This is what we fit in the trunk of the Accord - minus Maycie and Dylan, of course. There were times when we considered stuffing them in the trunk and keeping the duffel bags with us… but it never came to that.

We ended our roadtrip a couple of days early, on February 12, because we were losing our minds! Not really, but we felt that the kids had taken all the car-seat-time they could handle. We were also feeling a little pressured for time since we have several meetings this week and next week in California.

We had a wonderful trip and really enjoyed catching up with friends and family. We came home tired, but encouraged and we hope the folks we visited were mutually encouraged by all that God is doing in the Philippines and all that He has done through their involvment in our ministry.

We were eager to make it home, but we also felt sad that we couldn’t spend more time at each place we visited. We were truly blessed by everyone we were able to see and we are truly thankful for everyone who took time out to reconnect with us.

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Our planned route is in a large 7,000 mile loop

On January 18th we leave to take a road trip around the US visiting with friends who we haven’t seen in a long time. We are really looking forward to visiting with folks and we’re praying that wherever we go we will be an encouragement as we share what God has been accomplishing in the Philippines. Please pray for us as we travel for a little less than a month in a big 7,000 mile circle.

Please pray for safety as well since much of our driving will be in snow country. Pray also for the car to run well and for the kids (and us) to really enjoy the adventure of it. Thankfully, we have been able to break the trip up into fairly small chunks so it shouldn’t be as bad as it sounds. However, we are aware that it could be a disaster with a 3 year-old, a 1 1/2 year-old and Bailey 6 1/2 months pregnant. Needless to say, your prayers would be appreciated.

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We will soon be very well acquainted with this little grey car. We plan to spend over 120 hrs driving in it over a period of 30 days.

We are so blessed to have found a car for our road trip. It’s a used Honda Accord and we think we’ll be able to fit everything in it for the trip, but if not, we’ll just have to leave some things behind. During the next few weeks Brian will be making any necessary repairs to the car in hopes that we’ll have a breakdown-free trip – especially since it’s going to be cold in the Northwest during January. We’re also getting mentally prepared for that rude awakening!

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We are so blessed to have such a nice home in a quiet neighborhood. There is even a park just around the corner from us where our kids love to play.

We finally made it to California after quite a long sprint to-the-finish in the Philippines. We were very pleased to leave a fully functional flight program in the capable hands of Joel and Missy Davis. The transition took a lot of work, but we were able to make the switch without any interruption in flight service at a time when a lot is going on in the ministries that we support with the airplane. We praise the Lord for a safe checkout for Joel and for safety in Brian’s final flights. Thank you for praying for us, we feel we were able to finish well.

We arrived at Los Angeles International Airport and drove North to our home town in Santa Maria. We had pre-arranged to rent a house from a family in our church and were expecting it to be a pretty empty house when we arrived. To our surprise folks in our church had rallied together to collect furnishings, decorations, dishes, and everything you’d need to make a house a home. It was incredible! All we had to do was unpack our suitcases and we were in a functioning home – it was even decorated with the few decorations that we had left in storage along with many others that folks had contributed. It was such a blessing because we had arrived so incredibly tired from the previous months that we didn’t even feel jet lag this time around. It would have been a very difficult task to setup a house in the state we were in.

Before we left the Philippines we could see that no matter how we planned things, we were going to be so busy that making arrangements for our home assignment would have to wait until we arrived in the US. We made a definite decision to concentrate on what we had to do in the Philippines since that’s our main focus anyway. We decided to trust that God would fill in the details and we would continue to walk that exciting road of faith as we watch God meet our needs one day at a time.

We want to express our most sincere “thanks” to those who have contributed to help us with not only our monthly needs but also many special needs that we’ve had.  Everywhere we look we are encouraged by the sense of teamwork we have felt. Seriously – everywhere we look there is something that someone has done for us because they are investing in what God is doing in the lives of the Filipino people. One way or another God will accomplish what He wants to in the Philippines, but it sure is awesome He’s chosen to let all of us be a part of it.

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I unloaded the plane and loaded the truck for the last time this term. We plan to return next August and pick up where we've left off.

These last few months have been stressful to say the least. We’ve had a lot on our plate and had to adapt our schedule around several changes that we couldn’t have seen coming. This has meant that I have had to fly a lot closer to our departure for the States than we’d planned. In the end we were delayed enough that Brian was unable to finish Joel’s checkout so he shifted his attention to working with Garry, our chief pilot. The task was to fly with him and make sure he was current in all the airstrips so that he could take over checking Joel out on the last two airstrips.

During this process, Garry and I landed in our most challenging location and made a tough decision to cease flying there until repairs could be made. It simply didn’t seem wise to check someone out in there with the very pronounced bumps that have worsened throughout the year, thanks to a particularly wet year and earth quakes. Landing there has really been wearing on me because it has been nearly impossible to land without bouncing a couple of times just after touchdown – something that you don’t like to do on a 900′ airstrip where the first half of it is downhill.

We decided that it was best that I try to do the last flight to that location since I was already familiar with the idiosyncrasies of the airstrip. I would deliver the necessary supplies for the missionary to get to work on it right away. There are enough problems associated with a “last flight” of any sort, but this was a particularly stressful one as it was coming at the end of an already exhausting season in our lives. The challenges were compounded by a request for me to do a solo-airdrop in another location on the return flight – this is the highest risk operation in our playbook. All this was challenging enough and then we found out that our paperwork for the airplane’s annual inspection still hadn’t been signed at the government office so if I didn’t get the flights done on the 26th we’d have to wait until the paperwork was finished.

This is me landing on the airstrip a year ago. You can see it isn't the kind of place you want to be bouncing around in. In this photo the plane is just transitioning down the steepest part of the downhill. It's still traveling fast enough that it naturally wants to float off the airstrip. It used to be that we could force it down the hill to follow the transition, but as it is now, that is a very difficult thing to time properly.

I was well aware of the risks on this flight and tried to focus on just flying like I always do. The Lord gave us a beautiful day and I was able to accomplish all the objectives safely and with a smile on my face. It was a great feeling to park the plane in the hangar, unload it and empty it of all my personal effects because that was the end of my flights here until we return from the States. It was a fitting last day and very typical of our time here. We are so thankful for the prayers and encouragement we’ve received from those who were aware of our need for stamina and clear thinking. God delivered.

We now turn out attention to packing up the house and making sure we’ve transferred our to-do’s to our coworkers and tidied up any open projects or loose ends. We have just a little over a week left before we move out of the house and to Manila.

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Jet engines are easily restored from a flame out with a simple resuply of fuel flow and a restart.

A few years ago I took my motorcycle on a long ride in the Arizona desert. I was nearing the end of a very tiring 100 mile ride when the engine began to sputter. No problem, I thought, I’ll just select “reserve” on the fuel tank. I reached for the reserve lever only to discover that it was already there. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to limp an engine along that is in the initial stages of fuel exhaustion, but it can be quite a challenge. I swerved all over the place, bounced up and down, rocked back and forth – anything to try to slosh just a few ounces of fuel back into the carburetor so I could continue. Even 100 yards extra means a lot when the alternative is walking the bike home in the desert sun.

The bike finally died, 5 miles from home. In a final attempt to eek all I could out of the fuel tank, I laid the bike over on it’s side with the fuel valve down, I methodically and carefully sloshed all the fuel I could to the left side of tank and was able to start it up again. I rode home with the bike leaned to the left and was careful to go slowly over any big bumps lest I splash the minuscule amount of remaining fuel away from the tank outlet. I made it home without pushing the bike, but the last 5 miles nearly ruined the previous 95 mile stretch of pure enjoyment.

This is how we’ve felt the last couple of months as we approach the end of a 3 1/2 year term. We are in a ministry which doesn’t have any tolerance for fatigue and one in which we’re not allowed to be tired or make mistakes. Recently it feels like every day, or half-day that we have off of flight and radio duty is an opportunity to slosh more fuel into our tank so we can get through the next stretch. It’s in these times that Satan is eager to discourage us and knock us down. Please continue to pray for us and our strength in these final weeks. We have set our minds and hearts on finishing well, but we need your prayers now more than ever. There is still a lot of flying to do and a lot of decisions to make in the flight program before we can really focus on the decisions needed for moving to the States for 9 months. Bailey just finished her responsibilities with NTMA, one month before we leave Mindanao to head home. Brian will be finished on the 26th and spend a week getting ready to leave.

“A flameout refers to the failure of a jet engine caused by the extinction of the flame in the combustion chamber. It can be caused by a number of factors, including fuel exhaustion; compressor stall; insufficient oxygen supply; foreign object damage (such as birds, hail or even volcanic ash); severe inclement weather; and mechanical failure. Flameouts occur most frequently when the engine is at an intermediate or low power setting (such as during the cruise and descent phases of flight). Most of the time, they are recovered from uneventfully. To recover from a flameout, the pilot should ensure the engine’s fuel supply has been restored and then simply perform an engine restart.”

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I love Apple's simple language and how they make the complex seem so easy and simple. This is the symbol I was given when the iMac died instead of the normal Apple logo. Simple enough, "Don't enter. Time to move on with your life". It says so much with so little.

It was tragic to hear this week about the death of Steve Jobs. What an amazing inventor, businessman and communicator. He really made a lot of advances in the world today and many of his inventions are helping us in our ministry to work more efficiently and with less time staring at blue screens and syntax errors. One could even say he helped advance the Gospel, though he never believed it himself.

We use two Apple computers, an iMac and a MacBook. Neither are new, but both are vital parts of our ministry. We use them to communicate with supporters, write email, bookkeeping, flight scheduling, publishing safety data, presentations, inspections, research, networking, Skype, photos, videos editing, weather, etc etc… In other words, we really depend on our computers.

That is, until a couple weeks ago. I remember distinctly when it all started. After returning from a long trip to Luzon we found our iMac unable to boot up. Through the display’s backlight I could see fog and knew that our computer was in trouble in the tropics. After leaving the computer on for 24 hours in “boot up mode” it finally warmed up enough to dry out. It booted up but has never been the same. It would often crash without warning and without any discernible pattern. These crashes became more and more frequent until finally it wouldn’t boot any longer.

I was sad at the loss of the computer and saw it as merely a major financial hurdle for us at this point in our lives. I wasn’t worried about losing data or how long it might take to get the data back. I am fanatical about backups and keep two redundant copies made by two separate programs on hand all the time. One backup occurs hourly, the other occurs weekly. It’s a good system, but as often happens, I ran out of hard drive space for doing good backups. To get a large enough drive here is prohibitively expensive and in the end you question what quality you’re really getting. So, I found a good deal on a drive in the US and had it shipped here. Then I got busy and a few months went by without doing my redundant backup – only the hourly ones.

I still wasn’t concerned. I began troubleshooting the computer and the backup was working fine. Then a funny thing happened – our neighbor started welding and when he does our whole house’s power surges like crazy. You can actually hear the 60Hz hum in the walls. I’m not sure if it was the power surges, or the way in which the computer gave one final “crash” but whatever it was, the backup drive lost its identity and was never to be recognized by a computer again. This has set us back even further than we already were. I lost some important documents I was working on and weeks of work on other projects that can’t be recovered. Moreover, we’re down to using a 5+ year-old laptop as our primary computer and it has a tiny hard drive…not good for bringing it all home to the States with us.

We are reminded of how fleeting things are here and how we need to make sure that the things we are truly relying on are eternal or at least not plugged into the Philippines’ power grid. The tropics has no concern for expensive things, no favorites between Macs or PCs, new or old – it destroys them all equally. It’s quite remarkable really.

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Lyle Mankey and John Meerstra talking with the Dinangat people at the airstrip.

The following came from the NTMA field news on www.ntm.org. It is a great story of how we are all part of the same team:

A visit from a church team from Alaska helped the Dinangat visualize something they’d heard about.

A work team recently came from ChangePoint of Anchorage, Alaska, one of the sending churches of Eric and Casey Zimmerman, to do some construction and help in other ways at the NTM Aviation facility in Goroka. During their visit, they made a 45-minute flight to visit the Dinangat church, deep in the mountains of Papua New Guinea.

And while Eric and the team members were in awe at the fact that the Dinangat believers were hearing Ephesians 6 in their language for the first time ever, it was something that seemed very simple that caught the attention of the Dinangats.

“The Dinangat church leaders asked … if a few from the team would share their testimonies,” Eric wrote. “The work team leader went up to introduce the team as a whole before they spoke individually. With one of the tribal missionaries translating, he explained how ChangePoint was a church far to the north, and how they sent Casey and me … to help bring God’s Word to the people, and that I am one of the mechanics that keep the airplanes flying.

“And when he said this, the entire crowd began clapping their hands and there were a few cheers. I didn’t understand why at the moment.”

Later, when Eric shared, he tried to ensure that the Dinangat believers understood that just as ChangePoint had sent him and his family, “the Dinangat church was doing the exact same thing by sending their own team of Bible teachers on an outreach to one of their neighboring villages to bring God’s Word to them,” Eric wrote.

When one of the Dinangat Bible teachers shared later, Eric and the team began to realize what an impact their simple statements had. “We’ve heard about the greater body of Christ, but … now we are reminded that there are others who are our brothers and sisters in Christ,” the teacher said.

One of the missionaries to the Dinangat people explained to the team that the applause and cheering came because the believers realized that Eric is one of the people who have made it possible for missionaries to bring God’s Word to them, and ChangePoint made it possible for Eric to do that.

“They realized that it takes a team to make it possible for missionaries to live in Dinangat, all the way back to a sending church in Alaska,” Eric wrote. “Without mechanics and pilots and other support workers, and without their supporting churches, the missionary families in Dinangat would have to leave.

“They saw the big picture of Body function and were blown away by it.”

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It's been a real challenge to keep up with all the normal flying in addition to teaching Joel how to do it. Thankfully we're getting a little bit of a breather this week as we wait for Joel's check ride.

It feels like I’ve only just begun flying here in the Philippines, but by the time we head to the States for home assignment in November I’ll have flown almost 300 hours, nearly 1,000 landings and 600 flight legs. It doesn’t sound like much, but under these conditions and on these short flights, that is a lot of flying and loading and unloading! We’re now working with Joel and Missy Davis to hand responsibilities off so that they can run things by themselves while we’re gone. It is also important that Joel and I be able to fill in for each other when we are both working together after we return from the States.

This means that I have been flying as a flight instructor once again and working with Joel to get him ready to fly into our jungle airstrips. We have some very challenging weather with thunderstorms, typhoon winds, fog, haze and afternoon rains putting together an unpredictable cauldron of nastiness. Joel has been riding along on my normal flight routes and learning about the weather patterns and various routes and methods of dealing with the ever-changing weather conditions.

One day he told me he was actually praying that we would get bad weather so that he would have a better “learning experience.” I almost pushed him out the airplane door! God in his sovereignty has granted Joel’s request and we have had some very challenging weather to deal with – it couldn’t be a better environment for Joel to learn the idiosyncrasies of our small region of the South Pacific.

This week, Joel will take his check ride with an examiner from the Philippines and he will acquire his permanent Philippine pilot’s license. With that in hand we will polish up some of Joel’s techniques and skills and head for the tribal airstrips. It will be the most challenging thing I think I’ve ever done in my life. I am confident in our ability to carry out the flights safely or I wouldn’t be doing it. However, I would appreciate your prayers as we land on some of the most difficult Cessna 185 airstrips in the world. Pray for safety, good weather, good decisions, and if necessary that I’d have good and appropriate reactions as Joel lands on these airstrips for the first time.

Here’s a Video of Some of the Airstrips We’ll be Flying to:

Three Tricky Little Cessna 185 Airstrips

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Our family just days before we left for the Philippines. Maycie was 4 months old and Dylan was nowhere to be found!

Maycie is now a big 3 year old girl and Dylan will be one and a half years old when we get home.

This week marks our three-year anniversary of life in the Philippines and it has been an incredible three years. We have really felt God give us unnatural strength and endurance through some really hard times and incredible stress. As we look back at our first term here we see better than ever just how important it is to have a team of folks standing behind us, praying for us and encouraging us.

We are coming home in November for 9 months for our home assignment. We are looking forward to encouraging all those who follow our ministry with what God has been doing here in the Philippines. God has done an incredible amount of work in the lives of people here – Read Bayhon’s Story. All of it is a result of people like you getting involved with our ministry and we want to make sure that anyone interested in hearing about it has a chance to. We are also going to be coming home in a state of exhaustion and burrito and tri-tip depravation so we will need to recalibrate our senses – which shouldn’t be a very difficult task! We also desire to recover emotionally and physically in the comfort and company of our family and friends so that we can head back to the Philippines refreshed and ready to go at it again.

Maycie considers life here "normal" but we think it is important that she also adapts to her "native" California culture. That will also be an important part of our time in the States.

We plan to be in the States from the middle of November until the end of August 2012. It is a little over 9 months so we have decided to rent a house in Santa Maria, CA. God is good, and before we even put our need for a house out there, He has already provided a great home for us through the incredible generosity of some friends from our home church. We are so thankful to them as this is beyond anything we had hoped for.

We will also be looking for a vehicle to drive while we are there. We are thinking we will at least need to drive throughout the Western US if not all the way to the East Coast as well. Consequently we are praying the Lord might provide us with a reliable vehicle that is conducive to traveling as a family. Please pray with us for this provision and if you have any leads on a vehicle that might work for us please let us know.

We are really looking forward to our time at home and hope to spend time with as many of you, our friends and supporters, as possible. As we know more about our plans, we’ll be sure to share them with everyone.

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