An Ordinary Life, An Extraordinary Life

Chapter Four –South Pacific On the way to Los Angeles, we made one stop to the island nation of Malta where the Anastasis was registered. Because Malta has more lenient rules, many ship owners used to register their ships there. We needed more lenient rules. Malta is made up of several small islands located south of Italy. It features in one of Paul’s stories in the Bible when he was shipwrecked there. The native people were very kind in Paul’s account and we found them to be the same. One of my dad’s brothers had actually married a lady from Malta. He met her when he was in the British military. We got in contact with one of her relatives who ended up taking us all over the main island where we were anchored in the capitol of Valetta. Valetta has a cool old fort from the Middle Ages which was built above some small cliffs. One day, some of us kids decided to cross over from the ship, anchored in the bay, to the cliffs to partake in our passion for jumping off high places into the wate...

15 – Greece, Mediterranean, Malta, Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea, Panama Canal, Los Angeles, Pacific Ocean, Tahiti, New Zealand Summer had come to the Kinetta Beach Bungalows. They had these thin, flat boats like paddle boards at the resort and the water was warm and crystal clear. I would spend hours just floating around and diving down deep to pick up starfish and other things off the bottom. It’s a good thing we liked it because we didn’t really have much else to do. I had a pellet gun at Kinetta. One day, some of us boys were shooting stuff. We were aiming towards the water so we wouldn’t hit anyone. However, we either didn’t notice some people who had started paddling by out in the water or we didn’t think the pellets would reach that far. All of a sudden, one of the ladies jerked her head like she had been hit.  Like all smart boys…we ran. Once again, they knew it was us. It had hit the lady in the ear, fortunately on the cartilage and not in the canal. Other than a little re...

My mom had been wanting to start a program like King’s Kids on the ship. A professional dancer named Paula Kirby joined us and agreed to be the choreographer. Ship’s Kids was born. We began with a special Christmas program at a local theater. But Ship’s Kids posed a bit of embarrassment for me. I had fairly sweaty palms and there were parts of some dances when we had to hold another person’s hand. So I would get an “ewww” from the girls. Paula would also often tell me to put my head up straight. It didn’t seem to me that I was looking down so I didn’t know what she was talking about. But I would just tilt my chin up and carry on. It wasn’t until years later that I finally understood what she was talking about. The problem was that I have strabismus or what my parents called a lazy eye. If I tilt my head to the left, one of my eyes wanders off a bit. Over the years, I unconsciously developed a habit of tilting my head to the right so it wouldn’t wander. Later, I found out that some peop...

In 1981, a large earthquake hit the area around us. Even though we were anchored out in the bay, we felt the shock waves on the ship. We heard screams from the town on Salamis nearby. The leaders decided to use the opportunity to reach out and help wherever we could. The ship was being prepared for this very thing - to help the needy – and here we had an opportunity right where we were. They started distributing blankets and food and my father started leading street outreaches to offer people hope and stability in God for their shaken lives.  Not too long after that, we had to vacate the ship again. The Greek officials decided that with so many of us onboard, we were polluting the Bay. The ship leaders found a small multi-storey hotel down the coast from Elefsis in the small town of Megalo Pefco. The hotel had been damaged by the earthquake and they agreed to let us live there for a very reasonable price if we helped with the repairs. As Megalo Pefco was on the coast, it was just a...

Back in those days VHS video tapes were how you watched movies at home. We had a very few movies that were approved for public viewing on the ship. So we saw those few over and over and over again - movies like Hello Dolly, The Sound of Music, Chitty Bang Bang and It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad World. Us kids started playing games in the Aft Lounge. Aft is the rear or back in ship language so it was the back lounge in contrast with the forward lounge where we had our meetings. The Aft lounge had tables with couches and chairs which made great game-playing spots. We played card games like Uno and a game called Rook which is my favorite to this day. We also played a lot of Risk. Boys and girls play games very differently. Boys tend to be very competitive and really want to win. For girls, it tends to be more of a social experience. We boys used to mistreat the girls during our games. They would start talking and their minds would wander off. So when it was their turn and they weren’t paying attent...

Of course, even with my new-found desire to honor God, I was still attracted to girls. There was one in particular I liked for years and I think she liked me. But about the time I started liking her, I listened to another teaching by a YWAM leader named Lynn Green. It was called Live in Loving Relationships (LILR) and it helped form the way I handled relationships with girls for the rest of my life.  The main lesson from Live in Loving Relationships was that it is wrong to be controlled by your emotions and feelings over your will. Evolutionists believe that emotions are just natural impulses of the way we have developed and we can’t help but be controlled by them. Christianity is the belief that if God made us, then He designed us with certain guidelines, given in the Bible, which will help us to live our lives in the best way possible. Often our feelings and emotions, guided by a sinful nature, draw us to act in a way contrary to those guidelines. But if we want to live the way H...

There is a real tangible benefit of confessing sin to others. When sin is hidden, it has a greater hold on a person. When it is exposed or as some say, brought into the light, its grip is loosened. This was a defining moment in the life of the ship ministry. They realized God was about building a group of people - a community - rather than just restoring a ship. The leaders believed public confession would draw everyone into a greater unity as people became vulnerable with each other in exposing their sin. A microphone was set up at the front of the meeting room for people to confess their sins. As people overcame their initial embarrassment, a line began to form as one after another, people began to confess. There were about 350 crew at this time, so it took several sessions just for the confessions. Out of the many, the one that I remember specifically (besides my own) was by one of the engineers. He had been a nuclear engineer in the U.S. Navy. He confessed to some pretty serious de...

When we got back to the ship, I found a group of my friends up to no good. Most people would consider what they were doing fairly innocent. On a ship full of Christians, it was wrong. Before a holy God, it was evil. To my shame, instead of exposing it, I participated. Fortunately, circumstances were about to change everything. One day a friend and I were walking around the ship acting lewd in public and one of the girls told my father. I’m grateful she did. At 13 years old, I got the last and hardest spanking of my life. Before a spanking, some parents say, “This is going to hurt me more than you”. I saw tears in my dad’s eyes that day.  That was the beginning of a change in me. It was my own sinful heart that was drawing me to do what was wrong but my dad realized that I was being greatly influenced by others toward evil - and just plain stupidity. I always say boys are stupid and when boys get together, the stupidity doesn’t just add, it multiplies - exponentially. So my dad gave...

That summer our family went travelling. My father had a speaking engagement at a YWAM base on the island of Cyprus so he took us with him. Cyprus is an island in the eastern Mediterranean that has been contested by Greece and Turkey for many years. It is now an independent country but Turkey still controls the northeast. The YWAM base was right near the border between the two sides. We were told not to go up into the nearby hills because there were land mines. From there we traveled to Israel. We stayed in an apartment in the new part of Jerusalem, arranged for by a Messianic Jewish friend we had known in Hawaii. For some reason, Samuel and I spent a lot of time at the apartment playing cards but we did get to see a lot of the sights.  We got to run on the walls of the old city of Jerusalem. We went inside the Dome of the Rock or Al Aqsa Mosque, which is built on the site of the destroyed Jewish temple. It is holy to the Muslims because that is where Muhammed was supposed to have a...

The ship came out of dry dock and we moved back on. It was about this time that we first listened to music on the radio. My parents had a portable stereo or boombox, as they were called. While my dad was speaking in Hong Kong he bought another one and my brother and I inherited the old one.  We didn’t have money to buy music but we would record songs off the radio onto old cassette tapes. We didn’t get the greatest reception out in the Bay so the songs usually had a lot of static. We were a little behind the times because we were listening to songs like Diana Ross’s, Do You Know Where You’re Going To? and George Harrison’s, My Sweet Lord. We had no idea what My Sweet Lord was or who was singing it. We thought it was about our God. We were singing along with “my sweet lord” and “hallelujah”. Then we heard “Hare Krishna” and we were like, “Oh” and stopped. For most people, the word boutique probably conjures up images of unique and perhaps expensive clothing stores. For those of us o...

In December, the ship went into dry dock and all the families had to get off. Since it was the off-season, they found a six-story hotel south of Athens where we could occupy the whole building. It sat on the coast at the base of Pine Hill, fittingly named…the Pine Hill Hotel. The new location offered us new opportunities for shenanigans. Pine Hill had a large open area, devoid of buildings, filled with rocks and trees where we would have rock fights. It’s amazing that none of us got seriously hurt because we didn’t just toss the rocks, we gave them some serious velocity. And they weren’t small either. Every group of friends has at least one nut who does all the really crazy stuff. Our’s was a guy named Richard from New Zealand and during one of our rock fights, he did actually get knocked out. The road by the hotel was pretty narrow with trees on both sides. At night we would take the tape out of cassette tapes, attach it to the trees and tie it across the road. As a vehicle came up to...

When I was thirteen, I was cool. Our friend from California showed me how. We walked around with combs in our back pockets and whipped them out to comb our feathered hair at regular intervals. Thing was, I only combed the front. Someone pointed out to me that the back of my hair was pretty messy. That may have put a small dent in my coolness but I adjusted. We weren’t allowed to run down the alleyways (hallways) on the ship because they were narrow and it wouldn’t go well if someone came out of their cabin or around the corner and we ran into them. So, like any enterprising boys, we came up with an alternative. We started skipping down the alleyways. It wasn’t the most masculine thing but it accomplished the goal. The problem was, we would go faster by skipping than running. Talk about obeying the letter of the law but not the spirit. If you dove to the bottom of Elefsis Bay where our ship had been anchored you would discover a lot of stuff not natural to the habitat. One of our pastim...

One day an older lady came on the ship and anonymously left a box of coins for my dad. He didn’t know what they were but one of the single guys told him he’d like to have one to drill a hole in for a necklace. My dad had them looked at and discovered they were British gold sovereigns. At the time, gold was at the highest value it had ever been. The single guy wasn’t going to get his necklace. My dad had a lot of integrity. He asked Don Stephens if he should give the coins to the ministry since he wasn’t sure of the lady’s intentions. Since no one knew who the lady was and she couldn’t be asked, Don told my dad to keep them. Never wanting anything to come between him and God, my dad took the coins, put them on the floor, stood on them, thanked God for them but told Him that He was much greater than any earthly treasure. I wasn’t as mature as my dad. Being that I had very little money, on the rare occasions I got some, it was a big deal to me. I had got ahold of some kind of American mag...

Due to all the industrial activity, the water in Elefsis Bay was rather polluted. Added to that, all the sewage from our ship would go straight into the water. And speaking of sewage, up until this point, the sewage system on the ship was still not working. In Venice, we used to have to go ashore to go to the bathroom. In Greece, they set up a bucket and pulley system. When we needed to flush, we had to take a bucket to one of the supply locations, pull up a bucket-full of water from the Bay, dump it into our bucket and carry it back to our cabin to pour down the lavatory.  The ship cabins had bunk beds built into the bulkheads (walls). The beds could be folded in and out. When they were rolled down, the bulkhead was very thin between cabins. I was on the bottom bunk and Samuel was on top. The South African girl I liked lived in the cabin next door on the bottom bunk through the bulkhead right next to me. To add to my 12-year-old anguish, Samuel and her would pass messages to each ...