Christmas Humor

Heather and I missed out on seeing my side of the family in Arizona this Christmas. But we got some pictures via email that made us laugh very hard! Somebody decided to bring the pony, Flirt, into the house on Christmas and get the kiddos on it for some pictures! How funny! Here's a couple of those pictures.  

Monte and his little niece Isla

Danny and Maureen pose with Isla too

Logan and Isla

Isla with her mommy (my twin sister!) Kelly check out Flirt the pony!!

Logan the cowboy!

Monte pauses in wonderment over the fact that there's a horse in the house.

Well not only did we miss out on the chance to see them over Christmas, but possibly our only opportunity to ever see a horse inside a house!!  Thanks for the pictures Kelly and we miss you guys!

Elise and Jacoby at Thanksgiving

During Thanksgiving we got together at Dale and Tammy's place. At one point we got "the kiddos" Elise and her cousin Jacoby outside for a little photo shoot. Here's some of the highlights of the pics of Elise and Jacoby, and a few with Heather and Amanda and Zach too!

Elise's Birthday Pigout

Elise had quite a weekend last weekend.  She celebrated her first birthday, or as we called it, her "first birthday extravaganza!!"  Her actual birthday was on Friday.  And she had two birthday parties.  On Saturday she had one at Grandma Ellen's house, and on Sunday at Grandpa Mark's house!  Her auntie Holly made Elise two separate little cakes, one for each party, and boy did she tear into them!  There's a bunch of pictures above of her devouring her two cakes, as well as some other pictures from her parties.  Elise's favorite moment was when we all gathered around to sing her happy birthday.  The look on her face said "A whole room of people....singing to me.....how fantastic!!" When the singing and her own personal cake happened the second night in a row, she was sure this is what life was going to be like from then on....every night people sing to you and give you a cake!

Elise's Birthday....A Teaser

The first video is the "trailer" for Elise's birthday. Starring Elise herself. After that I will post a few extra videos on here of "bonus footage".

Christmas is in the air!!

Elise had a big day today!  She crawled on hands and knees "un-assisted" momentarily for the first time (very briefly).  Heather was there to shoot a few pics.

We have been trying to convince her that this method is faster and easier than scooting around on her butt, which she has pretty much mastered.  The truth is, to do something new like this, Elise needs the proper motivation.  Notice the little cheerio on the floor below.  

Elise experienced her "first snow" today:

We got a pretty good snow today.  Rumor has it most of the country got a piece of it.  So maybe you had snow today too!

The reason I put elise's "first snow" in quotation marks above, is because I am sure Elise will have many first snows.  The truth is, she was born in the snow up in Grand Rapids (well not born in the snow but, well you know what I mean...quit your snickering Zack Keith!).  But there's no way she remembers that.  When we bring her out there, it is new to her.  The beauty of it is, when it snows next year I am sure she won't remember this year!  And then when we come home on furloughs in the future, I am sure she won't remember the snow from when she was two years old!  So we look forward to many first snows with Elise!!

Elise has proved to be a fast learner.  We caught her playing some Christmas songs on the piano with Grandma Ellen.

And if you've heard the rumor about Santa missing a reindeer, it's true, and we found her!!

But when we brought her back to Santa, I'm not sure she was buying it.

Nope.  She knows the real Santa and that's definitely not him.

Elise is having alot of fun with the "little people" nativity set that Grandma Robin sent her.  How cute!  Thanks Grandma Robin!

Our little angel!

Pictures!

Here's a bunch of random pictures from the last month we want to share! We received a special visit from our friends Jeffrey, Bethany and their son Zeke a couple weeks ago. Two months ago, they were our neighbors in Michigan! Now they visited us passing through Missouri. There's some pics of Elise playing in the leaves with Zeke. There's a couple cool shots out the airplane window coming home from Boise. Of course, there's plenty pictures of Elise!

Elise's New-Found Mobility!

Just in the last few days Elise has really figured out how to get to something she wants. Does she crawl? No! Does she walk? No! How-about army-crawl? Nope! How does she do it?!! Watch and find out:

Halloween fun

Elise got together with her cousins Josie, Elladie, and Jacoby on halloween.  There was a whole lot of cute goin' on!  The day before while we were still in Idaho Elise and some of her MAF friends tried their costumes on pre-maturely to show off, so there's a few pictures of that too!

Accepted by MAF!

We received the news Friday from Mission Aviation Fellowship that we have passed their evaluation and are invited back to become part of their ministry.  How great!  Praise to God for giving us this opportunity, providing the training and the ability to meet MAF's standards!  I performed acceptably on two weeks of technical evaluation, and we were also approved after a psychological evaluation and interviews with MAF's candidate committee.  Once again thank you to those of you who prayed for us and encouraged us.  We are now in what can be described as an "engagement" with MAF, where we are not official staff members yet, but we have passed their evaluation.  In January they will have us back for a period of learning about the different places MAF serves with the goal of finding a place that we fit well with.  After that period, we will be assigned to a country and become official MAF staff.  Then we will receive training on prayer and financial support raising, and begin building a ministry support team immediately following.  More details later, as well as halloween pics of Elise and her little cousins!!

Grandma and Grandpa Lundholm

Elise got to meet Grandma and Grandpa Lundholm yesterday!  Elise was very excited (so was Grandma and Grandpa).  We're used to calling them "Dad and Penny" but I suppose now we call them Grandma and Grandpa!

Dad and Penny drove into Nampa last night from St. George, Utah where they live.  We're going to hang out with them all weekend and let Elise spend some good time with them.  We'll go see what Boise has to offer today and tomorrow and they will head back home Monday.

The word from Doug, the MAF mechanic that tested me last week was that I passed the mechanic portion of the evaluation.  What a relief!  I was definitely more worried about the Mechanic part of the test than the flight.  However, I know I can't take the flight for granted and I will try to prepare just as hard.  One thing I really liked was how much I just enjoyed doing the evaluation.  Doing the projects they gave me helped me to dust off and refine so much of what I've learned, and Doug has the heart of a teacher and he taught me so much.  What a good, enjoyable and challenging week!

Some difficult news came through two days ago.  Ron Royce, The flight instructor that I flew with in Tennessee last month died in a plane crash on Thursday along with the student he was training.  He was doing a training project just like the one we did with him almost exactly a month ago.  His student, like me was on his way to evaluate with a mission organization and him and his wife and two kids stayed in the same cabin that Heather and I stayed in while we were there.  Ron was an instructor with Moody Aviation in Tennessee and he instructed probably more than half the pilots here at MAF.  There are a lot of people that are sad to hear the news around here.  Ron was an incredibe guy.  Two things came through to me besides the fact that he was an un-believable flight instructor.  He was a very funny and light-hearted guy, and he cared about people intensely.  I was impressed that as I was training with him at Elizabethon airport, you could tell he knew and cared about the employees at the airport.   He introduced me to the janitor who he knew really well.  Also while I was preflighting the airplane one morning, Ron was talking with a young guy he had given training, and I looked over and Ron had him in a head-lock.  Ron was a fun guy and a teaser (he was seventy years old!).  He did something funny the first day I met him.  I know there is this code of conduct where you usually don't joke around too much with someone you first meet.  The first day I flew with him when I was saying goodbye for the day I reached out my hand to shake his and he made me miss his hand, I tried a few times and he kept doing it.  He said "Just testing the reflexes."  He did that every time and I'm not sure I ever actually shook his hand (well maybe when we said goodbye the last time).  Ron asked me to let him know when I was going to MAF and he would pray for us at the evaluation.  I emailed him monday night and he emailed right back and let me know he and his wife wold be praying for us and he is looking forward to hearing a report.  Now Ron is with the Lord!   I think the last thing he said to me was "Well, I'll see you later, but probably not in this troubled place!"  Now he is there with his Lord, and I imagine maybe he's doing the hand-shake thing with God or who knows whatever else kind of funny things he does.  He will be greatly missed by many and he lived a very rich life.

A couple cute videos!

Something Cute!

Elise got to try out a tricycle for the first time today!

A Surprise in the Hangar...

When I was getting my first tour of the hangar side of MAF yesterday, there was a surprise I did not know I was in for.  The MAF Kodiak was parked right there in the hangar.  

I made a blog post about the significance of the Kodiak in March of 2008, and you can see it by scrolling down to the blog archive. I had heard that MAF already had a Kodiak delivered to them. What I did not know is that they have three, and the fourth one is on the way. So when I went into the hangar today there were two Kodiaks parked in there. What a cool sight!




I said in the March 08 post, but I want to mention it again. These are cool looking (and performing) airplanes, but that's not what excites me about them. What excites me is what they are going to do, and how effectively and efficiently these things are built to do it! Each one of these airplanes is going to impact many lives!!

So one of the two Kodiaks in the hangar is getting ready to get flown to Indonesia to begin its service. The flight over is known as a "ferry flight." What they do is put two huge cube shaped metal tanks in the cargo area and fill them with fuel, and with the fuel in those tanks as well as the airplanes normal fuel tanks, the plane has enough range to make it overseas. I thought it was really cool to see those ferry tanks installed and I tried to capture them with the camera:
From the front of the airplane:

It's kind of hard to see what's really going on there, but they are two big cubical tanks that hold 200 gallons of fuel apiece.

And from the rear:


You can kind of see those tanks in there, but you can also see that HUGE cargo door! This airplane can carry somewhere around three thousand pounds of cargo. That's alot. It will carry over a ton of cargo into some of the smallest and most remote airstrips in the world
And here's a picture of the "avionics" in the airplane, or the instrument panel which is state of the art:



.

Yesterday they had the engine compartments open performing maintenance.

MAF is expecting its fifth Kodiak airplane soon as well, and i hear they plane to have ten by the end of next year. I had no idea they were getting so many so fast. How exciting! I knew they had 20 originally on order, but I figured that would take over a decade to fill, but they are filling it fast! God is providing for the making and sending out of these wonderful machines.

How do these planes compare to the ones I will probably flying right away?  MAF's fleet of some 140 airplanes is made up of mostly Cessna 206's.  They had a few parked in their other hangar room.  Here's a look:

Yeah it bears a resemblance to a simple Cessna 172. It is much more capable though, with a huge side cargo door and the capability to carry over a thousand pounds of cargo. This is the type of airplane I will be doing my flight evaluation next week (and this might even be the very one!)

How is the evaluation going so far? I think it has been going really well. I honestly was much more worried about the maintenance portion of the evaluation than the flight (though I've been preparing hard for both) but I feel I have been doing much better than I have expected to do on the maintenance portion. I was worried because my maintenance training was so long ago, but i am building an even deeper respect for my school because during the test, so many things that were taught to me are coming back to me. I am also seeing the value of prayer as I have been evaluated on many specific things that I have run across and had my memory refreshed right before it popped up.

A peek at MAF

We got acquainted with MAF's headquarters yesterday, and we wanted to give you a look.  MAF moved their headquarters here to Nampa Idaho a few years ago.  They were in Southern California, and the cost of being there drove them to seek somewhere more in-expensive.  It just so happens they do alot of their advanced flight training right up here in Idaho, so they moved their headquarters to Nampa (just outside of boise).  They have a cool facility, and some really cool airplanes to see there, but MAF is not about the cool buildings or about cool airplanes.  They are about the lives that are changed in remote parts of the world through what they do.  

This is what you see when you first walk in the doors.  Click on it and enlarge it, and you will see the different operations there at the headquarters.

The building is laid out "like an airplane" with two wings on either side, a middle section, and a tail that is an auditorium that serves as a lunchroom, chapple, and a rental hall for the community.  Here is a view of one of the "wings."

If you walk around the wings you find many interesting things.  There are many cultural artifacts around for decoration.  There's also some cool airplane models.  Here's a model of the new MAF Kodiak.

At the entrance they also have a neat exhibit.  For those of you who know the story of the 5 missionaries who were killed in south america in 1956 this will have some significance.  This airplane frame shown here (with a big print of the actual sandbar where the event happened) contains pieces of nate saint's actual airplane (the plane was in actual worse shape than this and they had to weld it together a little bit to make it look at least a little bit like an airplane) but these are the actual pieces of Nate Saints airplane recovered more than three decades after the event.

Here's a look at the "hangar" building from the front, where all the planes are parked, the maintenance training and flight training takes place:


A break for now, but more about the maintenance hangar in the next post!

Arrived in Idaho!

Heather and I are at the hotel in Idaho after a long day of travel.  We begin the evaluation process with Mission Aviation Fellowship tomorrow morning!  Today we left Kansas City around nine AM, our plane stopped in Denver, we changed planes in Salt Lake City, then arrived in Boise, ID around 1:30.  A really nice couple that works for MAF picked us up from the airport and had us over for lunch/dinner.   They let us take a nap at their place too (all three of us!) It was very refreshing.

Here's a few pictures.  Last night we had a get together at Ellen and Dave's.  We had lots of family members stop by.  We had a lot of fun when Elise's little cousin Jacoby came over and they were playing on the floor.  Jacoby was putting on a clinic for Elise of how to crawl.  She was watching in amazement!

Well I guess those pictures are later.  But here's Elise trying out her haloween outfit.  (not her costume, we're savin' that one for the big day!)

Elise had a pretty cool hairdo this day

Elise hangin' out with Grandpa Mark.

A group of us at the get together last night

Zack, Amanda and Jacoby

Jacoby leavine Elise in the dust!  He is a little trooper!  Crawling all over the kitchen.

Jacoby tries to give Elise a few pointers on how to do that crawling thing and Elise says "yeah, um, I already know that thanks for the advice though."

And then as soon as he turns around she tries what he told her to do.

A random Elise giggling picture.

Here's something random.  Heather was feeding Elise peaches, and I started singing the peaches song to Elise.  Do you know what song I am talking about?  The song about peaches fron several years ago by the band called the "presidents."  Well the computer was sitting right there and you can listen to any song on i tunes for 30 seconds for free, so we brought it up and played it, and Elise's face lit up and she started bobbing her head to the tune.  We grabbed the camera, which only had enough memory left for six seconds.  Her excitement went down (like usual) when she saw the camera because she focuses in on it.  So here's what we got.

Encouragement--MAF Bound

Today I found special encouragement in Psalm 19, and I will put it below to share.

The heavens declare the glory of God;

the skies proclaim the work of his hands.

Day after day they pour forth speech;

night after night they display knowledge.

There is no speech or language 

where their voice is not heard

Their voice goes out into al the earth,

their words to the ends of the world.

In the heavens he has pitched a tent for the sun,

which is like a bridegroom coming forth from his pavilion, 

like a champion rejoicing to run his course.

It rises at one end of the heavens 

and makes its circuit to the other;

nothing is hidden from its heat.

The law of the LORD is perfect,

reviving the soul.

the statutes of the LORD are trustworthy

making the wise simple.

The precepts of the LORD are right,

giving joy to the heart.

The commands of the LORD are radiant,

giving light to the eyes.

The fear of the LORD is pure,

enduring forever.

The ordinances of the LORD are sure

and altogether righteous

They are more precious than gold,

than much pure gold;

they are sweeter than honey,

than honey from the comb.

By them is your servant warned;

in keeping them there is great reward.

Who can discern his errors?

Forgive my hidden faults.

Keep your servant also from willful sins:

may they not rule over me.

Then will I be blameless,

innocent of great transgression.

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart

be pleasing in your sight,

O LORD, my Rock and my Redeemer.

Psalm 19, NIV translation

Many times I wish my memory was so much better.  I read a passage like Psalm 19 and my heart fully agrees with it, and I would just love to memorize it and reflect on it.  But I am so limited!  But I am glad to reflect on it this morning.  I wholeheartedly agree that the words that come from God's mouth give me life and happiness.  And I am a person in desperate need of his words.  Heather and I are flying out to Idaho day after tomorrow to take an evaluation to serve with Mission Aviation Fellowship.  Sometimes I wonder why God would want a person like me to be a missionary.  Someone who so often neglects His words and stumbles down the same sinful paths that he always has.  I am comforted by the last words written by Jim Elliot in his journal published by his wife after his death.  He said he was "throwing himself hourly upon God's for his mercy" wondering why God would use someone as wicked as himself to do His work.  Within a week after that Jim was killed by the tribe that he and his friends were trying to bring the news of Jesus to.  Reading and learning about Jim I know that few people were as passionate or as disciplined in living for the Lord as he was.  And yet he reveals his utterly sinful self. I suppose that none of us are worthy to serve God.  But I am nourished, comforted, directed, and sustained by God's words, and they work powerfully in my life.  They bring me a harvest of peace and joy that can't be faked or made up.

Movin' On

Well it's been a long tiring but good weekend, and now we are no longer Michigan residents. Ellen and Dave came and helped us move our stuff to Missouri. We're living with Ellen and Dave (Heather's mom and step-dad) for now during this phase of our trek to the mission field. This will be "home base" for us as we prepare to serve with Mission Aviation Fellowship. One week from today we get on a plane to go to Boise, Idaho to the MAF headquarters. We are going to spend two weeks there for an evaluation. They are going to evaluate my flying and maintenance skills for two weeks and get to know us as people to see if serving with MAF is a good fit for us. If that goes well, then in January we go back to begin our time as official staff members. After that time, we will begin several months of preparations to go overseas. Those preparations will involve mainly seeking a team of financial and prayer supporters, and going to various specialized training sessions in Boise. Well every blog entry needs to have some pictures right? So let me go dredge some up.

Oh, Here's one that's an instant classic.  My twin sister Kelly dressed up her daughter little Isla in her haloween costume and dressed up her little boston terriers in theirs too.  I almost doubled over in laughter when I saw this, it's too funny!  I got permission from here to put it on here:

Now tell me that's not the cutest little ghost you've ever seen!

Here's Elise chewing on her little rubber toothbrush.

Brushing her teeth is part of her little nightly routine (even though she barely has any).  The bristles are just made out of rubber, and we have a little song we sing to her that goes with it.  She seems to love this time.  Her little face lights up when we bring her into the bathroom and she knows its time.  Lately she really really wants to do the brushing herself.  First it's mommys turn (and sometimes she throws a little fit and turns her head away because she wants to do it herself).  When it's finally her turn, her little face lights up, and she usually turns the toothbrush right around and starts chewing on the handle.

Here's Elise with Grandpa Dave and Grandma Ellen

Some funny clouds on the drive back (only a pilot would notice that kind of thing)


Those last few pictures looked cooler in real life and the pictures left something to be desired.