I Aint Missing You At All

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 things. Part of it is to do with my introversion. I get time to myself here and there to recharge but when my family goes away I am like a battery on the deep recharge cycle

We didn’t have a movie theater in Kona, so going to the movies was a very rare event for us. There was a theater up the mountain in Kealakekua - a town world-famous for a certain “little grass shack”. It was 1977 and a friend of our family took Samuel and I to see the first Star Wars movie.

By this time the school had moved out of the apartments and was being held in a building up in Kealekakua as well. The Mansfields also had a farm up that part of the island on which they grew some of the Macadamia nuts and coffee that Kona is famous for. They used to hire us to pick them by the sack. 

I had a small brush with fame. Corrie Ten Boom was a famous Dutch lady who wrote a book called The Hiding Place. In the book, she chronicled her story of how she, along with her sister, endured imprisonment in a German concentration camp during World War II for harboring Jews. Her sister died in the camp just before Corrie’s release. Corrie came to Hawaii to visit the YWAM base and some of us kids went to the airport to greet her with plumeria leis we had made. Lei is the Hawaiian word for garland or wreath. 

Loren Cunningham began to recognize my father’s teaching and leadership ability and someone else took over the Small Boat Ministry School as my dad took on more leadership of the base. During this time, he also began to travel to the mainland of the United States and to Europe to speak at other YWAM bases. By this time I wasn’t missing him but we always enjoyed the treats he brought back from his trips.

Waiting at Keahole airport for Corrie Ten Boom to arrive

Comments

  1. Pioneer WomanAugust 16, 2020 at 2:17 PM

    I see Michelle Jordan, Karen Cunningham, Sean Hawkins with you. Second from left might be
    Quimby Graham, but not sure.

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownAugust 16, 2020 at 5:40 PM

    Interesting that you don’t miss people, I often feel the same! Not for lack of loving them, I suppose just a coping mechanism built up over the years. Nice to recognise that in a family member. Your cousin Catherine.

    ReplyDelete
  3. RhondaAugust 17, 2020 at 6:46 AM

    Just talking today with a TCK former student in his early 20s recognizing his having steeled himself against grieving multiple losses the last 20 years since his family entered missions.

    ReplyDelete

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