Many years ago, I was challenged by the words of Gandhi to the missionary E. Stanley Jones, as reported in Jones’s book, Gandhi: Portrait of a Friend (Abbington Press, 1948). In response to a question by Jones asking how Christianity could be made more indigenous to the national life of India, Gandhi replied: “First, I would suggest that all of you Christians, missionaries and all, must begin to live more like Jesus Christ. Second, practice your religion without adulterating it or toning it down. Third, emphasize love and make your working force, for love is essential to Christianity. Fourth, study the non-Christian religious more sympathetically to find the good that is within them, in order to have a more sympathetic approach to the people.”
Jones was dreaming of a Christian India; Gandhi was dreaming of an India that lived like Christ. Bold and purposeful dreams that would take purposeful people to enact them. The dream of Jones for India can be ours as well.
Victor E. Frankl, who wrote Man’s Search for Meaning (Pocket Books, 1959), was a Jewish psychiatrist who spent years in Nazi concentration camps. He noted that a peculiarity of man is that he can only live meaningfully by looking into the future. Prisoners who lost the potential of the future lost the will to live, and with that loss, they lost their spiritual hold. “Usually this happened quite suddenly, in the form of a crisis… Usually, it began with the prisoner refusing one morning to get dressed and wash or to go out to the parade grounds. No entreaties, no blows, no threats had any effect. He just lay there, hardly moving…. He simply gave up. There he remained, lying in his own excreta, and nothing bothered him anymore.”
Sometimes we may feel that we have so much to do that we cannot even dream. But Frankl reminds us that mental health is based on a degree of tension between what has already been achieved and on what one still ought to accomplish, “or the gap between what one is and what one should become. Such a tension is inherent to the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental well-being.”
It seems obvious to me that everyone should have a dream. In faith, we should pray and pursue that dream. It should of course be Biblical, extending to the needs of the world and answering those needs through the power of the Gospel.
However, this kind of dreaming is taking chances. You can’t know if your dream will happen. There may be some opposition, friendly fire, perhaps, but it is deadly. I may believe with all my heart—as I happen to—that the dream of reaching small language groups through a strategy of Bible storytelling is the best and right one, but I could be wrong.
Nevertheless, because I have some inkling that God may be directing me (and most often that is all I get), it seems best to follow it, rather than ignore it.
It is now many years since I wrote a piece about dreaming and gave it at a school function. In the very year I completed the essay, we went back to PNG to assist in the revision of the West Kewa NT. The main translator for that work was a man called Wopa Eka, from the village of Usa. He had a burden for the revision of the NT and had contacted two years earlier. He had dreams for his people and worked hard to accomplish them.
Our dream was to help him and to return to PNG and we wondered if it would be possible. At that time Joice was 70, enjoying her job and our Texas grandchildren, and wondered how we could feasibly return. At that point, my dream may not have been hers, but we returned in 2002 to work with Wopa. Joice saw her objections overcome: an older lady who was 80 and had been my secretary reminded Joice that she had years to serve. They found someone to take over Joice’s job and our Waco family decided to go to Ecuador to four years as missionaries.
Our dream to see the WK NT revised was accomplished by means of three separate trips to PNG and working by Internet with Wopa from the U.S. on revisions. In the June 2004, the NT was dedicated and Wopa immediately began working on the OT. His dream and ours was to see the whole Bible in West Kewa. I wrote a book called “Good Morning Jesus”—The story of Wopa Eka, Translator and Friend and it was published in 2013. My dream was that the book would be used by the Bible Translation of PNG, who published the book. to encourage other national translators. That dream has not happened. Wopa died in May of 2013 and the work progressed slowly, then stalled, since that time. However, the dream is still there.
Rose Lomba (aka Rose Poto) also had a dream: she wanted to see the New Testament translated and published in East Kewa. She became acquainted with Wopa and began to crusade for the translation. Our dream was realized by means of a transfer from WK to EK using both computer technology and a wide range of EK men and women who revised the work. The dream came true in a dedication at Kagua in July of 2005.
We still dream that the distributed New Testaments will be widely used and that the OT will be translated and published. Our part now is to pray and contribute financially as we are able. And, of course, we continued to dream about the Kewa people and PNG.
[revised from my thoughts of April 2002]
Karl Franklin
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