When I met Aileen Coleman, I was 18 years old, and I had not yet surrendered my life to Jesus Christ. My summer job was arranging tours of the Bible lands for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. One of our stops was at “the crossroads of the Middle East,” where an ancient road from Jerusalem to Baghdad crossed a route from Jordan to Damascus.
Mafraq is Arabic for “crossroad,” and that’s what this village was called. In Mafraq, we visited the Annoor Sanatorium for Chest Diseases, which specialized in treating tuberculosis, a lung disease that was endemic among the nomadic Bedouin people who lived in tents on the edge of the dusty Syrian desert.
Annoor was run by two remarkable women, a doctor named Eleanor Soltau who was a childhood friend of my mother, and an Australian nurse named Aileen Coleman. This part of the Middle East long has been a man’s world, and they were challenging the entrenched culture.
Aileen and Eleanor didn’t match my old stereotype of missionaries. They were gutsy and tough as nails, much like my grandparents. Yet they were warm, gracious and every ounce Christian ladies. They were in the process of building a new hospital when I first met them.
The more I heard these two dedicated women share their stories with the tour groups, the more I felt the urge to help them. I began to think about how much fun it would be to drop out of school for a while and help them build that new hospital. But I doubted my parents would ever go for it.
The hospital had only one beat-up car, because the others had been stolen by Palestinian guerrillas in an uprising against the king of Jordan. Their need for a better vehicle sparked an idea. Maybe I could convince my folks that I was needed in Jordan for some missionary work, after all.
When I got home, I said to my father, “I’ve been praying about the mission field.” Of course, this was a bunch of hogwash—I didn’t pray much, and certainly never about becoming a missionary. I proposed to him that the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association help these missionaries by purchasing a desert-equipped Land Rover in London, and I would personally drive it to Jordan. I sold my favorite sports car, a Triumph TR6, to pay for the trip, and persuaded my friend Bill Cristobal to come along. We drove the Land Rover to Dover, England, and took the ferry across the English Channel. Then we set out on an intercontinental journey—via France, Switzerland, Austria, Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, Syria and Lebanon. In a sense, I was roaming like a Bedouin.
Aileen never doubted the power of prayer. One day the hospital faced a $500 need and she asked me, “Franklin, will you pray for this need?” I considered myself a Christian, so I knew the prayer lingo. But I didn’t have the heartfelt conviction—the faith—to back it up. The next week, I was mixing concrete one afternoon when Eleanor came running, waving a slip of paper. “See, Franklin? Look! God answered your prayer.”
She showed me a check for $480. I joked that she needed to tell God He was $20 short—I definitely had an attitude. But through Aileen’s ministry, God began showing me how He answers prayer and how He could use me in His work. It was in Jordan where I first felt the Lord calling me to help the disadvantaged people of the world.
Mafraq was still on my heart in 1973 when I asked my father about ways to raise funds for the ministry in Jordan. He invited me to attend his Atlanta Crusade, where he introduced me to Dr. Bob Pierce, the founder of Samaritan’s Purse. I invited Bob to visit Jordan, and Samaritan’s Purse became a longtime supporter of Mafraq.
The Lord worked through Aileen to set my life on His path. The following summer, after my parents challenged me to make a decision about Jesus Christ—follow Him, or reject Him—I prayed in repentance and faith to receive Christ as my Lord and Savior. Two years later, Bob Pierce took me on a world tour to show me “the things that break the heart of God,” and in 1978, when he was dying of leukemia, he asked me to run Samaritan’s Purse.
All of this can be traced back to the day a young lady in Australia answered God’s call to serve in the Middle East. Praise God for the life of His servant, Aileen!
