A Pilot Paul from Papua story

How ironic that the day after I posted an article on a man with fifty mishap-free years as a professional pilot my equally professional pilot friend Paul Westlund, who had over 11,000 hours of experience flying in the most difficult aviation environment in the world, would lose his life along with his two passengers in a crash in the mountains of Papua, Indonesia. He was on what amounted to a “milk run.” A full investigation into the cause is underway.

Paul was laid to rest yesterday and all of Papua mourned. He was beloved by the people he served. He and I were nearing completion of a book on his adventures as a mission aviator. In honor of my friend I post here today one of his first stories. Please take the time to read it and contemplate the life of this great servant of God. DTS.

LOSING MY PROFESSIONAL PILOT FACE
By Paul Westlund, with Dane Skelton
Papua, Indonesia. Spring 1987

The apostle Paul once wrote to his protégé Timothy, “Keep your head in all situations…” That is good advice for anyone but especially for bush pilots. Our “situations” often run from the super serious to super comical in a single day, as my first flight with a translator revealed.

The path from student pilot to mission aviator is a long and difficult one. Mine had taken ten years of hard work from the first flights with Moody Aviation School all the way through eighteen hundred hours of flying experience to the Airline Transport Pilot rating.

All of that work, all of that training and expense and struggle to make it out to the field was, and still is to me, due to the importance of Bible Translation. When animistic people enslaved by fears of the spirit world are finally able to read and understand the message of Jesus in their own language it gives them hope beyond their wildest dreams.

So the main thing is to make sure that translator can get there in one piece. If something bad happens to a translator all of the work on a new translation can be lost. I had worked hard to be the best pilot that I could be so that would never happen. Now I was taking my first translator to his assignment in the field and I was so happy I was almost giddy.

The beauty of the blue morning sky, the deep emerald forests, the silvery rivers and majestic Papuan mountains outside my window were overwhelming. I thought: I get paid to do this? I kept looking away from the translator so he wouldn’t see the silly grin that my professional pilot face couldn’t mask.

But soon I saw something that rapidly wiped the grin from my face. We were over the village, making a high altitude pass to inspect the airfield. There was a wadded up white and green blur just off one side of the runway. What’s that? I thought. I turned and made another pass. O Lord! That’s an airplane! That’s what’s left of one of those aircraft called an Islander. That sobered me up quick. This is serious business. Bad things can happen out here kid. You better get your game on. You better be paying attention. I focused in hard on the task at hand, to get the airplane on the ground and parked as best and professionally as I possibly could.

And then, I stepped out of the airplane, and lost my professional pilot face for the second time that day. I had never been in a Papuan mountain village before. It was National Geographic in living color right in front of me! The men were wearing their only clothing, tall, thin, conical shaped gourds fitted over their genitals, tied just below the waste and pointing straight up. And the women were in grass skirts. Only they weren’t skirts, more like flat, dried, twelve inch blades of grass stacked atop one another and folded in half and tied over a string that circled the waist. And that was it. Nothing else.

It was more than this modest mid-western preacher’s boy could take! I joke with my friends that where I come from we take showers in our clothes! I could feel my face going full red. I turned around and stuck my head in the cockpit and studied my map. I wrote in my log book. I inspected the airplane! Anything I could do to keep my eyes off of the people. I couldn’t eat the rest of the day. I was just toast! This is a whole nother world, I thought. Have I landed on Mars or something? It took a long time for me to regain my composure.

The Papuan people are like anybody else on the planet. When they see an improvement on life they want it. Today, with better transportation and the availability of baled used clothing for pennies on the pound more Papuan people groups are wearing clothes. They really like wearing them because the mountains get cold. But they weren’t wearing them on that day and I was embarrassed.

Now, after twenty-five years on the field, the Papuan people are very dear to me. I no longer notice what they are wearing but what is in their hearts. And I keep my professional pilot face in place…most of the time.

OF AIRPLANES AND ECONOMICS

By Dane Skelton

Two themes seem to dominate the news of late: Airplanes and economics. Specifically, some horrendous crashes - the Reno Air Race crash, the Russian hockey team crash – have grabbed the headlines along with the Greek debt crisis, America’s persistent nine percent unemployment rate and the ongoing foreclosure crisis (not to mention the national debt!).

Bad news always gets the headlines. That’s what made me want to share some good news, and some good economic advice, that came from an unlikely place. An article in AOPA Flight Training Magazine caught my attention this morning. It was by a pilot who was retiring after fifty mishap free years in the air as an airline pilot and Flight Instructor. We never hear about these guys do we?

Now, I know you must be thinking: “Dane, what on earth does this have to do with economics, with paying my bills and achieving financial security?” Bear with me. The pilot boiled all fifty years of his accident free experience down to one simple principle: Always fly with the idea that if anything can go wrong it will and work hard to prepare for it. For example, you wouldn’t believe how many airplanes crash each year simply because they run out of gas. The veteran’s advice? Never assume the gages are correct. Unless you have personally drained dry the gas tanks on the airplane you are flying and refilled them so that you know exactly how much they hold and exactly how many gallons per hour that ship burns land and refuel when you think you have one hour of flying time remaining. Simple right? Self impose a one hour fuel margin and NEVER break it.

Now to the economic side of the story. We live in a world of economic hazards. Any thing can go wrong and usually will at the worst possible moment. We need to prepare for it. A hurricane can blow your house down or flood it; a trip to the emergency room can hammer your wallet; the car can break down and you will miss work. Yet few of us – including national political leadership - operate with any self imposed financial safety limits. We fly along on credit, with little to no reserve, blowing right past any kind of sensible margin assuming that all will be well. Until the bottom drops out, the sky closes in, and our personal economic engines start to sputter. Safe landings are hard to come by in those situations.

But the biblical principle (see the Proverb below) is quite simple: Work hard, spend less than you earn, set aside funds for future contingencies, and do it consistently, year after year. Then that tsunami called Poverty won’t be able to outrun you nor the bandit Scarcity overpower you.

Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise! It has no commander, no overseer or ruler, yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest. How long will you lie there, you sluggard? When will you get up from your sleep? A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest-- and poverty will come on you like a bandit and scarcity like an armed man. (Proverbs 6:6-11 NIV)

There is no such thing as security apart from God. Even the best prepared person can be overcome by an economic hurricane. But as I have seen time and time again, God provides for his people through his church. When we follow the biblical principles of economic discipline we will know the peace of financial security and the blessing of being able to help others when the crisis comes.

CHANGING IDENTITIES

By Dane Skelton

What are you known by among your friends? In other words, what are the identifying characteristics that make you, you? As adults most of us are known by our professions, or former jobs. I’m “the preacher” who used to be “a car guy” (and still is most of the time). What sets you apart or makes you unique among your peers? It might be a talent, or a theology you’re attached to. He’s a Calvinist, she’s a singer. Or social / political views: He’s a vegetarian, she’s a conservative. Most of us find some comfort, some level of personal worth by identifying ourselves that way. It helps us know who we are.

Now what if God was to suddenly call you out of that comfortable identity and open a door into a whole new world that you had never considered before? Would you walk through it? That’s what happened to the Apostle Peter in Acts chapter ten. It’s the story of how the gospel was first introduced to a gentile audience. A Roman centurion, a gentile who feared God named Cornelius, is visited by an angel. The angel tells him to send for Peter. At the same time Peter, an observant Jew who ate only kosher food and never entered a gentile home for fear of defilement, has a vision of all kinds of hitherto “unclean,” as defined by Old Testament dietary laws, animals. In the vision the voice of the Lord says, “Rise Peter, kill and eat.” Peter struggles with that command until God says, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.”

The point of the story is that Peter is no longer to consider the gentiles “out of bounds” for the gospel. When Cornelius’ servants call for him Peter welcomes them, travels with them to Cornelius and wonder of wonder for a Jew, enters his home to preach. It’s a great story of the spread of the good news.

But the thing that brought me up short was how quickly God expected Peter to exchange his old identity for a new one. The Old Testament dietary laws are key identifying marks of a Jew. They are one of the things that make a Jew a Jew. How hard it must have been for Peter to discard them! You can see it in his response to the vision: “Surely not Lord! I have never eaten anything impure or unclean.” (Acts 10:14). Yet God clearly calls Peter to walk through that door into a new identity. He is no longer simply Peter the Jewish follower of Jesus. He is Peter, the Jew who makes friends with gentiles and even eats and sleeps in their homes.

How can that be? How can God just UNDO two thousand years of Jewish theology and spiritual identity in a single story in the book of Acts? Well, he didn’t undo anything. He fulfilled all of the requirements for holiness and righteousness and purity, things which the dietary and other exclusivity laws were made to illustrate, in the person of his son Jesus Christ. He fulfilled them perfectly and brought them to a conclusion at the cross. Now the holiness, and righteousness, the spiritual purity and identity that mark his people out in the world come not from how they dress or what they eat or where they go or don’t go or who they hang out with. Now it all comes from Christ. (See Colossians 1:19-23).

Peter embraced this radical change because of his identity in Christ. So what is your identity? What have you called unclean that God says is no longer unclean? What door is God calling you to walk through that would have been unimaginable before Christ gave you a new identity?

REMEMBER THE WARRIORS

Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.

Jesus

The peace and security that you and I have enjoyed for the past ten years is easy to take for granted. There have been terrorist attacks and attempted attacks. The Fort Hood massacre stands out in memory along with the wanna be martyr shoe bomber and the underwear bomber and Times Square bomber attempts at mass murder. Many other smaller, one man operations perpetrated by Muslims against people of various faiths and no faith at all have been carried out since 9-11. But no plot with the coordination and scale of 9-11 has succeeded. Thus most of us live without fear. We complain and make jokes about airport security, wonder if our rights are being abused by the phone companies, yawn lazily and go to bed not worrying if the world will still be the same tomorrow.

That is due in large part to the dedicated professionalism of the men and women of America’s Special Forces, the CIA and other clandestine services. They are invisible to most of us, avoiding the limelight by necessity as well as by preference. We hear about them occasionally, most notably Seal Team 6’s successful mission against Osama bin Laden. But then the headlines fade and we forget.

I’m writing this today to ask you not to forget these brave men and women. Their task is Biblical: “He is God’s servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the evil doer.” (Romans 13:4). Theirs is a dirty job that requires a lifetime of dedication to personal discipline and the honing of warrior skills that are unknown to the rest of us. The training itself is often as dangerous as the missions and goes on unseen and unheralded for years, sometimes decades, before the moment arrives and a chief executive finds – as the President did with the bin Laden mission - that he has the tools to defend us.

I’m afraid I’m not doing this subject justice so let me encourage you to learn on your own about these brave men and women who lay down their lives for us every day. The two books I’ve read are: Masters of Chaos: The Secret History of the Special Forces by Linda Robinson and The Night Stalkers: Top Secret Missions of the U.S. Army’s Special Operations Aviation Regiment. There are others. After you’ve read them you won’t forget to pray for the warriors who protect us from the terrors.

EULOGY FOR JOHN STOTT

February 15, 1993, the sanctuary of Atlanta’s Church of the Apostles, is recorded forever in my personal Bible. It’s recorded there because I knew I would never want to lose the lecture notes I would take that day. They came from the same man who authored at least eight of the most important books in my personal library including his magnum opus THE CROSS OF CHRIST and over fifty others that will influence Christian leaders for generations to come. His name was John R. W. Stott. His clarity was legendary, his accuracy impeccable, his thoroughness indisputable. As Tim Stafford wrote in his Christianity Today Magazine eulogy, “He always turned to the Bible for understanding, and his unforgettable gift was to penetrate and explain the Scriptures. As editor Kenneth Kantzer wrote in CT's pages in 1981, "When I hear him expound a text, invariably I exclaim to myself, 'That's exactly what it means! Why didn't I see it before?'"

John R. W. Stott passed from this earth at age ninety on July 27, 2011. Stott was the Rector of the Church of All Souls in London from 1950 to 1975 whereupon he became Rector Emeritus so that he could continue to spend more time on his worldwide ministries. I want very much for you to know and appreciate him but I can’t begin to cover, in the few paragraphs here, the impact he has made. Instead I will share my notes from that day and encourage you to read the Wikipedia page about him on your own.

“Never take the attitude that you couldn’t be clearer, more accurate or more practical, no matter what kind of compliments you may receive.”

“Some of the Bible is hard to understand. Therefore, never be so arrogant as to think you don’t need a teacher.” (2 Peter 3:16).

“Never take your modern ideas and transplant them into the meaning of the Biblical writer. Take the meaning of the writer and say it, speak it into modernity.”

“Our ultimate goal and our constant motivation are and should ever be the supreme glory and honor of Jesus Christ.”

“The good news is just this: God’s righteousness – God’s way of putting us right without putting himself into the wrong.”

“In exegesis (Biblical interpretation) I feel the need to think myself prayerfully into the text until I am under it, not over it. It is meditation really, over and over, reflecting on the text prayerfully, until I think that I understand its message. It takes time. It begins with time.”

I hope you will visit Wikipedia and Christianity Today to read more about Stott. However, if you find that you do not have time remember this much: If there is some part of the faith that you do not understand, some place where you want to go deeper but do not know how, or some collision between the world as you know it and the gospel as you understand it – consult John R. W. Stott. You will be glad that you did.