“It’s a sad day for Kenya,” said Michael E. Ranneberger, the American ambassador to Kenya. “My biggest worry now is violence, which, let’s be honest, will be along tribal lines.” (Full NYT article here)


(Photo NYT)

We have been in a state of "lock-down" on our compound today, in the heart of Nairobi. Black smoke is billowing above the treetops just a block or two away. The crack of gunfire ocassionally breaks the errie silence of a city come to a standstill. Kenyans went to the polls on Thursday last week for their presidential elections, and things have not progressed well over the weekend. Here is a link to a current New York Times report about the chaos we are witnessing, and with a little browsing online you can probably come to your own conclusions about the election. I'll keep my opinion to myself. But as you pray for us, perhaps you can pray for this country too. That's what we're doing tonight.

It's Christmas eve here in Kenya, and the kids are getting ready for bed... on that night above all other nights when kids can't wait to get to bed. It's fun to re-live the anticipation of Christmas morning through the eyes of our children. We talked about anticipation at dinner tonight. Imagining how Mary must have felt. Wondering what the wise men talked about on their long journey chasing the star. We have the ceramic nativity scene set up as we have every year, and I find that I can still get lost in it. I remembered a short devotional I wrote a few years back about just that. I don't think I have ever posted it, so I've copied it below. And I still count myself among the shepherds...

"Baby Jesus lost an arm this Christmas. I heard the telltale sound of ceramic and fireplace brick colliding at our mantle downstairs. A speedy investigation caught the culprits red-handed – our four-year-old clutching the bed of hay (minus the baby) and his little neighbor friend with a helpless little lamb in his grip. They looked up at me speechless for a moment, and then proceeded to blame each other for the mishap. I gave my son a swift reprimand for disobeying mom's orders not to touch the manger scene, and his friend was sent home. I then got out the super glue and easily fixed the babe's little arm, and set him back in place under the tender gaze of Mary. I paused a moment and looked at the familiar scene of our Christmas tradition. On the one side three wise men stood bearing gifts, themselves adorned in rich clothing. Even their camels were ornate. In the middle were the tired couple and the baby, and one angel to represent a multitude of heavenly hosts presumably. And on the other side, was the riff-raff: Two shepherds in rags trailing smelly animals. Standing there and pondering the arrangement, it occurred to me how much theology was wrapped up in that scene. Kings to pay homage to the King of Kings. Angels bow down. God using the simple things to shame the wise – a teenage girl, a stable, and Immanuel lying in hay. And the shepherds. What else could they be there for except to show that everyone was welcome? Looking at the array above our fireplace, I wondered where I would be standing if I could enter the scene. Of course, I would be with them. We all would. In fact, on closer examination, it becomes apparent that even the wise men are “dressed in rags” as they kneel before the child. This ceramic rendition of the greatest story ever told has always had a central spot in our home each December. Now I remember why it also has the centerpiece of our hearts. Because what I saw in the guilty eyes of my young son as he blamed his friend, is what I see in my own broken nature, and what I imagine it looked like in the garden some time back when Adam pointed a finger at Eve. We are a hopeless mess. But hope, it seems, came unexpectedly and wrapped in swaddling clothes. And since then, Christmas can be summed up in three words far too profound for my little head… God. With. Us.

Makes Ho-Ho-Ho seem a little empty huh?"

(From our December 07 newsletter)

November 11, 1997... November 11, 2007
Renee and I marked ten years today. We flew off to Africa for the first time exactly a decade ago – young, broke, bright eyed, and ready to change the world. It seems like a lifetime already, and like yesterday.

While we don't count ourselves "old" just yet, we have surely grown. Looking back over the past ten years, the first thing that comes to mind is how thankful we are to have something to look back on. There was a time when we thought this adventure would be short-lived.

I remember a year or so into our first term, when Renee cried a little too regularly and I retreated to the work. Stressed and somewhat downtrodden, we hid away the credit cards lest we buy a ticket home on impulse and go, Jonah like, in the exact opposite direction of God's gentle, leading hand. We looked for reasons to stay, and looked for a vision of ourselves five or ten years into it – one where we could see the point of what seemed like such a great sacrifice. But despite the clearly awesome ministry before us, we couldn't see it. Wiser missionaries told us to stick it out. And they were right.

For a new missionary, youth and a US passport are an insurance policy. In them are the knowledge that you can always go back and make a new start if things don't work out quite right. We held on to these, for a long time unknowingly, as an "exit strategy" of sorts in our endeavor. And as the years moved on, we sometimes struggled to see our youth slip away. Ten years later, it seems much less important. Thirty-six years old now, still relatively broke, the passports represent less of an exit and more of an entry into other possible ministries in other lands somewhere down the road. And our security is not wrapped up in job-potential anymore, but in a faithful God with a history of meeting our needs. This has been a priceless lesson, and really just a footnote to the broader lessons and insights of a decade of ministry.

I have flown actively, and safely, as a mission pilot for four terms. I've logged three to four thousand hours over Africa - the individual hours representing distances that would otherwise be measured in days or weeks of travel without an airplane. I don't know exactly how to measure the impact of all that flying on Christ's Kingdom, but I am not unaware that it is probably very large. These skills have sustained ministries, rescued people in distress, brought hope to hopeless places, and encouragement to other missionaries contemplating their own exit strategies.

The mission airplane simply plays a supporting role in the wondrous drama of God at work at the ends of the earth. It is a backdrop to churches planted, lives transformed, and such ordinary things as hospitals built, wells dug, and people cared for. In Africa, wherever redemption and remoteness meet, there you will find airplanes and pilots. Being counted among them, in my muddied boots and tattered flight shirt, to save the day or simply be humbled again, has been an awesome privilege.

For Renee, the privilege is yet one more step removed as she graciously assumes a supporting role to my supporting role. Time has not changed the difficult reality of this second-hand blessing – the life of a pilot's wife. But time has revealed the importance of her contribution. Renee is my anchor. As I go out from day to day to wrestle thunderstorms and evil men, as I grit my teeth and face the chaos with a courage easily mistaken as my own, the truth is that I only have the nerve for this work because I have Renee behind me.

I have learned to appreciate her like I never could, I don't think, carving out a life of comfort in America. With an unfettered view of Africa's awful dark corners, I have had my naivety shocked by the reality of humanity's inhumanity, stirring me closer to my precious wife and kids. Renee has slept through many nights without me. And she's slept through as many with me awake at her side, meditating on life's fragility, knowing that every day has been a gift. These years have been stressful for our marriage. And they have been like glue.

This valuable perspective has not only brought about an unexpected closeness in our family, but it has also challenged my presumptions about God. Part of me came here, I think, to see what God looked like in Africa – if the idea of God made any sense here. What I have found is a God less predictable, but more real, than I ever knew. His hidden ways are like a metaphysical mountain sometimes, especially when confronting the misery that defines Africa. But His ways seem more and more right as I grow older. More simply, God has grown very big to me whilst serving here. And I appreciate more and more the feeling of being small.

The enormity of Africa's problems contribute to that feeling of smallness. They are saddening, and there's not much we can do about them on a human scale. The depth of human sin, impervious to the world's programs and projects, yields only to the life-changing power of God. Changed hearts are the only hope for Africa, but this is true anywhere in the world. As a missionary sent to this particular place, our task is not to save the world. Our task is simple obedience to the Master who, in His way and in His time, will do the saving. Understanding our "calling" to this work as obedience to God has helped us to see the reasons for sticking it out. We are not striving toward some puny human goal, but instead resting in a God who works in us and around us, and remarkably, through us.

These past ten years are full of fleeting glimpses of God's redemptive work... I hear a little girl squeal with joy at the sight of her mother. The two, reunited on the parking ramp of a war-torn old airstrip in eastern Congo, were separated in the onslaught of ethnic fighting and the girl lost to the forest. She was found months later and placed on my airplane. She runs into her mothers arms just beneath the wing of it, and I will never forget the sight. I see a Sudanese pastor hoisted upon the shoulders of a village, the whole assembly bursting into song as they celebrate his return, surrounding the plane, shaking the earth. I see a ragged portion of the Bible painstakingly translated, delivered by air, clutched to the chest – to the heart – of an old woman in a hut of sticks and thatch. I hear a sigh of relief from a weary missionary on a patch of mud flanked by thunderstorms as I unload two thousand pounds of medicines to her isolated clinic, "Thank God you got in, we ran out of supplies yesterday." I am hugged by a young Sudanese man, his mouthful of crooked teeth calling me "brother" on a neglected strip in the middle of what I consider to be nowhere. There is no such thing of course. God is everywhere. It's only that you need an airplane to see that it is true for Africa.

Through the eyes of a pilot and a plane, these years have offered a window into what God is doing here. And they have revealed His purposes in us amid the process – through the uncertain moments, the heart-stopping, the heart-wrenching, and the glorious. How do you measure the value of such a gift? And how do you say "thank you" to those who have prayed, and paid, your way?

It has been interesting to look back at ten years of ministry and come out with a singular, tremendous feeling of being blessed. One would gather that ten years would add up to some sum of what has been given or sacrificed. Yet this journey has been our gain. And now we see the future a little differently than we did when we were twenty-five.

This was a full week, even though I flew only 4 days of it. I slept soundly last night, spent.

Nine hours in the air on Sunday started it off. Up to Kenya's northern border with another pilot and then solo into Sudan flying for a small mission agency. I took five or six men back home, to one of the furthest points we fly to. It was good to fly in a straight line again. The rains have left Sudan. It's dry, and hot again. Soon the dust will churn up in layers of belligerent winds to obscure the sky. But we can still fly straight through it, even if we can't see a thing. The autopilot helped me a lot this day. I would miss it tomorrow.

Monday was a harder day. I was in one of our little planes, a Cessna 206, the one controllers at Lokichoggio affectionately call the "mosquito." It's slow, and the vast spaces of Sudan just seem too big for such a crawl. 99 knots when loaded and pointed into a light breeze. But it is economical to fly, and lots of missionaries like to use it. I went as far on Monday as I did on Sunday, but it took a lot longer. The place to which were going was a new airstrip for me. I knew nothing but a few coordinates which I hoped were right. They weren't. When we arrived overhead, there wasn't even a clearing in the scraggly trees to call a runway. A few miles to my left, however, looked promising, and so I wandered over that way. I figured this was it, but the runway still eluded my discerning eye. There was a village, and all kinds of clearings. I have a standard procedure for such questionable landing areas. I line up to land in one of the clearings, and if the passengers start yelling and making a fuss... then it's probably not the runway. I picked right on the first try and rolled out on a rough, whitened plain of dusty soil and stopped where the huts were. The guys were elated to be home and thanked me several times. I managed a smile even though my rear-end was aching from the four hour journey. So I took a walk around the plane a few times before strapping back in for the four hour trip home. It was a rough trip back, one of those times when flying looses some of its allure.

Tuesday started early with an impossible load to fit in such a small plane. It was for missionaries going "home" to their post, and I didn't want to deny them any little thing I could possibly squeeze in. So I took near an hour to pack, jam, unload and reload, rearrange and tie it all down. We were clearly underweight... but the bulk of it threatened to pop the doors open in mid-air. I wiggled in with the three passengers and blasted off for a glorious half-hour flight. Arriving at the mountain-top airstrip, I was delighted with the light winds, which would otherwise threaten my ability to take off down the valley with them on my tail. This place is possibly the roughest we go into. No matter how smoothly I roll the wheels onto the grass, it still rattles my brains, and ejects the contents of the glove compartment all over the cockpit.

These wonderful folks were happy to be "home." A middle-aged missionary couple, with their son back from boarding school, here to spend Christmas on the mountain. Some of that stuff I so laboriously packed in the plane was their Christmas stuff. They thanked me. They asked me to thank my wife... for supporting me as a pilot. Because without the pilot, they would have no ministry here. I made a note to encourage Renee with that, and actually did some time after I got home.

But I wasn't home yet, and even the taxi to the top of the airstrip before my takeoff roll proved to be a challenge. As I maneuvered around mounds of dirt and spots of soil that looked soft enough to sink into, I hit a little rise with the right wheel and spun around to the left, burying my right wing in the shrubbery. Stuck on a dry airstrip. The guys are going to get a laugh out of this one, I thought. I shut down the engine and got a little help pushing the plane into the clear. I hopped back in and blasted off, leaving the contents of the glove compartment, once again, all over the cabin. As I raised the flaps and gently curled the airplane around a ridge, I tuned the HF radio just in time to get a call from Nairobi.

"There's a medivac at Lokotok. They need you there immediately." And so I continued the turn, right past the heading I set for home, and direct to my new destination. "Standby for an ETA," I blared back into the radio, and leveled off. It was all downhill from here, Lokotok being a little dirt strip at the foot of another mountain nearby.

Here is a mission station where a team of young and old missionaries are starting a new work, and training in ministry at the same time. One of the young women, betrayed by her mountain bike, was there at the airstrip in a shoddily tied sling and a bit of road rash across her face. I re-tied the sling for her broken shoulder, thanks to years of boy scout training, for what Nairobi Hospital would later call a "first-rate" job.

For all the reasons missionaries look forward to the sound of an approaching airplane, injury and illness are high on the list of good ones. I got to fly the little "mosquito" all the way back to Nairobi for my battered passenger, going up high and zig-zagging around clouds to keep the flight as smooth as possible. I did a reasonably good job at it, but was most thankful for the steady tailwind that graced our trip home - 127 knots... not too shabby for the 206.

I guess I didn't get enough rest on Wednesday and Thursday because when I got up at 4:30 in the morning on Friday, I secretly wished I was a banker and not a pilot. What a silly thought. What banker gets to pierce an overcast sky at sunrise to be embraced by the warm, sunny blue expanse which is reserved for men who fly? I pointed the Caravan east. To Somalia. Americans don't go there these days, so we only fly this way for local mission agencies with Kenyan staff. Two and a half hours in, a quick drop-off, and two and a half out. At the destination, a good straight length of grass in the eastern third of the country, we are met by a man named Mohammed, naturally, and a contingent of soldiers. They are all very friendly. It's just that the country as a whole is not, and so I cannot waste any time on the ground. I make greetings and hand out a few newspapers. The folks I just dropped off are careful to remind me to pick them up again in a week. I smile a confident grin... of course we'll pick you up. It is a pretty flight home, just me and the fair-weather cumulous clouds. I have time to listen to a sermon on my iPod and feel at home there above the world for a while. Among all the things I'm thankful for at that moment, it being Friday is certainly one of them.

Yeah, I was spent last night... but in the best kind of way.