BAPTISMS! Am I qualified??

      Ukarumpa doesn't have a church.  Okay, that's not quite true.  As the Body of Christ, we, of course, are the Church.  But the members of our community come from all over the world, from many different cultural and denominational backgrounds, and as you can imagine in a missionary community, there is a higher than average number of ordained pastors per capita.  But there is no "church" as you might imagine.  We have a meeting house where we meet on Sundays and usually one of the aforementioned pastors will speak, or a visiting pastor might be in town and he'll speak.  But we don't have a regular pastor or a regular church staff.  It's all done by members of the community, which is either fantastic or really awful, depending on what you need, I guess.

      So some time ago my kids (all three and without any pressure from me) let me know that they all wanted to be baptised.  I was happy about this and thought that probably the next time we were in the US or the UK the kids could enroll in some kind of pre-baptism training (just like I went through when I was a kid and got baptised) and hopefully God would provide a pastor or a youth group leader who they would want to baptise them.  I said all this to them.

       "But Dad", they said, "we want YOU to baptise us!"

        Now I know that the correct should have been unbridled joy at the thought of such a wonderful opportunity, but no!  I was freaking out.  Was I qualified to baptise people?  Didn't you have to be a pastor?  At least a youth group leader?

        I'm ashamed to admit it now, but I put them off.  We had lots of stuff going on and no time, etc., and I knew it wasn't great to be putting them off, I mean, I really didn't want to "quench the Spirit" so to speak.

       Time went by.  And then several other kids in the community decided that they wanted to get baptised, and my kids decided that they did, too.  I knew I should be excited, but I was filled with dread.  What if I got it wrong?  What if I accidentally swerved into heresy?  Who am I to be baptising people? I'M A MECHANIC!

       The big day came and over breakfast I let my son know what I was thinking.  "What if I get it wrong?" "Dad", he said, "that's silly!  You won't get it wrong."  And of course I knew he was right.  Looking back at Bibical baptisms, there's no great long liturgy that needs to be memorised and delivered in iambic pentameter.  It's just stuff like the Ethiopian who said "Hey look!  Here is water!  Why shouldn't I be baptised RIGHT NOW?!"  And of course Philip baptised him.

        So, at 2 p.m., we and about 50 other people made our way down to a local river.  One of the pastors from our community gave a short talk about baptism and the 10 kids who had chosen to be baptised that day were baptised.  Some by the pastor, some by their dads,  My kids were the last, numbers 8, 9, and 10.

        We decided to go in birth order, which seemed to make sense. My son and I walked towards the water.  At some point it sank in what we were doing and I started crying.  I stopped at the edge of the water, facing away from the crowd and tried to regain my composure, but all to no avail.  Others saw me and they started crying, too.  It was either a really special time or a real mess, depending on your point of view, I guess.   I'm super thankful that my kids were not embarrassed by my tears.

       I spoke to the crowd, and it was hard because I was crying and couldn't stop and my voice broke and it was a disaster, but a special and holy time.  "I'm not a pastor", I said, "by God's grace I am a mechanic!"  I paused and spoke to the crowd again, "I hope nobody will be offended if I ask my wife to help me."  There did not seem to be any objection, especially as I was so emotional, and my lovely wife came forward and asked each of the kids the questions we had agreed to ask them and together my son and I walked out into the river.

      So that's how that went!  In the end I realised what a special thing it was to be able to baptise my own kids.  I am thrilled that they have made public their commitment to follow Christ and I love them all very much!  Pray for MK's (missionary kids).  We love them, but like all kids, they do have their struggles, some more than others.  

      These photos were all taken by Anita McCarthy, who is a great photographer.

Motorcycle And Small Engine Guy, And Also Other Stuff

 

         Like this big Astra 6x6 cargo truck.  It needed a battery cable terminal replaced and I was the guy who heard about it first and who felt most able to just get right on it:

 

       Just to give you some idea of scale, the bottom of the window in the door is almost 7 feet off the ground (over 2 meters for you metriqistas.  Like that?  I invented that term, just now, on the fly.  You're welcome, world). 

        That's all for now!

Post Earthquake Shop Clean-up

      So I mentioned last time that we have just returned from furlough.I know, I know, we are supposed to call it "home assignment" now.  Call me a traditionalist, I still call it furlough.  Maybe I like feeling connected to the generations who called it that before me.

       Anyway, so while we were gone, (several months ago) there was a huge earthquake that really shook up Ukarumpa.  Thankfully we don't have much in the way of big infrastructure to crumble or fall down, but there was lots of little damage.  We were amazed to come back and find our house almost completely unaffected, but my work area at the AutoShop was another story.

      See those shelves?  The upper ones that are almost completely bare?  When I left, those shelves were groaning under the weight of a large collection of motorcycle parts.  The earthquake threw almost all of them right down on my floor.

      Several of my friends offered to clean the stuff up for me, but asked them please not to, because I knew that if they did, I would just have to go through it all again to get it organised. And so it sat, knee deep in some areas, until we returned to PNG.

     When we got back, I was told I had a full month to try to get it all reorganised.  Part of the reason why everything fell down was because the parts were all stored in a rag-tag collection of old cardboard boxes of various sizes.  To make my job a little easier, I decided to make the shelves a little deeper, make them a lot sturdier, and then make up a bunch of plywood boxes to replace the cardboard ones.  Here is how the first set turned out:

     I'm definitely not a carpenter, but I think these boxes turned out pretty nice.  As you can see if you click on the image, they are sensibly labelled with things like "Headlights #1"  "Scrap brass - heavy" and so on.  The workbench beneath the shelves is also tidy, and perhaps most remarkably, here is the floor: 

     I'm aware of the fact that many of you are thinking, "it's still a mess", but trust me, it has been many years since so much of this floor has been so clean.  The other side of my motorcycle lift still looks like this: 

     So as you can see, there's still a ways to go.  Believe it or not, most of the 9-10 engines visible in this picture were neatly stowed away at one time.  I would very much like to have seen this whole avalanche of motorcycle engines have come cascading out from where they were!  It must have been something to behold and must have made an awful racket as well.

      Anyway, in all I ended up making 30 bigger plywood boxes and I think 3 smaller ones.  Some of the labels started getting a little goofy and I began to get "clean up fatigue":

 

 

 

     Not done yet, but at least I have enough stuff cleaned up to be able to start doing regular work and can do more cleanup/organising between those jobs.  The sharp eyed among you will notice that the tops of the workbenches still look pretty cluttered.  You are right, they are. But my main lift is cleared, the secondary lift is cleared, that's more than enough to get us going.

         Andrew, in Ukarumpa

About 10 Minutes...

      Alright, so furlough happened, and we just got back what?  a little over a month ago?  I wasn't sure we would come back...

     So backstory: over the years I've been in Ukarumpa, I've had many friends.  Because of the nature of our community, people come and go all the time, but generally, my circle of friends contains a significant amount of overlap.  In other words, I become friends with Bob, a year later I also become friends with Fred.  Some time after that I become friends with Hank.  Bob leaves, Fred and Hank are still around and by the time one of them leaves, I've also become friends with new arrivals Ed and John.  And so it went for a long time. 

       Last term was different.  Already as far back as 2018, I started losing friends at a rapid rate.  One after another they all left, and new relationships were not developing in the normal way. I was older, new people coming in were younger, young enough for the age difference to be a barrier.

       By 2020, most of my friends were gone. And most of them had left unexpectedly early.  Some simply never returned from trips back to the US.  Most were gone for family reasons of various sorts--one left because his kids had all graduated and gone back to their home country and his wife couldn't handle the idea of living so far away from them.  Another left because one of his kids was struggling with life in PNG.  Some left during the pandemic and lockdowns.  At that time there was widespread uncertainty about what we could expect here in PNG and some people chose to go back to their home countries and ride out the storm there.  As everybody else was leaving, (and almost nobody coming in), we decided (along with a few others) to extend our field term by 1 year.

       So there I was losing friends at a terrific rate, and then there was a management crisis at the AutoShop and I reluctantly agreed to manage the shop for 2 months until another guy came back from furlough to take it over again. 

      Do I even need to tell you what happened?  He never came back.

      I ended up managing the department for a year.  A very difficult year.  We were badly understaffed, we were overworked, we had to deal with terrible supply chain problems, and at the end of that time, I got a negative review from some guy in middle management who decided to wait until I was on my way out the door before letting me know that there was any kind of problem!  I was completely blindsided by this, and because of my mental state at the time, took it far more seriously than I should have.

      So!  I was losing all my closest friends, I was stuck in a job I didn't want and was not very good at, my home country of the USA was in all kinds of political turmoil, the whole world seemed to be in a tailspin.  Things just kept getting worse and worse and I began to think it was time to quit.  I guess I became depressed.  I was certainly burned out.  Absolutely, positively, burned out.  I had a very hard time caring about anything or getting excited about anything.  I just drifted along, kind of numb.

     So finally we were off, and I for one was not at all sure that we would ever return.  For the first 5 months of our furlough, I could not face the idea of speaking at churches.  We visited friends and supporters, we did a 7,175 mile road trip all over the USA visiting people, and that was good.  I might go so far as to say that was even somewhat healing.  We based ourselves in Waxhaw, NC, which is a convenient location for us--our organisation has a training/maintenance facility there, and also has long term accommodation available.  We also have friends there and it's a (relatively) short drive from there to our supporting churches and family in TN and also to family in FL.

       During that first 5 months, I hung around with people I knew who had also ended up in Waxhaw, and gradually my healing began.  I threw myself into my US hobbies and put Ukarumpa and PNG out of my mind as much as I could.  I spent time with old friends; when we were in TN, I told the kids dozen of stories about various adventures I had when I lived there. We spent time with my brother and his family, some of the best times we have ever had with them.

        At the end of that first 5 months, we left the US for the UK portion of our furlough.  I'm sure I've explained this before--my wife is from the UK and when we go on furlough, for visa reasons we usually will do 5 months in one country, then 5 in the other country and then go back to PNG.  We find that this gives us adequate time and opportunity to visit the people and churches we need to visit.

       In the UK I got covid, (pretty sure it was covid, I never did take a test to find out) and that put me out of action for 3 months.  I started off and just sick and in bed and feeling terrible, but then after that,  for 3 months I was pretty much unable to leave our flat due to terrible pain in both knees, both ankles and both feet.  I bought myself a pair of crutches just to be able to get around the house.  I didn't know for sure what was wrong with me but when I was better we took a trip to visit friends and one of them told me that what I had experienced was one of the known forms of long covid.

      While we were in the UK we made plans to go back to the USA in order to visit our churches there.  So instead of going back to PNG as we normally would, this time we went back to the US, visited our supporting churches in TN, spent time with my brother and his fam, spent more time with my parents and just generally managed to get done all the things I had been unable to face doing before.  

      At some point, I no longer wondered if we would go back.  At some point, it just became an accepted thing that was going to happen, and something that I was even looking forward to.

      And so now we're back in Ukarumpa.  I'm gradually developing new friendships while staying in touch with a number of those who left. For the first time in several years I am not even the assistant manager of the shop.  I'm just a mechanic/road rescue guy/buyer/other.

      Life goes on!

      Today I found myself working on part of a motorcycle which belonged to a Papua New Guinean friend of mine.  He actually died while I was out of the country and so now I'm fixing this part for his heirs.  But I was struck today, looking at this part--it's been sitting here at the shop waiting for me to come back and fix it since before he died several months ago, and when I finally returned and got going on it, it only took me about 10 minutes to repair.  I don't know why that thought is sticking with me, but for some reason it is.