The View From the Right Seat

July 2010
For such a disciplined bunch, pilots can be oddly irrational at times. Especially when the guy with the clipboard jots a surreptitious note in the margin of your evaluation form. Or when the simulated instrument flight is wed to a simulated instrument failure and, impossibly, the engine suddenly "fails" at the wicked hand of a grinning check pilot. When you jump from one checklist to another wondering what you missed while a very real million-dollar airplane sighs heavily and starts a downward trek to the very real earth below. Read More...

Soil, Sheep, and the Work of a King

March 2010
Is it hard to believe that God still delights in the feeling of moist, fertile soil scooped up in his earth‐creating fingers. Impossible to imagine that he still cares to cradle a frightened lamb in his world‐embracing arms? That he laughs at the display of a dancing earthworm? Or smiles in a face full of wool? Is there more than just toil in one’s work? Is there also joy, and purpose, and a lesson in reconciliation? Read More...

Move Against the Fear

July 2009
For fifteen days I traveled through central Africa. Into the middle of the continent, and the middle of some of the worst humanitarian disasters in the world. Our objective was to gauge the state of the church here, if there was one, and to learn how to re-engage these lands with a renewed missionary effort. What do you take on a trip like that? Good boots and a Bible. A notebook and an open mind. And, if you dare, an open heart.
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Downsizing

April 2009
But freedom, as they say, isn't free. For me, today, it's $24.98 plus tax. The cost of one multi-function injection-moulded plastic container (with lid) perfectly proportioned for airline travel and robust enough for many round-trips. The "Action Packer" is a staple of missionary life as I know it. A product crafted by the good people at Rubbermaid. It was likely envisioned for the purpose of amassing and storing people's stuff, but has the curious ability to also reduce it. Read More...

Man with a Message

February 2008
Kibera is perhaps one of the largest shanty towns in the world. A place bustling with life. And a place where it is painfully obvious that life is cheap. Today, the streets and footpaths of Kibera bear the marks of a war zone. Read More...

A Hill in the Heart of Congo

November 2007
At the end of the day, or at the end of lifetime, a mission station is still more than buildings or the presence of a missionary. It is a place where out of the chaos of a forest, a hospital emerges, and out of the darkness which engulfs a society, a church emerges. It is the work of men and women like Earl and Helena. And it is the work of God.
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Whole

September 2007
All forty-four gathered in the main rehabilitation room. They sat on floor mats, a mass of giggles and crutches. Each wore a blue tee-shirt with the John Paul motto wrinkled across the back, borne of the Apostle John: "that they may have life abundant." Read More...

Lost and Found in Sudan

March 2007
Panther Bior tugged at my elbow. "How many more miles?" he asked. I looked at the GPS, turned back toward him and shouted above the roar of the airplane engine, "Fifteen." "Fifteen," he said and paused thoughtfully, "that is good." Read More...

Remember the Fall

March 2006
I walked quickly to catch up with the group and, coming alongside Joshua, I matched my pace to his. The low, late afternoon sun brought a reprieve from the awful heat of the day, and we made our way down a sandy road toward a village Read More...

Hauling Salt

September 2005
Well this is a new one. I check the airstrip list and scan a thousand odd names to find my next destination. With an often-repeated series of twists and toggles, I can program the latitude and longitude into the GPS computer and instantly get a course, distance and ETA - only fifteen minutes away, roughly southeast from my present position over the vast and featureless Sudan Read More...

The Volunteers

June 2005
From the four corners of America to the mysterious reaches of East and Central Africa... Professionals, students, moms, and every variety of church lay-people pack their bags and brave the vaccinations. They come to Africa on a mission. Read More...

What's in a Word?

October 2004
We sat hunched over on goatskins, in a dark, steamy, somewhat smelly hut of sticks and grass and cardboard. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dim light, after coming in from the blazing sun of a Kenyan afternoon. Read More...

From the Front Lines to the Refrigerator Door

April 2004
Home again – in the familiar pew of a hometown church, I touch the wood and upholstery and then look down to see the scuffed leather of my familiar shoes set against the deep, clean carpet. My mind wanders for a moment and I imagine these same shoes against the red dirt of Kenya where they were just a few short weeks ago. Read More...

Walking With the Sudanese

November 2003
Heat. Flies. Black cotton soil. All of them stick to you like glue. The heat can top 120 degrees plus humidity, the flies simply will not leave you be, and the mud cakes so thickly to your shoes you cannot lift your feet. Some areas are dotted with sparse vegetation, and others are thick with trees. Blue sky, brown dirt, and muted greens and yellows in the grass - in every direction it is the color of earth and bearing little resemblance to the twenty-first century. Read More...

In the Fight

June 2003
My wife looked quizzically at me after I got the call. “I thought you hated Congo flights?” A hint of excitement must have been evident on my face. After all, I was just called in to finish off a week-long evacuation out of Bunia, a volatile little town in eastern Congo. Read More...

Common Grace in an Uncommon Place

March 2003
Frozen boogers on my sleeve. Fingers numb, dizzy from a lack of oxygen and chilled through five layers of clothing, I pull myself up the final rock wall here at sixteen thousand feet above sea level. It’s 5am…a bright full moon setting in the west and the promise of a new sun on the eastern horizon. Mild hypoxia continues to slowly take its toll… Read More...

God in the Chaos

September 2002
A refugee camp looks a bit like the aftermath of a tornado. Scattered about in the open grass are clothes and pots and people. The stuff of many otherwise organized lives, and the very lives of those who have fled look as though they are littering a hillside with nowhere to cook their dinner, nowhere to lay their heads. Read More...

Flying Congo - Two days on the Job

July 2002
Tuesday morning, 4:30 am, I jump out of bed two minutes before the alarm clock sounds; my mind is in full gear, even anticipating my wake-up call. A flight uniform and a well worn pair of boots are laid out and I get dressed like someone who has done this a thousand times. I grab my overnight bag, stuff my passport into a zippered side pocket on my cotton khakis, and spend a few moments sitting in bed next to Renee. Read More...

A Tribute to "the Guys on the Floor"

June 2002
Seven thousand feet below me, lost in a greenish mist, is a canopy of tightly packed trees. It stretches before me for hundreds of miles, and creeps behind for hundreds more. I’m flying over the rain forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly known as Zaire, and simply known to us as “the congo.” Smack down in the middle of the continent of Africa my flight takes me over not only dense forest but over an unforgiving land ripped by wars and sad, brutal histories. Read More...

A Beautiful Sound

February 2002
Snap.snap.snap.snap.snap. A cool and dim dawn hour awakes to the sound of high-voltage igniters firing steadily as the engine compressor spins to life with a speedy whine. The Cessna Caravan begins its start sequence: Starter engaged, igniters on, fuel on, a whoosh and a low rumble as the gas generator lights. Engine revolutions build with a dry, metallic-like whir as the nine-foot propeller disk paddles the morning air. Read More...

The Great American Road Trip

June 2001
So much road. So many white lines ticking away aside our little Honda at 65 miles per hour. Two thoughts constantly cross my mind. Where do we get all this asphalt? And why can’t we send some to Africa? For seven weeks this Spring, the country opened up before us over five thousand odd miles of America. Read More...

What is Misssionary Aviation?

January 2001
It’s hot, it’s tiring, it’s a foreign landscape unfolding before you at a hundred and fifty miles per hour. Read More...