Skip Navigation

Going On

Every day, a sweet, seventy-eight-year-old lady stands in a room of filing cabinets and files insurance information and missionary financial reports one by one. She says one-sentence prayers for the missionaries as she slides their papers into manila folders.  

As Fran Weddle quietly serves behind the scenes at the ABWE home office, the casual observer wouldn’t know that deep within her heart, she cherishes memories from the jungle city of Iquitos, Peru. She remembers God’s watchful care as she once clung to the side of a riverboat during a windstorm on the Amazon River. She can still see the faces of the Peruvian women she discipled and the missionary children she taught. And she fondly recalls receiving hens as thank-you gifts.

Fran’s story begins in the 1930s, when she grew up in a Christian home in Iowa. Since her father was a farmhand who worked on Sundays, she wasn’t able to go to church until her teenage years when her sister could drive. Later, at a missions conference at Campus Baptist Church in Ames, Iowa, young Fran dedicated her life to missionary service. In her early twenties, she left home to study at Baptist Bible College, then joined ABWE in 1959.

As a single woman, Fran needed to raise only two hundred dollars a month to live in Iquitos, and she arrived there in December of 1961. Apart from the frustrations of slow communication back to the United States, she didn’t have a hard time adjusting to the primitive life and hot tropical climate. She was already used to rationing and being content with little, since she grew up during the hard times of the Great Depression.

Fran held classes for missionary children in a small chicken coop behind a missionary’s house. Over the years, dozens of missionary kids from the Brazilian and Peruvian Amazon were part of “Aunt Fran’s” classes. Andy and Diane Large, former students of Aunt Fran’s, say she had a genuine Christian walk of faith and a real gift with witty, spur-of-the-moment puns. “She has been a gift from God in our lives,” they say, “and she is to this day, because we know she prays for our family regularly.”

When Fran wasn’t teaching, she was visiting homes, discipling women and girls, and comforting and encouraging those who suffered sorrow. For thirty-five years, she poured out her life for others and for the sake of the gospel.

Although she no longer receives hens as thank-you gifts, Fran continues to faithfully serve her Lord and confidently admits that it’s through prayer that God has wrought His work in her life and the lives of those for whom she has prayed. Whether in Peru or in the ABWE Finance Department, she has had joy in knowing that she is doing what God wants her to do. Her journey has been one marked by resilience, contentment, and constancy.

When asked for her advice to future generations, Fran told an illustration she heard from Dr. John Patton: “Americans and American Indians were sitting around a campfire swapping advice when one American asked the Indian chief for his words of wisdom. The chief said, “Go on. Go on. Go on. Go on.”

To this, Fran adds her own application, “People tend to lay their lives on the altar as Romans 12:1 commands. But then they get up and walk away—they take them back. I believe that commitment is for your whole life.”

Fran Weddle is just one example of many people who have served with ABWE and have done so with total commitment for the long haul. They are the gold that runs through ABWE’s foundation. Their example encourages us to go on, and their prayers sustain us.