Just a Door

In 2015, as we were launching head-first into a God-sized project – transitioning our flight program to a turbine helicopter instead of a Cessna bush plane, we found ourselves facing a wild array of emotions. Crazy excitement at what this tool would mean for our church planters, mixed with some fear and trembling – what if we heard wrong? What if this isn’t what God is doing? Not only did we need a helicopter, we needed specialized training for several pilots and mechanics, a new set of specialized tooling and equipment, and we needed land near our guesthouse and resources to build a new hangar and flight center. 

Hangar design ideas flew back and forth between the various team members involved in the project, and soon we were reaching out to potential suppliers for estimates on construction materials. Not that we were ready to build, but we needed to know how much we were asking God to provide. I contacted a garage door supplier to request a quote for a main hangar door, and within a few days God had provided a top-of-the-line commercial grade overhead door, exactly what we needed for our hangar! We had no R66 helicopter, no hangar, and no land to build a hangar on, but God knew that we needed His confirmation that we were on the right track, so he provided a door.

The story didn’t stop there. After months of fruitless, discouraging looking and negotiating for land to build a hangar on, God chose to encourage us once again. Our plan was to fabricate an inexpensive semi-portable hangar out of shipping containers. While it would have worked and been relatively inexpensive, it would have been a time consuming construction project, one that God knew we didn’t have time for. So He provided a typhoon rated, pre-fab hangar for us! Through a group of christian businessmen spread from Australia to the Philippines, God provided once again. Now we had a door and hangar, but still no land to assemble it on. Within a few weeks of God providing the hangar, we had a contract on a piece of land. Because of God’s provision through the faithfulness of His people, today we have a fully operational helicopter flight program that is serving both foreign and indigenous missionaries in over a dozen different villages.

To read more about the construction process, check out the story about our Angel in Flip-Flops.