Chuck McConkey - Missions

[0:00] Bible Church goes back to the 1970s with Chuck and Bonnie McConkie, and we were all a lot younger then. And they were a missionary couple whose support we undertook many, many years ago as they faithfully ministered the Word of God, particularly in Honduras at the time, and in other venues as well.

[0:23] As indicated in your bulletin, Chuck was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam during one of the more difficult and sadder periods of American history.

[0:39] And along with the expertise that he developed as a helicopter pilot, and actually he was well into flying before he went into helicopters, but he always had a yin for flying and a love for it, and with that he has coupled concern and a care and a love for missions.

[1:00] And the way the Lord has used him and Bonnie over the past several decades, particularly in missionary enterprises, has been just truly remarkable, and we've come to appreciate this couple so much.

[1:12] They make their home now in Florida after having lived in the Columbus, Ohio area for several years. And Chuck is retired. I don't know if you call it retired or semi-retired or what, but he's got an extensive military background, particularly in aviation.

[1:28] And we are just grateful that he is here today to share with you the burden the Lord has laid on his heart and what is happening now with an aviation organization that he is serving with, and he is a board member of, and we want him to tell us about that.

[1:43] But we want him to also share something about his personal testimony. So, Chuck, come right ahead. Pleasure to have you here, brother. We look forward to it. Marv, I think I am retired as much as you are retired.

[2:09] I thought I was going to retire. I look forward to going down there and, you know, just pulling out all the Greek books and theology books and just plan to study all half a day and then play my harp a little bit and watch Gunsmoke and then get into the Greek books some more.

[2:29] But Pastor Marv has been sharing with us what he's calling the gap. And within that gap, the church has a mission.

[2:42] And part of that mission is sharing with others the good news. And, you know, Paul calls us ambassadors.

[2:55] He even says that he is an ambassador in chains. But the fact that we're called ambassadors implies this isn't our home. So, you know, we're just kind of here.

[3:06] It's kind of a strange position, really. When you think about it, those of us who are believers have what Paul says. You know, we've still got that old sin nature within us, but we've got a new nature.

[3:18] And they're fighting within us. And we've got a message to share with others. And in this gap, it's quite a unique situation for us.

[3:33] And so I'm going to share with you a little bit this morning about missionary aviation. Not that being a pilot is a big and almighty thing.

[3:51] You know, being a missionary first is foremost. Being a pilot is second. You know, Paul used ships. He traveled by ship.

[4:03] He used technology. Jonah used a submarine, I guess. And we used some airplanes.

[4:16] But as I was, you know, Marv asked me last week to share what Harvest Aviation is about and what we're doing down there in Florida.

[4:27] And then he said, you know, go back and share a little bit about your early life, a little bit, how I got into this. So let me go all the way back to maybe junior high.

[4:40] I felt the Lord leading, you know, that I need to tell others about Christ. And didn't think much about it back in junior high.

[4:52] Got into high school. And I knew I was going to be a pilot. I had no idea I'd be using aviation in missionary activity.

[5:04] But had no idea that it was even possible. But back in 1968, Dave Campbell and I were in the same class in high school.

[5:18] And we graduated together in 1968. We've been friends ever since and long before that. I had my private pilot's license in high school. And Dave was my first passenger.

[5:32] And, oh, we've got a lot of memories to go way back. And back in high school, I knew I wanted to go on further education somewhere.

[5:45] So I applied to two challenging schools. The first one was the military academy at West Point.

[5:56] And Congressman Clarence J. Brown nominated me to West Point. I was telling Barbara a few minutes ago that some of this medication that these doctors put us on just dries our mouth out horribly.

[6:14] So that's why the water there helps a little bit. But Congressman Brown nominated six of us to West Point and let West Point choose which one they wanted for the actual appointment.

[6:31] I did not get the appointment. So I had been accepted at Moody Bible Institute. That was my second choice. And I enrolled in the missionary aviation course up there.

[6:44] As orientees, we went one week early, you know, to go through our little orientation process.

[6:54] And I remember sitting down in the auditorium and the first speaker stood up. And the first words he said were, Welcome to Moody Bible Institute, the West Point of Bible education.

[7:08] I thought, hey, I made it after all, you know. And I knew that was where I was to be. So missionary, being a missionary pilot was foremost on my mind.

[7:20] That next summer, the summer of 1969, I went out to California and worked with Missionary Aviation Fellowship. Painted houses, mowed grass, washed airplanes, did all kinds of things that nobody else could do.

[7:37] You know, it takes a lot of talent to do those things. No, it freed up the missionaries to do what they needed to be doing out there. And I really enjoyed it. Got to meet some wonderful people. And just really clenched in my mind that I really did feel called to be a missionary pilot.

[7:57] However, when I got back home in August, summer of 1969, I drove into the driveway at the farm.

[8:08] And my mother came out to greet me. And she had an envelope in her hand. She says, Welcome back.

[8:19] I've been trying to get you all ever since you left California. We didn't have cell phones back then. Wouldn't have worked anyway because I don't like cell phones. But she couldn't get a hold of me.

[8:32] And she says, You need to read this letter. I think it's important. I looked at the return address, and it was from Richard Nixon. Had no idea he even knew who I was.

[8:44] He had a, he had a, inside he was, he was highly encouraging me to take a physical because the consequences were lengthy.

[8:56] And I thought, well, I better go take this physical. I entered the Army in September, went to basic training in January of 1970, just two weeks after Dave left for the Air Force.

[9:13] So Dave and I have kind of followed each other around. He ended up eventually in Thailand when I was in Vietnam. So we've kept tabs on each other everywhere we went.

[9:25] Six months ago, I retired from the Army after being in the Army for 39 continuous years.

[9:41] As an officer, we had no contract like an enlisted, and therefore we're officers for life unless we actually resign. And I took 11 years in what they call the Individual Ready Reserve, and that's when we were primarily involved in missionary activity.

[10:01] But seven years ago, looking towards retirement, Marv and I took a little vacation just two of us down to Florida, and we were driving around and looking at things and enjoying things.

[10:18] Went to a wonderful Holocaust museum down there in St. Petersburg. And while we were going around, we were looking at, you know, just mobile homes here and there.

[10:33] And we drove into one mobile home park. And as we drove in, Marv says, Chuck, this is where you and Bonnie need to live.

[10:46] And do you all know he's a prophet? Yeah, he's. I took Bonnie down. We looked at quite a few mobile home parks, and we, in fact, did settle on that mobile home park.

[11:00] We didn't know at the time that Harvest Aviation was at a local airport not too far from our home. I was ready to settle into retirement.

[11:12] And we were just driving around looking at airports here and there because I wanted to fly a little bit. And here's this sign, Harvest Aviation. And Bonnie's like, you know, uh-oh.

[11:26] So we waited a couple years, and then she and I went over just two years ago to kind of get acquainted with the folks there.

[11:38] And so I started volunteering a little bit, just hanging around the hangar, helping out here and there. But we'll get into that a little bit more here.

[11:54] Let me jump now to April 26, 1970. April 26, 1970.

[12:06] Does anybody know what the significance of that date is? That was the first worship service at Roosevelt Junior High School.

[12:19] First worship service at Roosevelt Junior High. That was in 1970, April of 1970. In March of 1971, Reverend Marvin Wiseman was called pastor to be the pastor of this church.

[12:39] That was in March of 1971. In April of 1971, I was assigned to the 101st Airborne Unit in Vietnam, up north, close to the DMZ.

[12:59] And I was assigned to an attack helicopter unit. That meant I was going to see a lot of combat. And I did. I eventually came home with 18 combat air medals, which is a lot.

[13:16] A lot of combat. And while I was there, in April especially, I started flying immediately.

[13:32] The Army had a regulation that said that you could only fly 50 hours in a 30-day period unless the brigade commander waived it up to 90 hours.

[13:46] And then it could be waived again by the first general in my chain of command up to 140 hours. Nothing over 140 hours in a 30-day period.

[13:59] The need was so great for combat pilots. I flew 146 hours in the first 21 days.

[14:12] That's a lot of flying. I was worn out. I know why the regulations are there. Just flying 146 hours in a 30-day period is one thing.

[14:24] But combat flying, unless you've been there, you don't know what it is. I remember several times, you know, I don't know what was going by the door, but the concussion was so loud.

[14:39] You know, my body just shook. The instrument panel was all blurred. I couldn't see anything. When you're in intense combat, there's just one word, confusion, mass confusion.

[15:01] There's just no other way to describe it. The Cobras are working out, firing rockets in, and the killing that goes on with it. And I'm thinking, you know, I'm a missionary pilot.

[15:17] What am I doing this for? But as some of you have read my memoirs, you know, 1 Thessalonians 5.18 was my favorite verse.

[15:30] And everything give thanks, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning me, concerning you, me. And that verse, in every intense conflict, when the bullets are flying, that verse just went over and over and over and over in my mind.

[15:56] After I flew 146 hours and 21 days, I was immediately grounded when I got back to the company area. So I asked the commander, I said, you know, can I get a pass to go to Saigon?

[16:09] I said, sure, why not? You know, you can't do anything here. So I knew some people at Wycliffe Bible Translators. They were still in Vietnam doing their work during that time.

[16:20] So I went to Saigon, went to visit the Wycliffe Bible Translators office. And before I came back up to the north, they gave me as many gospel tracts as I could carry in the Vietnamese language.

[16:41] I think it was Vietnamese. I couldn't read it. But they were working also in the Bru language up in the area where I was. So some of this may have been in the Bru language that Wycliffe was translating.

[16:59] Now, kind of put this together a little bit here. In May of 1971, this would be about the second or third week in May, I was picking up these gospel tracts in Saigon and started distributing them.

[17:24] That was in May of 71. May 23rd is the date that Grace Bible Church officially was recognized as a duly organized New Testament church.

[17:39] The same month, probably the same week. Here I am. I'm a combat missionary pilot in Vietnam handing out gospel tracts.

[17:53] And I'm thinking, I've got this transportation here to help me deliver these gospel tracts. So I would stuff my pockets full.

[18:04] We'd go out. We'd be in intense combat. As we were flying out, you know, I obviously couldn't take my hands off the controls while we're hovering there and the fighting is going on.

[18:15] But as we would fly out, I'd reach in my pocket, throw a handful out. Reach in my pocket, throw another handful out. I was there as a missionary pilot.

[18:27] And, you know, the combat stuff just kind of came with the turf. Probably the same week as when Grace Bible Church had their official recognition as a New Testament church just after they'd called Marv.

[18:45] And this would have all been at Roosevelt Junior High and meeting on Wednesday nights at the YMCA. This church wasn't built yet at that point.

[18:59] But another amazing thing happened. Daryl Henderson was writing letters to me.

[19:17] And, you know, we had met before, you know, several years earlier. And now that the church was started, he was sending me Marv's cassette tapes.

[19:30] Y'all remember what a cassette tape is. And I was listening to these in Vietnam. And Daryl sent some letters. Marv wrote to me once or twice.

[19:41] And Daryl would send Marv's letter. But primarily Daryl was sending me letters, assuring me that Grace Bible Church was praying for me and thinking about me.

[19:57] And little did I know that here I was in Vietnam as a missionary pilot. And I had a supportive church right here.

[20:08] And both of us got started the same week. That's amazing. Barbara, I'd like to say thank you.

[20:20] You were at that time raising three kids and a husband. You were involved in trying to run a bookstore.

[20:31] You were involved here at a new church. And at the same time, you were loaning me family time for Daryl to write to me.

[20:43] Thank you. Let me jump forward a few years.

[20:54] 1973. Bonnie and I were married right here. I was standing here facing that direction.

[21:05] Right here in this new building. And in 1973, I don't remember all the little details, but there were three of us families that were commissioned by the elders to be missionaries from Grace Bible Church.

[21:24] The Andersons being one family, the Worsers, the other family, and then Bonnie and me. We began our service with Wycliffe Bible Translators and then eventually transferred to Mission Aviation Fellowship out in California.

[21:39] And then we served with MAF in Honduras. We had both a helicopter down there and fixed wing.

[21:57] Back during that time, it would have been 78, 79 era. Honduras was at war on paper with El Salvador.

[22:07] El Salvador is just to the west of Honduras. Honduras and El Salvador were at war with each other. The war started in a soccer game in Mexico City.

[22:18] It lasted two days. But on paper, it was like eight years before they could resolve it. The El Salvadoranian Air Force came over to Honduras and shot up both of the Honduran airplanes in the Air Force.

[22:41] It wasn't a big Air Force. Shot them up on the ground. The war was over. At the same time, though, and this is much more important, El Salvador was involved in a civil war.

[22:57] The guerrillas were at war with the National Guard. Very, very vicious civil war.

[23:07] Consequently, we dealt with a lot of refugees coming across the river and through the mountains. Refugees don't want to leave their homeland.

[23:22] However, the situation in El Salvador was that up in the mountains, a guerrilla would maybe come in on a Monday or Tuesday, come in, tell the pastor he wanted a steer butchered for his men.

[23:39] He was going to pick it up Thursday. If the church complied, then no one in the church would be assassinated.

[23:51] If the church did not comply, someone in the church would be killed. And it happened time and time again. Now, jump to the other side with the corruption in the National Guard.

[24:09] When the National Guard found out about it, if the church did butcher the steer to give to the guerrillas, then the National Guard would assassinate somebody in the church.

[24:22] In the church, it was a lose-lose situation. You know, when Bonnie and I came back, we gave our little report. I didn't include that in the report.

[24:32] This is probably the first time that I've shared this with you all. Tremendous persecution. So pastors were coming across into Honduras with their churches.

[24:47] They were bringing their churches into Honduras. They had no food out there. And we would fly food. We would fly medicines, things like that.

[25:01] In one case, we even had to build a new runway just to be able to work with these refugees. At the same time, to the south of Honduras is Nicaragua.

[25:18] Nicaragua was involved in an intense civil war at the same time El Salvador was. So we had not only the El Salvadoranians coming in from the west, but refugees coming in from Nicaragua.

[25:36] The church, again, was persecuted in a very, very similar way. And I went over to the hangar on a Sunday morning.

[25:49] Sunday mornings, you know, we'd check into our radio net. All the pastors out in the jungle and in the mountains had radios. And Sunday mornings, we're always quiet.

[26:00] The pastors out in the mountains and jungle were getting ready for church. And hardly ever checked in on the net. But as a net controller, you know, we had to be there. So I turned the radio on.

[26:12] And before I even got the net started, I heard this pastor just crying on the radio.

[26:23] A little place called Mokron. Mokron had probably a population of 60 people. And overnight, he had like 2,000 more refugees come across.

[26:40] We were to find out that the refugees in these churches came across the Cocoa River, which is very dangerous. This is a large river. It's nothing that you can wade through.

[26:51] In El Salvador, the river, you know, you can walk across it anywhere you want. Kind of like the Rio Grande in places. But the Cocoa River is a major river.

[27:03] Several pastors brought their churches over in the dead of night. He lost several people.

[27:15] He lost children. He lost babies. And so the pastor in Mokron was matching up little babies, little nursing babies, with nursing mothers who had lost their child just to keep these kids alive.

[27:34] But now we've got like 2,000 people to keep alive. So I got with the other pilots at our little station there. And we just loaded food up and started flying to Mokron.

[27:47] And people couldn't eat as much food as we could carry. And it was quite interesting. One of the other things that you have to consider in these Central American countries is that if an American missionary is co-located at a church in the country, the persecution increases a little bit because the dirty American is there.

[28:19] And a lot of the missionaries left Nicaragua for that fact with the idea that they could go back after the Civil War was over.

[28:31] But they didn't want to stay there in the villages because the church was persecuted a little bit more. So M.A.F. got the word that we needed to get another family out.

[28:48] They didn't make it out when the opportunity existed, when the window was open to get out. And a church had been hiding them for at least a month out behind the church.

[29:00] They were living on rice and corn, cornmeal. I was a husband and wife and a little girl and a little boy.

[29:19] So I made a kind of a rescue mission flight down to get them. We coordinated it with the government. And knowing that I had to take some sort of a gift to the gorillas, we loaded up the airplane with food, more like camping food, you know, cans and things.

[29:46] And so I loaded the airplane up with something to present to them. So I got down there, and the gorillas only took about a fourth of it, and they said, we'll take the rest of it on out to the church, but here are your missionaries.

[30:01] But they said, you need to file a flight plan. I noticed that the people in the flight line, you know, they were kids, 14, 15, 16-year-old kids with M16s in combat clothes on.

[30:24] And they escorted me at gunpoint into a little room, just a small room. All it had in there was an old card table with one chair and a flight plan was sitting on the table there.

[30:40] And they said, fill it out. They were trying to intimidate me, you know. Here I am trying to fill out a flight plan in Spanish with four M16s aimed at me.

[30:56] Little did they know that wasn't anything new to me. You know, I'd just come from Vietnam. You know, so four measly little M16s wasn't that big a deal. It was.

[31:09] I mean, you know, but I sat down and I filled out the flight plan. After I filled out the flight plan, they escorted me out in the hallway. And an older gentleman, probably one of their colonels in their guerrilla warfare hierarchy, I don't know, he was a man of quite importance, it was obvious.

[31:31] And he talked to me and talked to me this and that, trying to confuse me, you know, all this in Spanish. For about a half hour, maybe 40 minutes. And then these kids came back.

[31:43] And they said, I want you to make a flight plan. So they escorted me in another room and had to make out another flight plan. Same situation. And then they compared the two flight plans.

[31:54] And they were identical, so they let me go. And I took this family back to Honduras. And the mother and wife was sickly, very sick.

[32:06] And when I landed in Tegucigalpa at Toncontin Airport, their mission director came walking out. And he met them.

[32:16] And he said, the 737 is sitting right there. It's on hold in case you guys want to go to Miami. I've got tickets. And he said, if you don't want to go now, I've got a doctor downtown that can see you.

[32:34] So the husband asked his wife, he says, what do you want to do? It was just as hilarious as it could be. She says, I see golden lights.

[32:46] He thought she was hallucinating. He said, what? I see golden lights. And he turned to his director.

[32:56] He said, I don't know what. So I asked her again, I see golden lights. And then she turned to her husband and says, honey, I see the golden arches in Miami.

[33:07] Let's go. Let's go to McDonald's. Those were the golden lights she saw. One day out near the El Salvadoranian border, just 4,000 feet from the border, I had a little runway out there, 800 feet long.

[33:34] And I was picking up some Hondurans. And all of a sudden, out from the brush jumped a gorilla.

[33:46] The Hondurans were petrified. And I thought, well, obviously he's in charge. He's got the gun. I don't. And I just answered his questions, worked with him. After about a half hour, he believed me and let me go.

[34:03] I don't normally talk about this, these two instances, when I was basically held hostage for a half hour. But this is just so mild as compared to things that are coming.

[34:22] This is some of the experience that I bring to Harvest Aviation. I decided to, this is basically two years ago, excuse me.

[34:42] I decided and felt led to go ahead and join Harvest Aviation. But before I did, I came up and sat down with Marv in his office here.

[34:56] And I said, Marv, this is where I feel the Lord's leading me. But I'm not going to do it on my own. And I am so convinced that a local church is so important in a missionary's life.

[35:10] I said, I'm just not going to do this. So we talked about it a little bit. And I went on down and joined. Harvest Aviation is a very small organization.

[35:25] We fly into Belize primarily. Don't have time to get into all that. But several of the board of directors down there had health problems.

[35:43] And one would resign this month and another next month. Before long, there was one board member left. And Mike Birch, he is, if you pick up the article, out here, Jennifer brought the newspaper up.

[35:59] On page two, Mike Birch is at the top here. He's a generation younger than me. He's away from home an awful lot.

[36:11] He's a charter pilot, kind of like an airline pilot type schedule. So he's not at home a lot.

[36:21] But he called this board of directors meeting with three of us who had been volunteering. And he said, I'm the only board of directors left.

[36:33] He says, I want all three of you to be board of directors with me. And he said, first of all, you need to become members.

[36:44] And I vote for all three of you to become members. Do you accept? Yes, we do. Okay, now I vote to make you all three board members. Do you accept? Yes. And so we became members and board members in a 30-second board of directors meeting.

[37:02] Then the next question he asked, he said, Chuck, now I want you to be the president and the CEO. And I said, okay, hang on here a minute. You know, I don't know much about this organization. It's probably the stupidest thing I've ever heard.

[37:14] And he says, well, I don't have time to do it. And I said, well, let's split the responsibilities. So he and I are now co-chairing the CEO position, whatever that means.

[37:28] You'll notice in this newspaper article he's called the vice president. He's really the president. He doesn't care. I don't care. You know, we're there.

[37:38] You know, and at that time, before the three of us came on as new members, they only had three members total at that time.

[37:54] So when with the six of us now, we doubled their membership. And during the past year, I've been out kind of recruiting folks and looking here and there.

[38:04] And when I say recruiting, I don't go out and try to get people. And it's, to me, kind of more like mushroom hunting. I go out to see what God has already grown out there and then go out and pick it.

[38:16] And throughout the course of my recruiting effort, there are now 14 of us. I haven't recruited all of them, but that's kind of been my emphasis.

[38:30] But we've turned away several folks. And the reason I've turned them away is because they did not have a strong local church behind them.

[38:40] To me, you know, we need that long, strong local church behind each person. All of our people that come to us are what we're calling independent contractors.

[38:59] They raise their own support. As a mission, we're not going to get involved with that. We have no aspirations to become a big, mighty, giant name of something.

[39:09] You know, we're just a group of people working together. And the people that come to join are independent contractors.

[39:22] They have their own insurance. They do everything. And we as a nonprofit organization will give them a 1099 at the end of the year for tax purposes if funds come through our organization.

[39:34] But they're kind of on their own, you know. And some of the younger guys, you know, over the last several months, hey, Chuck, I need to talk to you about this.

[39:48] And my first question is, have you talked to your elders? You need to go back and talk to your elders. So that's kind of a policy that I'm using down there.

[39:59] And one of the fellows that left the organization, when he left, he was encouraging me to go out and build up revenue.

[40:12] He said, you know, there's a missionary gal doing something with a 5K run sponsoring, you know, people, this and that and on.

[40:24] He said, you know, with your organizational skills, why don't you go do that? And people can sponsor runners and we can build up some funds for our mission flights to Bay Least.

[40:38] And I thought about that right away. I thought, no, that's, you know, I have never considered that I would put a nonbeliever in a position where if they gave funds to support a missionary project, that in their own private life, they may say, look, Lord, what I did to help you.

[41:02] That's not it at all. And I wasn't going to foster that. So I dropped it, you know, it just wasn't the way I was going to conduct missionary business.

[41:16] So thinking about that, I contacted Mike. I called him and I said, Mike, you know, we don't have a lot of funds.

[41:28] Basically, our bookkeeper's job is to inform us of how much money we don't have. And aircraft parts are quite expensive.

[41:42] I said, Mike, I know we use credit cards. We use credit cards because anywhere we go to purchase gas, we have to use a credit card. But so we do a lot of our business by credit card.

[41:54] And I said, Mike, what's our policy on going in debt to buy aircraft parts when we know that we can't pay it? Will we get into this thing of just paying the minimum on a credit card?

[42:11] He'd already thought this through, and his response was classic. I love it. He says, Chuck, if we get to the point where we can't buy aircraft parts and there's nothing to do in the hangar, we stop, we wait, and we go out and pull weeds around the hangar.

[42:28] Excellent. You know, if we don't have it, we don't spend it, we go out and trim the bushes and pull weeds until the money comes in. So then all of a sudden, and if you've read this article, I won't go into it too much here because the Lord's provided a Seneca II twin-engine aircraft for us.

[42:53] It's larger than the one we use now. There are a dime a dozen junk airplanes out there ever since 2008 when the economy went down.

[43:04] You know, the husband and wife are sitting at the breakfast table, and it's like, honey, you know, you haven't flown your airplane for a year. I know, I know, but, you know, two years go by, three years, and four years go by.

[43:16] You know what we'll do? We'll donate it to Harvest Aviation. You know, we know it's only worth about $10,000, but they'll sign off and say it's worth about $180,000 that we can use our taxes.

[43:30] Those airplanes are a dime a dozen out there. This one was flown by an airline pilot as his own personal airplane. He decided he was going to maintain it, so he got his FAA maintenance license to maintain it.

[43:43] And he says, I'm going to be the only inspector on it. So he got his inspector's rating also. And it flew right up until two months prior to being donated to us.

[43:54] You can read the story there. We do make monthly flights to Baylise.

[44:09] I sponsored a membership conference last year, and I wanted to do another one in November, a time when we bring all of our members together. And I bring some experience from, you know, when I was in command positions in the Army.

[44:26] You know, tell me three up things, three down, three positives, three negatives. You know, emphasize the negatives. Tell me what's wrong. What's going on here? What do we need to do to improve? And that's what this conference is all about is to get our folks to tell us the truth.

[44:42] And Jennifer was tremendous. She was keeping notes for me in all this. Her notes are like a stenographer. You know, I mean, you know, they're beautiful. So she and I are going to use these notes.

[44:55] You know, what we need to do, that's going to kick off our next conference in November. November, we needed to reacquaint ourselves with some of the missionaries.

[45:11] We've been making all these flights for several years, and I told Mike that he needed to go down. He's the president. Go down, visit the people, visit the missionaries. So they decided on a four-day mission flight down there.

[45:25] He and another pilot, and then one of our younger guys, 22 years old, he has a special interest in Belize because his grandfather started seven churches there years ago.

[45:39] And so suddenly we're now on with this flight down there. They're going to go down for four days, and we have nobody to coordinate this thing.

[45:51] So Jennifer says, well, I think I can do that. You know, she's emailing them all. And so they took off, flew down there, and she's setting up meetings in different places.

[46:06] And I told her, I said, well, Jennifer, I appreciate you emailing all 39 of these missionaries. And she says, well, Uncle Charlie, it's actually 60 now, and it could be closer to 70.

[46:21] And she says, I haven't had time to do anything, you know, because they would email her and say, where's the next meeting going to be? And she'd email them back. And in two cases, they said, when is the one at so-and-so?

[46:35] And she says, I'm sorry, that one's already over. That was yesterday. But if you get on the bus, you know, a two-and-a-half-hour trip, you can go up to wherever. And they did. And it was a tremendous success.

[46:46] And before we went down there, just a couple days before they flew down there, Mike Birch said, you know, we need a brochure or something to put in the missionaries' hands. So a couple days before I went down there, Jennifer ginned up a brochure, printed out 100 copies or so.

[47:06] So they took it down with them and handed them out. And on the horizon, my three-year plan, I want to come up with an evacuation plan for our missionaries in Belize.

[47:19] One of my points in the three-year, five-year plan was to get one of our folks to be a missionary on location in Belize.

[47:30] Well, the result of this trip down there, a gal came up to Mike Birch and a young lady and said, I want to be that person.

[47:42] I can handle that for you. You know, be your representative here. Well, I didn't know, but she's Belizean. That's her, you know, she's got a local church supporting her.

[47:56] And at this moment, she's filling out her application. So the Lord's going to provide in that manner. And what better than to have a local citizen being our representative down here?

[48:13] Now, I have no idea how to be a board of directors to manage foreign nationals. You know, it's rough enough with what we've got going. But the other thing I want to do is get down to Fort Lauderdale and talk to the Belizean consulate.

[48:29] I need to talk to her about, you know, what kind of plan does she have? What kind of plan does their embassy have to get foreigners out?

[48:43] You know, a lot of rabbit trails to follow. It's kind of fun. Persecution is going to increase tremendously.

[48:56] I handed out a piece of paper there. You all can read that. It's time to close here. But I'm going to jump all the way down to the bottom there.

[49:08] We as a church, we as a missionary organization, are challenged by the world system to be tolerant. You need to be more tolerant of things of the world. And they don't, when they say that, they don't understand our God.

[49:25] They don't understand that our God has zero tolerance for wickedness, for evil. However, they don't understand the difference that the Lord and Savior that we serve has a lot of patience.

[49:44] But that patience comes to an end. If you look at God's tolerance as a brick wall, you can't get through it, you can't get over it, you can't get around it. But God's tolerance is a brick wall.

[49:56] You're just not going to convince God that he should tolerate evil and wickedness. However, God does have a lot of patience. But if you can picture tolerance, no tolerance as a brick wall, then picture God's patience as a bucket full of water.

[50:15] And you're slowly pouring the water out. There comes a time when that last drop is going to come out of that bucket. And that coincides with what Pastor Marr has been teaching us about the gap.

[50:28] There comes a time when this gap has an ending date. And when the last bucket of God's patience runs out, literally all hell is going to break loose.

[50:40] And with that, there's more, but that's it. Marv, I'll turn it back to you there.

[50:52] I think we'll let it go at that for now. Thank you. I appreciate it. And grab me if you've got any questions. We'll go from there.

[51:02] Thank you so much, Chuck. I know that you shared only a very small pittance of what you could be telling us.

[51:17] And we're grateful for the burden that the Lord has given you and for the way he's using you now. Retired or retreaded, however you want to put that.

[51:28] So let's close with a word of prayer, shall we? Father, we are truly grateful for your patience and your long-suffering. And we look about us throughout the world and we see so much evil dominating in so many places.

[51:44] And we marvel that you are remaining in your long-suffering. And we don't know when that's going to conclude. But we want to be a people who are active and involved in what we should be doing and could be doing to give the gospel to as many as we can in as short a time as possible.

[52:04] And right now we pray for the spirit of wisdom and understanding as to how we as individuals or as a church may be best involved in a strategic ministry like Harvest Aviation.

[52:20] We are grateful for the dedication of the handful of servants who are working in this capacity. There are so many other things that they could be doing that would be a lot easier and a lot less demanding.

[52:32] But we sense very much that these people simply want to be used of you. We want to honor that however we can. Thank you for the time we've shared together. And thank you for being the God that you are and for having made us what you have in Christ, in whose name we pray.

[52:51] Amen. Thank you all. You are dismissed.