Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Alaska- Kingdom Air Corps.

Like every mission trip I have been on, the blessings on the Alaska trip were to numerous to count. Hopefully, I can give a decent summary of what I experienced.

I suppose that I will begin with the lessons learned. I have been avoiding sending out my resume since before the trip, because I felt like the Lord was telling me to wait till after the trip. I believe that there was something on the trip I needed to hear from him. The first thing I learned is that I am as content working on small airplanes as I am working on helicopters, and the device I am working on is not nearly as important as the people I am working with. I learned this by getting the opportunity to work on Dave King's AS 350 helicopter for a couple days. The maintenance I performed was very cosmetic.
This topic segway's nicely into another hard truth I learned (I should say relearned). My occupation is not important at all, living in and sharing God's kingdom is priority number one. I tend to loose sight of that. The Lord through Dwayne King did a good job of reminding me of that (he spoke from Phillipians 2: 1-3). My prayer coming off this trip is that I will be able to continually visualize kingdom living for our lives; be less consumed with what I am doing and more consumed with who I am doing it with and for. There are many other little lessons but I will try to keep this brief.

As a guy I have to compartmentalize, but understand that everything sort of blended together on the trip. The personal reveleations, the scenery, the good hard work, the fun adventures; all of them sort of fused.

The maintenance portion of the trip consisted of about 70 hours of pracitcal experience on Cessna aircraft. The purpose of the trip was for me to pass my required aircraft inspections course. The course was three credit hours and I knocked it out in what was without doubt the least painful two weeks of class I have ever taken. It was easy, essentially the class portion was just looking up and memorizing FAA regulation locations. The lab portion consisted of performing annual inspections on Dwayne's airplanes a C-172 and C-170 in my case. It was good fun and didn't seem like work.

As far as the fun portion goes, we got to experience the fourth of July (Alaska style) almost immediately after we got there. The pictures say it all for this one. It was awesome. To sum up though... Tractor parade, moose and bear potluck, cars being launched off a cliff and a bowling ball cannon launch (empty metal tube, orange bowling ball, black powder you get the picture). That very next Saturday we went to Seward and floated the Kenai National Park. Also, awesome. We ate dinner on Fox Isand in the bay. This was to the tune of prime rib, salmon and king crab. Later the following week we took a trip down to the river and shot guns and had caribou brats on the camp fire. The last Saturday we hiked the Matanuska glacier. It was a amazing little trek. It's really fun to try to hike without ice cleats.

I think this gives a pretty good summary. I need to cut it off either way since it is becoming too long. The trip was fantastic. I would love to post more about Kingdom Air Corps. ministries, so we will see if I can get to that later.

Smugmug link to pictures. Let me know if you need the password.

Zoom out on the map to see where the boat ride went and all the places I visited.
Map