Kick-off Week 2023
It’s been one packed week! Dwayne picked me up at the Anchorage airport on Saturday afternoon with Mother’s Day flowers in hand and an Outback dinner afterwards. What a great husband! We picked up groceries on the way home and just like that, I was back at the Ranch! Monday morning was our fun and informative staff kick-off meeting where we caught up with each other and coordinated our plans for the summer season going forward. Tuesday was a really fun picnic with staff and volunteer families eating delicious burgers and dogs and getting better acquainted.
The team from Antrim Brethren in Christ Church, Chambersburg, PA had been here the week before I arrived, and they accomplished the impossible in four days as they dismantled an old hangar building at the Palmer Airport and transported all the beams, siding, roofing, and parts to a location near the Ranch. The materials will be used to construct a new auto shop over the next couple of summers.
Wednesday morning brought the first of a three-day flight student orientation for more than a dozen missionary flight students and their instructors. Each of these students is working on a specific rating or flight endorsement, having been called by the Lord to serve as a missionary pilot in an area largely unreached with the Gospel. On Friday, they had a survival training seminar, then spent the night in the woods in a real-life simulated emergency scenario. Everyone was sleepy this morning at the wrap-up just before a hot breakfast, but there were a lot of comments about all they’d learned.
Today, a couple dozen young adults from our beloved Russian church in Wasilla are coming to work on the Kingdom Air Corps’ entryway from the main road, cleaning up brush and beautifying the area. We hope to have signage up soon. As always, some of them take over the kitchen and cook up delicious food for lunch and dinner. We are looking forward to music and fellowship with them tonight.
It's still late spring here with temperatures dropping into the 30’s at night. Snow is melting on the mountains, but even King Mountain still has some. But the trees are budding—it’s amazing how in just one week, signs of spring are popping all around. Hopefully by next week we can plant flowers!
There are more people here than I can remember this early in May. The dining hall is packed with volunteers, flight students, CFI’s and their families, probably 50-60 folks in all. We have at least a half dozen babies and toddlers and twice as many preschool and grade school kids. It’s a hopping place, for sure!
We thank the Lord for all that he is doing as we dig in for Week 2. The sound of airplanes taking off and landing will be continuous; the study room will be filled with students discussing what they are learning well into the evenings. The kitchen will be a hub of cooking, baking, and dishwashing from early morning to well after dinner. Everyone is pitching in to complete many work projects: fixing water leaks, smoothing rough roads, chopping wood, coaxing heaters to work. What a great team of volunteers we have, and we are thankful for each one. Romans 12:4-5 says, “For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.” God is at work, and we—together with you, our prayer partners and supporters—are all a part of his great plan for bringing peoples from every nation into his kingdom.