Un-Expected Pit-Stop

Headin' home today, driving through Farmington, New Mexico I got that dreaded surprise that anyone who drives a long distance hopes they don't get.....my transmission went out! Fortunately it still worked well enough to drive in first gear, so I made it to a McDonalds to use the free internet to see if I could find out what I could do. I started to get nervous as the only options I could come up with involved nearly $3,000 and a one week stay in Farmington. I got ahold of someone who sells salvaged transmissions and he happened to have a Saturn. And he referred me to someone who can install it in (hopefully) less than two days. All for less than a thou. Phewh! So knock on wood hopefully they don't give me a lemmon! In a way, this is actually a little bit of a blessing in disguise. We have always known our transmission was fishy (it has been for the last few years), so we were always a little nervous it would go out on us at a bad time. Well it went out on me in Farmington which is a fairly big town. And Heather and Elise are comfortably at home in Missouri. I will be able to use the day or two in the hotel to get stuff done that I need to do anyways. And we get out tranny replaced for a decent price. So all in all that went pretty well. Perhaps the biggest cost I will feel is the extra two days until I get to see Heather and Elise again!

So why don't I put up the token "Elise picture" to cheer this post up:

Elise looking pretty studious in the hotel the other day.

Cotton Candy, Pics, Travelin, etc!

Heather and I wrapped up our stay in Arizona today. I took her to the airport in Phoenix, and enjoyed one last evening with my family (minus mom, who is somewhere in the skies over South America right now).

Yesterday Heather and I enjoyed a special treat. Thanks to the generosity of a friend of my sisters', we enjoyed a free night at a resort in Phoenix last night before Heather and Elise flew back to Missouri this morning. The resort had a water park, and it was really fun watching Elise take it all in. She really loved stumbling around the resort and checking out all the cool fountains. She also enjoyed one of her favorite past-times, which is getting anybody and everybody's attention that she possibly can by waving and smiling at them. At dinner last night she got to try cotton candy for the first time.

When she first saw it, she said "Bunny!" It bears a striking resemblance to the pink bunny that she got for Easter. It took her a while to convince her she was supposed to eat it.

Sharing with mommy!

After dropping Heather and Elise off at the airport, I went back to the hotel to check out and get all the odds and ends loaded in the car. When I walked out of the hotel lobby, I looked up and a Quest Kodiak aircraft passed right over the resort! This is remarkable because I understand that to date I think there only exists something like 20 or 30 Kodiaks. And most of them are overseas, serving in mission aviation. I found a really cool picture taken by an MAF pilot in Indonesia of the "old" plane, the Cessna 206 (the small plane), parked right next to the new plane, the Kodiak.

Now that's a cool picture. Our flight program in Papua plans to replace all of the Cessna 206's with Kodiaks eventually. Twice the payload, at half the fuel cost in a rugged and modern aircraft sounds pretty effective to me! Believe it or not, the Kodiak, though it is quite a bit larger, gets in and out of almost all of the same airstrips that the 206 can.
Enough tech talk. So after Heather, Elise and I said our goodbyes, and after checking out and seeing the Kodiak, I headed back up to Payson and enjoyed one last dinner with family. Two aunts were in town (Suzy and Carmel) and cousin Summer was also in town having just moved here from New Zeland. We ate with Granny and Grandpa at their house, and Kelly, Isla and Buddy came too! Then Carmel took us on a hike (that I am going to be sore from tomorrow!). So tomorrow I begin driving the Saturn back to Missouri to meet back up with Heather and Elise! I will drive two days, staying overnight in Denver. Heather and I get to be in Saint Joseph for about a week, and then it's up to Michigan! Lots of travel, but I feel like we are getting used to it! God has blessed us with great progress and wonderful times with people so far during our ministry partnership phase with MAF.

The Lord's hand

Back when Heather and I were preparing to move from Columbia Missouri to Grand Rapids to train to serve with MAF, we spent time beforehand showing friends and family what we were going to be training for. In order to help describe to people what MAF does, we randomly chose from their website one of the places they serve to show people what type of impact MAF has had there in the previous year. The place we randomly chose from among about a dozen other places was Papua, Indonesia. I still remembering sharing with people that in 2004, each pilot in Papua was able to save missionaries about five work years worth of traveling, and was able to transport around 200 tons of cargo. We even had (and still have) a google earth picture that we would show people showing how rugged the terrain is there and what kind of barriers those who seek to minister to the isolated tribes in Papua face. Today Heather and I received the news that we will be serving in Papua. We received the news right as I was getting ready to send in our next MAF newsletter for MAF to send out. In the newsletter I had already included a story about Papua that I heard several days ago that jumped out at me. I think it's really cool to see the Lord's hand in all of this.

Prayer

Pastor Jim at Mountain Bible (in Payson, Arizona) introduced us to the church yesterday and let us share briefly what we will be doing with MAF. I know I said it in an earlier post but it was really special for me to be back at Mountain Bible because it was there that I heard and understood the forgiveness and eternal life offered in Christ. And in the youth group during high school I began the life long process of growing in my faith. They also had us set up our MAF display for people to look at after the service. Heather and I were both deeply touched by several couples that we didn't know at all who came up to us and said very seriously that they will be praying for us. Some said their whole family will pray for us. We were speechless about that. We know that it is through prayer that this message of Christ moves forward. It is a mystery to me why God would give us the responsibility of taking the news of His son to those who haven't heard, and why he would listen and respond to our prayers. But for some reason He chooses to do so! And it's a wonderful thing. I've heard somebody say that as we seek Him and talk to Him in prayer, it's not that we get Him to do what we want Him to do, but he aligns our hearts with what He wants to do and gives us joy in that.