Mabel Francis - One Shall Chase a Thousand

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One Shall Chase a Thousand
ISBN: 978-1-60066-264-5
LOC Catalog Card Number: 93-70740
1993 by Christian Publications, Inc.

Previously published by Christian Publications, Inc.
First Christian Publications edition 1993
First WingSpread Publishers edition 2014

All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America

3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Cover illustration 1993 by Karl Foster

Unless otherwise indicated
Scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE: NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION. 1973, 1978, 1984 by the International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House.
All rights reserved.

Miss Mabel Francis

Anne Dievendorf and Mabel Francis leave the Hiroshima airport for retirement.

Miss Francis spoke at a Labor Day rally in Lima, Ohio in 1948. The young people of the Toledo Gospel Tabernacle presented her with this motor scooter.

O n the occasion of the celebration of 100 years of Alliance ministry in the Land of the Rising Sun, it gives me great pleasure to write a foreword to One Shall Chase a Thousand.

Mabel Francis was here for more than 50 of those years. Whether in our churches or suffering in a Yokohama prison camp or in an audience with the Empress or other dignitaries, she preached Christ.

Miss Francis came to Japan with few worldly goods and left with the eternal wealth of hundreds of Japanese won to Christ. She received the highest honor the government ever bestowed on a foreigner. But beyond the praise of men, Miss Francis won the hearts of the Japanese people. A pastor once told me, Mabel Francis was one of us! That is the greatest compliment a missionary can receive.

Her preaching of Christ, her message of the Spirit-filled life, her deep love for the Japanese people and her sacrificial lifestyle still speak, though her lips are now silent. May her message speak to you through the pages of this book.

Richard C. Kropp

Field Director, Japan Alliance Mission

Tokyo, Japan

I t was the summer of 1945, just before the end of the great war in the Pacific, and the city of Tokyo was in ruins.

The long-range American bombers had become a scourge, spewing their destructive explosives on the Japanese cities, while desperate military and government leaders considered the few remaining alternatives to surrender.

Among the Japanese there was an impending sense of doom, but it could not be publicly confessed because of the traditions of super patriotism and loss of face.

Gaunt and weary Americans, still surviving after four exhausting years in Japanese internment and prison camps within the environs of Tokyo, realized their danger, too, as the American B-29 bombers made their runs high in the skies over the Tokyo targets.

But Mabel Francis was an exception. She had no personal fear for herself, because she had chosen to stay in Japan during the war in order to be on the scene to help the Japanese people when the war ended. Although she turned 65 years of age in that summer of 1945, her thoughts did not stray towards the prospect of retirement. She thought only of the great spiritual and emotional needs of the Japanese when the disaster of defeat would finally come.

Miss Francis and her sister, Mrs. Anne Dievendorf, were two of the surviving Americans in Tokyoand two of Gods great missionary nobility. With hunger pressing in upon them daily, they were waiting out the end of the war in a Catholic monastery which the Japanese had pressed into service as an alien internment camp.

The fires and destruction resulting from the bombings seemed to creep closer and closer to the institution housing women internees from several nations at war with the Japanese. Nightly they were herded by their Japanese jailors into the basement, as the sirens wailed the signal of American bombers overhead.

Anne, the junior sister in terms of age, was often near the point of nervous exhaustion. She had been in camp detention since the day after the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941.

So it was not surprising that on one of those August nights in 1945, huddling in the cellar and with bombing targets leaping into flames nearby, Anne whispered, Mabel, if they would make just one seconds mistake in letting those bombs go, they would fall on us!

But the senior sister had an amazing answer of faith for the terror of fear.

Anne, thats one thing we dont have to be afraid of, for we know why we are here. We have been here all this time at Gods command, and with His promise that one shall chase a thousand and two put ten thousand to flight. It just wouldnt read rightthat we stayed in Japan at Gods command only to be killed by mistake in an American bombing raid!

Faith was triumphant and the story does read right. And Mabel Francis is semi-retired at the age of 87, finally taking time off to tell it!

Written in 1968 by

Gerald B. Smith

I t did not seem possible that tiny Japan and the powerful United States of America could be on a collision course in 1941. But dark war clouds were hanging over Japan and I knew that I was under surveillance, for there was always a policeman stationed outside the door of my little missionary home in Matsuyama.

All Americans were suspects in Japan in those days prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor and the actual beginning of the war with America. It was a very hard time for missionaries. We couldnt do very much, we didnt have free access to travel and, worst of all, the Japanese people themselves were afraid to come to us, afraid to be seen talking with us. When the relations between the United States and Japan began deteriorating so rapidly in 1941, I had already been living in Japan for 32 years. The board of The Christian and Missionary Alliance in New York had altered its policy in 1909 to allow me, as a single woman, to sail for Japan to join the small missionary forces in these islands.

My brother, the Rev. Thomas Francis, had left an Alliance pastorate in New Jersey to come to Japan in 1913. He had enjoyed a very successful missionary career which emphasized the launching of new Mission churches. In 1941 however, he was home on furlough.

My sister, Anne, who had joined me in Japan in 1922 after the death of her husband, was located in the strategic city of Fujuyama on the large island of Honshu. I was on the other side of the Inland Sea, in the city of Matsuyama on the island of Shikoku.

Our missionary work had brought us very close to the hearts of many of the Japanese people and we knew that, as a whole, the people themselves did not want war. If it had been left to the people, war with all of its horror and death and destruction would not have been their will.