By Rev. J.W. Frank
With your permission I will use your paper to reach our friends in Mount Airy. We wish them to know that we still cherish in our memory the pleasure of having their fellowship while living among them, and of their affection which we feel still abides.
One year of worship with the congregation of the Central Methodist church, where we were privileged to hear preaching and singing in our native tongue, was a most helpful experience. Nevertheless, we had goodly fellowship with other communions; and our denominational loyalty must not be misunderstood for sectarian bigotry. The fact that the Central Methodist church and its Sunday school are paying our salary and devoutly praying for us is very comforting and helpful to us in our reflections and activities. In moments of meditation and ecstasy we delight to think of our friends as communing with us by way of the throne of God while fervently praying for us. God’s children have been using the wireless telephone for ages. How blessed are they whose unceasing petitions and supplications reach the sympathetic ears of a loving Heavenly Father! And how poor and unwitting are those who have been taught about the true God and yet are not on speaking terms with him through unceasing prayer!
Mr. Editor, when you once suggested to me that the missionaries should, or might, have feelings or visions of rapture not common to others, I may not have seemed to corroborate your surmise as you expected, inasmuch as I have always felt that missionaries, in common with all Christian workers, should think of themselves as unprofitable servants after they have done their utmost.
However, I have repeatedly stated my conviction that missionaries are the happiest people I know. Furthermore, recent experience leads me to agree with you that we are entitled to special ecstacies, not because of superior goodness, but possibly as a gracious compensation for deprivations. If our deprivations have their remuneration then we may not be making such great sacrifices as our friends sometimes think.
Mrs. Frank contracted influenza about the middle of February. Before recovering from that she took something like inflammatory rheumatism caused by poisoning from septic tonsils. While this was ats worst she took pneumonia in her left side, though not of a very malignant form. Though confined to her bed for two months, with fever much of the time, she did not fail to eat a single meal. We are 13 hours’ ride by boat from our nearest American friends, and 33 hours’ ride by boat from the nearest white doctor. But Mrs. Demaree and Miss Bennett came by turns to stay with her and to prescribe suitable diet. A good trained nurse was sent from Kobe, and two Japanese doctors proved to be efficient. After she was able to leave her bed we all came to Kobe that she might be under the care of Dr. Barker and to have a chance. She is now well except her tonsils where she may have taken out when we pass through here in July en route to our summer home.
We are enjoying our stay in this city with a population one hundred times as great as that of Mount Airy.
Kobe, Japan, April 29, 1921
J.W. Frank
From the front page of The Mount Airy News, Thursday, May 26, 1921
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