An Ordinary Life, An Extraordinary Life

 12-14 – Venice, Greece, Cyprus, Israel, England When Jewish boys turn 12, they have a rite of passage called a Bar-mitzvah that ceremonially ushers them into manhood. One of our teachers thought this would be a good custom for us to practice as well, albeit with an altered kind of ceremony. We were required to choose, memorize and recite a whole chapter from the Bible. It was a good tradition to participate in but I still had a lot of growing up to do. There was a fun, two-person strategy game we started playing when we were in Venice called Mastermind and while we were docked there, the Mastermind organization asked to rent the ship for a tournament. It was fun watching the proceedings but the best part was that they left us all their extras. There were cases of small bottles of juice that were so intensely delicious I can still taste them in my mind to this day. They were such a treat that we gorged ourselves.  While some work was done on the ship in the Venice shipyard, ou...

 Chapter Three - Greece Venice is a long way from New Zealand. Our route took us through Hong Kong and Switzerland. We had to stay the night in Hong Kong so my dad wanted to catch an authentic Chinese dinner in an authentic Chinese restaurant. As we walked into the restaurant, we noticed that some of the other tables were filthy. We thought this might get interesting. My dad knew someone who came along to order for us but he had a previous engagement. He ordered, then left. We had no idea what we were getting into.  They brought out the soup and we began to eat. They also began to pour the tea. But when they went from cup to cup they didn’t stop pouring. They just moved to the next cup, soaking the tablecloth in between. Then they brought a second course, which included long noodles. The waiter pulled out a scissor-like utensil (on which we thought we saw some rust) and proceeded to cut the noodles in the bowl. He also wiped his hands on the part of the tablecloth that hung do...

 11 - U.S. West Coast, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Venice My parents decided to go back to New Zealand for some months before travelling to Europe but my father sprung another fun surprise on us. He had a speaking engagement at the YWAM base in Salem, Oregon so he decided to make a West Coast family trip out of it. While we were in Oregon I underwent another childhood rite of passage when I spun myself in one of the large clothes dryers they had on base. That was also where I saw my first snakes, playing with the harmless garters they had on the property. We drove from Salem all the way down the coast to San Diego on the famous Highway 1, stopping at different spots along the way. That was when I was first introduced to the grand American restaurant breakfast when I ordered a loggers breakfast at a diner along the way. It was HUGE to my 11 year old eyes and stomach.  We visited San Francisco, staying with a friend of my parents in a nearby town called Richmond. We were warned that...

In 1978, my father was going to die. Argentina was hosting the FIFA World Cup and YWAM was putting on a huge outreach to the contestants and fans. My father believed he was supposed to go but he also felt like he was going to die there. A terrorist group had been threatening to wreak havoc during the competition. When Loren Cunningham heard about it, he prayed that God would extend my dad’s life like king Hezekiah in the Bible. There was another catch. My father had applied for permanent residence in the United States and while the request is being processed you are not allowed to leave the country. In ignorance, he had already left once on another speaking trip. Fortunately, they let him back in, albeit with a court date to decide our fate. It turned out okay that time but even if he survived in Argentina they would probably not let him back in the country. During the outreach, he preached on the streets every time like was going to be his last. He expected a bullet at any moment. He ...

The school had moved yet again. We were now meeting up Hualalai near the farm property. YWAM had their own school bus but there were too many kids to fit on just the bus. In those days, kids were allowed to ride in the back of a pick up truck which is obviously pretty dangerous, and we were packed in there.  One day, my friend Mark and I were messing around in the back of the truck on the way to school and the driver stopped and told us to knock it off. We didn’t realize that he could see us in his mirror so when we got under way, we started messing around again. Corporal punishment was in full force at this school and when we got there we felt its effects. Besides that, I have very pleasant memories of that school. There was a huge Banyan tree in the yard and a couple of tetherballs. It was there that I learned how to make the best paper airplane in the world. To this day, I still make them in the three-year-old class I teach at church. On a non-windy day we used to throw them str...

Skateboarding was a big pastime in those years with plenty of space to ride on the property. There was a nice, smooth former shuffleboard court and there was also a road on a hill down the side of Building Three that ended in a large drainage bowl you could ride into and around. It was a good place for bikes too. The bowl had no outlet, so after a rain, water would sit in there and get very nasty with tadpoles and such.  In Hawaii, if you got scraped, it was easy to get a staph infection, which could turn into painful sores that could actually be life-threatening. The bowl was not a good place to wipe out and I was always too scared that I was going to, going too fast down the hill. Somebody built a ramp on the side of the bowl and one day, someone told Samuel to slide down it. Unbeknownst to him, there was a nail sticking out and he tore up the back of his leg. There was a pool on the property. Someone actually found it by falling into it through the overgrowth. There were some fu...

 Another acronym some people use for YWAM is Youth Without Any Money. Despite this, YWAM, Hawaii was trying to purchase an old, abandoned hotel on 45 acres in Kona, with the goal of turning the property into a university. Even though it was a monstrous amount of money to us, YWAM made an offer on the property well below what the owners were asking. But that was the amount the leaders thought they should offer and they believed we would win. Much to everyone’s disappointment, someone else bought the property. But then the deal fell through and it was up for sale again. It sold again. But that deal also fell through. Finally, the owners sold it to YWAM for our original offer. There were four large buildings on the property that they numbered one through four. Unfortunately, squatters had taken up residence in some of the rooms. We couldn’t move in until they evacuated and they were given seven days. On the last day, my dad and another man moved in to try to force them out. Although o...

During the small boat ministry school we got to sail in the beautiful deep blue water up and down the Kona coast but now the training phase came to an end. A practicum was planned to sail the boat over to the nearest island of Maui to do ministry. My parents were going along to lead the outreach and us kids were staying behind.  I had a deep sadness, knowing that I would miss them. I don’t know if it was a coping mechanism or just part of my personality but consciously or unconsciously I steeled myself against that pain and learned to not miss people at all. In YWAM, people come and go all the time and I just got used to it. That was the last time I missed anyone for a long time. Although I have missed people since, this part of me has caused conflict with my family and most seriously with my wife. I have tried to help her understand that me not missing her does not mean that I don’t love her. I just enjoy people when I am with them and when they are not with me, I enjoy other thin...

Mongooses are small squirrel-like creatures that abound in Hawaii. In the late nineteenth century they had been imported to Hawaii to control the rat population, which was damaging the sugar cane. Someone didn’t do their homework because mongooses are mostly active during the day and the rat is mostly a night creature. Mongooses also breed like crazy and they have no natural predators in Hawaii, so they are ubiquitous. They are too big to catch in rat traps but it was a fun pastime for us to set traps and watch them get their noses snapped. There was lots of open land behind the Barnabas House going up Hualalai. One day Samuel and I decided to go hiking up the mountain. On the way we found a horse tied up in a field. I had some kind of affinity for horses and didn’t like to see it tied up like that. I untied it and set it free – idiot. We saw it again on our way back down. Fortunately, someone had found it roaming around and tied it back up on the side of the road so its owner could fi...

YWAM had bought some houses in town and started running training schools out of them. They asked my dad to help lead one and our family moved into the Aloha House with twenty something young ladies. It was the perfect opportunity for Samuel to use his special female-scaring skills. Kona has a plethora of what are called Kona cruisers - very large, frightening cockroaches. My brother used to tell the ladies to be careful because the cruisers would eat their eyelashes while they were sleeping. I’m sure there was many a yawn from the lack of sleep in that school. As an outreach we went to the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Our family stayed in the parsonage of a local church. At the back of the parsonage was a large, steep downhill slope where I spent hours by myself playing an unusual game I had made up. I would erode the dirt at the top of the slope and call the rolling dirt my army of “dirties”. I enjoyed watching the dirties pour down and “conquer” everything in their way. What can I say? ...

 It was during the Kona-Kai days that I underwent the Christian sacrament of baptism in water. There is an old, defunct airport at the ocean that is now a park where we used to have events and that was where it happened. I usually always followed Samuel in these things but this time I made the decision myself and got baptized before him. My parents also believed in the present-day work and gifts of the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity. As part of that, they believed in a baptism of the Holy Spirit. My father sat Samuel and I down one day and asked if we wanted to do that. We did, together. Earthquakes are not out of the ordinary in Hawaii. Early one morning we got hit. Samuel and Joy did not get along the best, so even though Samuel didn’t sleep anywhere near her, Joy told him to stop shaking the bed. As Kona sits on the coast, it is susceptible to tsunamis. As a precaution, we had to evacuate up the mountain to the public High School. I grabbed my two most valuable thi...

Since we didn’t have much money, my father was always interested in doing anything to save as much as we could. No one in YWAM gets paid. In fact, everyone pays fees. There was a property up the mountain or mauka as they say in Hawaii. They used the property as a farm and a center for training. Some people had built some semi-permanent coverings out of wood frames and plastic on wooden platforms with tents inside to live in. My dad thought that was a great money-saving idea. The farm was a fascinating place to play. Some of the lava up there was broken up into huge, steep hillsides of very sharp rocks. Of course boys like a good challenge so one time we decided to try to run down those hillsides. I still bear scars from those very sharp rocks cutting into me as gravity took control and sent me sprawling. Strong gusts of wind would sweep through the farm, ripping pieces of the plastic off the frames but my father was undaunted. One night we had a strong storm with torrential rain. My si...

Chapter Two - Hawaii 8-11, Hawaii So in 1975, when I was eight-years-old, we made the big leap from the South Pacific Ocean to the North Pacific when we left New Zealand to settle in the town of Kailua-Kona on the Big Island of Hawaii.  Hawaii was settled by Polynesians from the Marquesas islands between 300 and 500 A.D. The first recorded contact with Europeans was in 1778 with (I sense a pattern)…Captain Cook. He named the islands the Sandwich Islands after his sponsor, the Earl of Sandwich. He reported the native name as Owyhee. On Cook’s second visit in 1779 he was killed in a conflict with the natives. In 1893, white settlers overthrew the monarchy and in 1898, Hawaii was annexed by the United States of America. Kona is the site of the yearly world-famous Ironman Triathlon. But once again, what many people think of as paradise was somewhat less so for us. The town is built at the ocean at the bottom of a volcanic mountain named Hualalai. The Kona coast is lava rock in various ...

After the missionary work in the Cook Islands, my father was languishing in a “normal” domestic life. He felt like his life was wasting away. But it was during that time that my mom attended the event that was going to send our family on a global adventure.  One day she went to hear a famous missionary named Brother Andrew but another missionary also briefly spoke at the event. His name was Loren Cunningham and he was the leader of an international Christian missionary organization called Youth With A Mission (YWAM). That day he talked about how YWAM wanted to buy a ship to do missionary work - right up my dad’s alley, melding his ship experience with his desire for missions! A few weeks later, my father got a call from someone in YWAM to say the ship they were trying to purchase was actually in New Zealand about 400 miles south of us in the capital city of Wellington. My father decided to go join them to help get the ship ready and the rest of us went down some months later during...

We had a fuchsia hedge that grew around our property that attracted bees. Of course, bees always stimulate boy’s instincts. Samuel and I decided to try killing them by quickly slapping them between our hands. That was when I got my first bee sting. And speaking of killing insects, we indubitably discovered the pastime of incinerating ants with a magnifying glass.  We were cat people and there were three, one at a time - Fluffy 1, Fluffy 2 and Fred. I think a car hit one of them and I’m not sure about the second but the third met its demise in a way I will never forget.  My father had a tool shed in the back yard that he had turned into a study and my parents used to leave the cat in there when we were gone. There was a small gap under the door and when you came up to the shed, the cat would put its paw under to play. One day we heard a horrible noise and ran outside to see a Tomcat with our poor cat hanging limp in its mouth. The Tomcat had grabbed hold of our cat’s paw under ...

Volcanoes built New Zealand and our local extinct one was a small cone called Mangere Mountain. Every once in a while we would head up there for some hiking or riding a sled my father had made. It was a very steep hill to ride down, which terrified me. My father could be very handy. He also made a slip and slide out of a very large piece of strong plastic which he used to set up in the front yard. The neighborhood kids would all want to come over for hours of fun. Our family had one car but in those days most things were close enough to walk to. Before I started school, my mom used to walk me across the fields of the local Manukau Rover rugby club just down the street to the Mangere shopping center about a mile away. That was where I once underwent the childhood rite of passage of getting lost. Fortunately, we had the car that day and my thinking skills came in handy. I just went to where my mom had parked the car and that’s where she found me. The car was a VW beetle. One time she los...