discovered my joke. She laughed and laughed... Little
things, but just enough to make us talk about them again and again.
" Little things can be like that: they
can give us delight and make us thankful. When you pause and remember some of
the “little things” that have happened in your life, remember that God is not
only the creator of the universe, He is also the initiator of “little things,”
and these can be as marvelous to us as the Milky Way.
" I think a lot about the “little
things” that enhanced our marriage , and there is, thankfully, no shortage of
them.
"About
Grief... Joice gave me a small plaque which says, Happiness is being married
to your best friend. It stands alone in my study and reminds me that happiness
through marriage is not eternal, but love is.
" At one time or another, we all have
grief, anguish and pain that we call heartache, and it is difficult to describe. It is impossible to quantify,
although we may call it “deep” or “deep-seated” because it is so hard to
locate. It is extreme and pressing, profound and even unfathomable—there are
many words and expressions that we search for to get the feeling across. We
find it in our heart, mind, emotions and words.
"My wife Joice would not like to see me
like this: she would remind me of how faithful God has been to us, how He knew
the path our lives would take from beginning to end. She would be strong when I
am weak, accepting God’s pain and demonstrating it in her prayers and attitude.
When I think of her like that, it helps me, but it does not fill the emptiness
now in my life.
" It is now over a month since she died
and went to heaven. They tell me it will get easier as time goes on. I hope
that is true. However, recently I tried to clean out her desk, but after a few
moments I was overcome. The same thing happened when Karol, our daughter, came
to clean out Joice’s personal items in the bathroom. I had asked her to do this,
but when she saw my anguish, she said 'Maybe you had better not watch.' I
couldn’t—it was like I was throwing part of her away. So, it hasn’t gotten easier in the sense of my loss, and I am told that grief is like that.
" However, I do not want to grieve as
one who has no hope, nor do I wish to pray for her return. She is with God,
worshipping in heaven, with a new body. I am so thankful for that—it helps me
overcome some aspects of my grief.
"And Death... The traditional wedding vow goes like this: “ I, _____, take thee, _____, to be my wedded wife/husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do us part, according to God’s holy ordinance; and there to I pledge thee my faith.
" I’m sure I skipped over the phrase till death d o us part rather quickly, but once death parted us, I realize how serious that expression is. I can’t take it lightly because our parting here is final. For almost 65 years we fulfilled that vow, according to God’s holy alliance. That is also my comfort—needed badly now.
" Not many of you have been married as long as Joice and me were, but if you are married you have taken a vow. It is a sacred promise and a privilege to fulfill. "
God called Joice to heaven on March 22,2021. " I miss her terribly," he emailed me yesterday (June 3, 2024) " but have my daughter, her husband and 3 US grandchildren nearby. I am still living alone in Waco (Texas). "
On May 3 this year, missionary Karl Franklin was awarded an honorary doctorate degree (Doctor of Humane Letters) at the commencement exercises of the Dallas International University.
All comments welcomed
rrschwarz777@gmail.com
©2021, 2024 Robert R. Schwarz
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