An Ordinary Life, An Extraordinary Life

Growing up, my dad would ask us three questions almost every day – have you made your bed, brushed your teeth, had your quiet time? These things were drilled into us. A quiet time is a time by yourself when you read your Bible and pray. At best, it is a practice that is very helpful for the Christian life. At worst, it becomes a rote religious duty. Oftentimes, it’s something in between.  Nowadays, instead of asking my kids if they have had their quiet time, I ask them if they have had time with the Lord. This keeps it focused on the purpose instead a task. It also doesn’t imply that once you’ve had your quiet time, that task is done and that’s your time with God for the day. Time with God should be constant and you can have multiple times alone with Him in a day. For me, although it was a discipline, I found quiet times to be helpful in bringing my focus back on what was important and in giving me wisdom for how to live. As I began to obsess more and more on music, God began to ch...

Someone decided to give Mercy Ships another ship outright. It was about a third of the size of the Anastasis yet was in much better shape than the Anastasis had been when we got her. It still needed some renovations and support needed to be raised. It was called The Petite Forte and it was located in Jacksonville, Florida. Don Stephens asked my parents if they would move there to be the leaders and they agreed. Since I only had one more year of school, I wanted to stay in Hawaii to finish it out. My parents decided to leave me under the supervision of the Stephens family. The families from the ship relocated to yet another amazing place to live. It was a Seventh-Day Adventist camp way out in the lesser developed part of the west coast of Oahu, all the way up the back of Waianai Valley. The camp had a kitchen/eating/meeting hall, a bathroom building and seven sleeping cabins, all in a semi-circle around a field with a large tree in the middle. At the back of the camp rose a large hill w...

We sailed from Kawaihae to Hilo. Kona is on the leeward side of the island which means it gets very little rain. Hilo is on the windward side which means it gets a ton of it. It is actually one of the wettest cities in the world. The Outreach Team that my dad led had made some changes as some people left and new people were added. Some of the new guys like Ted McKenzie and Steven Wallett were to become some of my very good friends whom I would see all over the world in later years. But they got right to work in Hilo doing evangelism once again in schools and churches and on the streets. The weather in Hilo matched my mood. For the first time in my life, I actually missed a girl - that inconsolable, mournful longing just to be with her. So this is what it felt like. I had some help with my blues from a popular group at the time called Men at Work. They had a song called “Blue for You” which was about a break up but the sentiments worked for my situation as well. Sometimes the sun shines...

Hapuna beach is about 8 miles from Kawaihae. Some of us boys decided to go one day. It is on the way to Kailua-Kona so we got a ride with someone going to town and we were just going to walk back. We had boogie boards and had a great day catching waves. As we were walking back, it started to rain. But it wasn’t just a sprinkle, it was a tropical downpour. Of course, we had already been wet from being in the water so it wasn’t going to kill us. But the rain was so hard, it hurt. And even though we were in Hawaii, it made us cold. We had a dilemma. The ship rules forbid hitchhiking because of the danger it posed. And even if we were allowed, who was going to pick up soaking-wet boys with boogie boards? Also, there is not a whole lot of traffic on that section of that road.  Some people are wired to be rule-breakers. I’m not. I believe most rules have been made with good reason, usually to protect people from others or themselves. But in this case we were desperate. We decided that if...

Chapter Five - Hawaii, Take 2 When we got to Hawaii, we first anchored offshore at Kailua-Kona because they didn’t have a dock big enough for a ship. This was a very historic occasion for YWAM. The university and the ship were the two biggest projects. YWAM’s founder, Loren Cunningham called them the twins. Now, for the first time we were together. They put on a big welcome for us with the big wigs going ashore in canoes for a reception at the beach and up at the university. When they returned, we sailed about 35 miles up the Kona coast to Kawaihae where we could dock. In Kona, I saw Leilani again (the girl I met in Samoa with King’s Kids) and she was still very attentive. She also had a sister a few years older than me and another sister a few years younger. I realized that they all had a flirtatious aura about them which gave me reservations. Nevertheless, I was attracted and she was so attentive that my misgivings were overcome and she captured my affections.  Again, because of ...

One day we decided to do a youth group trip to explore the island and try to find a place to do some cliff-jumping. We drove to the other side of the island where we found a shallow stream meandering into the ocean. There were small, thin trees on the sides so we decided to climb the trees to jump into the stream. There wasn’t much water so we always hit the bottom. But if we landed shallow enough it didn’t hurt too badly. On the way home, we hit the jackpot. We found a waterfall about 20 feet high with a large pool at its base for some real cliff-jumping. That evening when we got back…the ship was gone! There wasn’t a whole lot of room at the docks in Western Samoa so when another ship came along the Anastasis had to move out. Fortunately, it didn’t have to go too far. It had just anchored out in the bay. But, as of yet, there was no launch service to get out to it. We would have to spend the night ashore. They found a place with the YWAM outreach teams for the girls to stay. For the ...

Our next stop was Samoa. The Samoan islands were contested by three nations for a number of years – Germany, Britain and the United States. A treaty was finally agreed to where Germany took control of the western islands and the United States controlled the eastern ones. New Zealand later took over Western Samoa at Britain’s behest, during which time they were responsible for some pretty egregious incidents to the detriment of the Samoan people. Western Samoa achieved independence in 1962, while the United States still owns American Samoa. 4 Our first stop was Western Samoa. They were hosting the South Pacific Games that year, now called the Pacific Games. They are multi-sports competitions every four years for nations just from the South Pacific. YWAM was hosting an outreach to the Games and the ship ministry brought support. By this time King’s Kids had been involved in sending teams around the world and they were represented at the Games. They had also recently put out a pretty slic...

Most islands in the South Pacific do not have good waves because they are usually surrounded by a shallow reef where the waves break before forming anything good to ride. But someone knew about a good spot in Tonga. I never surfed growing up because I was always scared of the point of the surfboard hitting my face. I was usually in a place with reef too and when you stand, the fall is always harder with more potential to land on the reef. I always what we called boogie boarded. I have since found out that the correct generic term for this kind of board is a body board. But in those days, we called it a boogie board because Morey Boogie was the dominant manufacturer of body boards. So, as old habits die hard, that is what I still call them.    The best waves to ride are the ones you catch when they start breaking at one end, riding them down the face of the wave as they keep breaking. We didn’t have a good boogie board. Either because we couldn’t find a good one in Tonga or bec...

After Fiji, we moved on to the nation of Tonga. Although it was a British-protected state for about 70 years, Tonga is the only island nation in the region to not have become a colony. Instead, it has been ruled by a constitutional monarchy since the 1800s. Tonga is not as developed as many of the other Pacific island nations. Most of its citizens are subsistence farmers and many rely on money sent from the half of its citizens who live abroad, mainly in Australia, New Zealand and the United States. 3 Sometimes in the ship community, we didn’t see our parents all that much. My dad was also travelling from time to time. One day someone asked me when my dad was coming back. Either I hadn’t been listening, I forgot, or I really didn’t know but I answered, “Is he gone?” Apparently, he was in Florida at the time. Once again, in Tonga we delivered the relief supplies we had brought for the recent hurricane damage and focused on evangelism. The DTS that had started when we left California had...

 16 – New Zealand, Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, New Caledonia, Hawaii After our South Island tour, we ended up back in Auckland. Our next destinations were to be the South Pacific islands of Fiji, Tonga and Samoa. They had recently been hit by a devastating hurricane and New Zealanders had donated supplies for relief efforts. They had also donated some fire engines, which were loaded onto our forward deck. It was July by now and even though it was beginning winter where we were in the Southern Hemisphere, we were on the American school system and it was coming up to our summer vacation. The ship was going to come back to New Zealand after the South Pacific so we talked about me staying to work and make some money. I’m glad it didn’t work out as I have great memories from our time in the islands. Before we left, some of us kids were playing games in the Aft Lounge as we often did. My father had been running what they called the Outreach Team which was a team dedicated to evangelism. One of t...

We arrived in New Zealand in a beautiful place called The Bay of Islands, so-called because it is a large natural bay with…lots of islands. That was where I had lost my blow-up canoe back in my early New Zealand days. Supposedly, The Bay of Islands was scientifically found to have the second bluest sky in the world. It was the first area in New Zealand to be settled by Europeans and the location of the town of Waitangi.  Waitangi is where the British and Maori chiefs signed the Treaty of Waitangi on February 6, 1840, effectively giving the British control of New Zealand. We arrived on February 5, 1983, one day before Waitangi Day or New Zealand Day - a national holiday. But there was trouble in paradise.  Many younger Maoris had been protesting their treatment at the hands of pakehas, as white people are called. They claimed terms of The Treaty were being violated and many called for a boycott of the ceremonies held on the Waitangi Treaty Grounds. Numerous police in riot gear ...

Some of the teens from the ship had listened to a lot of radio in Los Angeles. Some of the popular songs were “Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor, “Hard To Say I’m Sorry” by Chicago, “Abracadabra” by the Steve Miller Band, “Eye in the Sky” by the Alan Parsons Project, “Maneater” by Hall and Oates and “Mickey” by Toni Basil. Another song we listened to during that time became one of my all-time favorites because it turned out to have a lot of significance for us. It was “Southern Cross” by Crosby, Stills and Nash. The Anastasis did not have air conditioning so as we got further and further south, we started sleeping out on the open decks for cooler and fresher air. They kept separate areas for single men and women and families.  “Southern Cross” is a song about a man who sails the world following a failed love affair but that wasn’t the significant part for us. The Southern Cross refers to a constellation in the southern hemisphere with four stars in the shape of a cross. They are featur...

After six months in Los Angeles, our next destination was New Zealand. There were still some bad feelings from when we had lost the previous ship there years before. They wanted to take the Anastasis to try to assuage some of that. First though, the ship was stocked up with relief supplies for the people of Guatemala. The president, Efrain Rios Montt was purportedly a Christian and had appealed to the ship ministry to bring relief for his people after years of civil war. The ship ministry had been running DTS’s during our time in Greece and while most YWAM DTS’s average about 30 people, the ones on the ship had usually been quite a bit bigger. Now, with all the publicity we had been getting, the DTS they started as we left L.A. had about 150 students. With that and many new crew members, the ship became quite a bit more crowded. A lot of people came to see the ship off and as we were leaving, two teenage girls started waving intently at me. As I looked closer, I noticed something writt...

After about three weeks, we arrived in Los Angeles. As we pulled into the port town of San Pedro, thousands of people were waiting on the dock in a large reception. A special stage was set up where (among others) YWAM’s leader, Loren Cunningham and Jim and Joy Dawson were waiting. Once we were tied up to the dock, we Ship’s Kids went onstage to perform a couple of songs, people made speeches and then the onslaught began. Up to now, we had been relatively isolated. Now the ship was going to become very public. The ship was very expensive to run so raising support was vital and one way to do that was public tours. Thousands of people began to tour our home and it was a success. Support began to pour in, not only financial but also material aid for other countries and more crew to help run the ship.   People from the United States are some of the most friendly, generous people in the world. There had been some incredibly kind and generous people in Greece but (for the most part) ...