

JESUS

& COMPANY, PART 2

The earth is the LORD's, and everything in it, the world,

and all who live in it.

—Psalm 24:1

JESUS

& COMPANY,PART 2

Don and Sondra Tipton

FRIEND SHIPS PUBLISHING

Scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION

© 1973, 1978, 1984 International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Bible Publishers.

Jesus & Company, Part 2

Cover photo by John T. Wong/Photolibrary/Getty Images Copyright @ 2012

FRIEND SHIPS PUBLISHING

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ISBN: 978-0-578-12339-4

Friend Ships Publishing 1019 N. 1st Avenue

Lake Charles, LA. 70601 U.S.A. Tel: (337)433-5022

Printed in the United States 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to my mother, Gwendolyn Irene Tipton, a remarkable woman who has served God for sixty years. She is the greatest inspiration of my life. While I was still being formed in the womb, Mom asked God to give me wisdom above all else. I have her to thank for whatever wisdom I draw from Him.

Always ahead of her time, Mom became one of the first professional female race car drivers. At the age of eighty-seven, she is currently recov- ering from an injury sustained while flipping her golf cart. Slow down, Mom. She taught me to think big and persevere. She inspired me to take chances and trust God. She showed me how to love and share and care. She trained me to never ever give up.

For the past twenty years, Mom has traveled the world with us, sailing to Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and throughout Central America, providing help to people in need. She resides at our home base, Port Mercy, serving in a variety of ways. Her life is still being poured out for the benefit of those around her.

My wife, Sondra, and I along with our children, Ron and Teri, and Mom's great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren all know the love of the Lord because of her tenacious prayers, her endless support, and her warm and joyful ways. Thank you, Mom! This book is dedicated to you with the love and respect of your entire family.

CONTENTS

Dedication

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1 Lock and Load

Chapter 2 Unexpected Friends

Chapter 3 Even Our Very Lives...

Chapter 4 A Moment in Time

Chapter 5 A Nation at War

Chapter 6 Spies in Disguise

Chapter 7 Out of Time

Chapter 8 Bushwhacked!

Chapter 9 The Firefighting Camp

Chapter 10 Even if They Were Pure Gold

Chapter 11 Blow the Whistle, Throttle Down

Epilogue
PREFACE

This book is a testimony of the unusual events that occurred over the course of many years while serving the Lord and depending on Him for literally everything. It is written in the hope that by reading these stories the reader will gain a better understanding of the loving nature of our Father, watching Him act on our behalf as we invest in helping others. We believe these stories demonstrate how much God loves and cares for people in need and for us, even when we are of absolutely no account to anyone but Him.

They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony.

—Revelation 12:11

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To every crew member and guest worker, past or present, who has come for even a single day, those wonderful people who have pushed Friend Ships toward the goals God has set before us, your handprints are forever engraved on the work that we accomplish. Thank you for your service to our great Lord and Master.

It is truly your story these pages tell. Men, women, and even children of faith have come and continue to come each day to work hard and to serve well. We know you have been blessed because, as the Bible so rightly says, those who help the poor lend to the Lord, and He pays unequaled dividends. You are exceptional people. There is nowhere on the ships or in the ministry that does not bear your handprints, you who are willing to put your own plans and priorities aside to serve His plans and His priorities.

INTRODUCTION

Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injus- tice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—when you see the naked, to clothe them, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?

Then your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear; then your righteousness will go before you, and the glory of the LORD will be your rear guard. Then you will call, and the LORD will answer; you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.

If you do away with the yoke of oppression, with the pointing finger and malicious talk, and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday.

The LORD will guide you always; he will satisfy your needs in a sun- scorched land and will strengthen your frame. You will be like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail. Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins and will raise up the age-old foundations; you will be called Repairer of Broken Walls, Restorer of Streets with Dwellings.

—Isaiah 58:6–12
CHAPTER 1

LOCK AND LOAD

The World War II cargo ship Spirit of Grace was anchored just off the coast of the island of Guanaja. Her landing craft sailed through the crystal blue Caribbean Sea, traveling back to the mother ship from the storm-ravaged village of Savannah Bight. As the craft pulled alongside the hull of the stately ship, the crew made fast the lines. They prepared to off- load tons of food and drinking water from the large holds of the freighter. Spirit of Grace could lay off the coast of any country. She carried two big landing crafts that her powerful thirty-ton cargo gear could lift and splash into the ocean. Owned by our nonprofit corporation, Park West Children's Fund, a humanitarian aid organization operated under the name Friend Ships, the five-thousand-ton ship was a huge asset to our work. Once filled with relief supplies, the fifty-foot landing crafts could sail ashore and occupy any beach, maneuvering through even shallow streams up to villages and communities in desperate need. We felt like God truly had His own invasion fleet. Who would have thought it possible?

When the landing craft had finished filling her belly full of rice, beans, corn, canned meat, and drinking water, thirty of the ship's crew members, including my wife, Sondra, and me, climbed down the Jacob's ladder that hung alongside the hull and found a secure place to sit on top of the sacks of food and cases of water that were piled high on deck. We settled in for the twelve-mile journey around the island to a remote village called Mangrove Bight.

The craft set sail for the open ocean. We found a break in the reef and cut into the large rolling seas. We had been directed to the secluded Mangrove Bight because the people there had received so little help. Their village had been lush and tropical, but now their homes and fishing boats had been smashed to pieces against the mountains by a four-story-high tsunami created when the ferocious Hurricane Mitch made landfall. The storm had left the villagers with little shelter, transportation, food, or drinking water and no way to fish, which was their primary source of income.

By the time we approached the village, it was dark. Local fishermen spotted our boat offshore and quickly came to help. They brought small skiffs to meet and lead us in through the dangerous reef, guiding the craft through a maze of sandbars and rocks. The guides shined a bright flash- light, blinking turn left and then blinking to the right. We crept along in the dark at one or two knots toward a small damaged pier.

The landing craft was designed to be able to run up on the beach; it had a very shallow draft. That was good because at times we had less than three inches of clearance over the jagged reefs.

As the vessel slowly and carefully approached land, we saw smolder- ing fires illuminating the outline of partially remaining structures and makeshift tents that lined the shoreline. It was an eerie feeling as bonfires burned on the beach and the air filled with smoke. We heard the sound of children crying in the night and the hum of a few small generators. Aside from the dim light the generators gave and the low smoldering fires, the community was bathed in total darkness.

The scene looked prehistoric, the skeletal remains of hundreds of hurricane-ravaged palm trees cracked in half, their jagged ruins pointing upward, and the steep mountains looming in the background. I turned to Sondra and said softly that it reminded me of a scene from the Vietnam War movie Apocalypse Now. I felt like we needed to lock and load as we approached an unknown and potentially dangerous camp that had been bombed out and destroyed.

The craft pulled up to the pier, and our men leapt ashore to catch lines and secure her. We turned off the engines and set down planks to serve as a gangway. When our eyes adjusted to the darkness, we saw whole families watching us as they each huddled together under a single piece of light tarp stretched over a small frame. We distinguished the welcoming faces of hundreds of people near the pier, waiting to greet us. Among them were excited children assembled on the shore, and behind them was the stun- ning sight of complete destruction that was Mangrove Bight. Great piles of debris filled the landscape, which was littered with makeshift structures and mangled trees.

We were quickly greeted with big smiles, a sense of relief, and heartfelt joy. Help had finally come! The villagers said they had never seen a boat as big as the landing craft enter their shallow coral-infested harbor and asked if we had sailed the vessel all the way from the United States. We explained about the mother ship at anchor twelve miles away on the other side of the island.

We learned that the residents of Mangrove Bight had a healthy love of God, so in anticipation of the Lord answering their cries and in faith, believing someone would come to help them, they had gathered up lumber from the rubble to erect a community warehouse. When they had seen that help was coming, some of the men had quickly nailed a small lamp to the outside of the building and connected it to a generator so we would have light to off-load the landing craft. They called the warehouse by its Spanish name, bodega, and asked that we store the goods there, where they would be safe, secure, and dry during the frequent rains. I was pleased to see that the bodega was bigger than our boat, so the goods we delivered would be well able to fit.

First we carried a big missionary pot from the craft, along with some pans and propane burners so the galley crew could prepare soup for the entire village. Then we brought out guitars, and someone made makeshift bongo drums out of empty pots. Everyone from the village came, and each brought with them a cup or a bowl to have dinner. Many people told us they had not heard music since the hurricane, and they gathered around to make a joyful noise as they praised the Lord. What beautiful worship it was!

When we had all finished eating our fill, the villagers and crew formed a line to off-load the supplies. It stretched from the landing craft to the warehouse. We made a plan that each family would receive all they were able to take to their tents before we started to stack what remained in the bodega.

Mangrove Bight had no cars or trucks, but within a few minutes the pier filled with wheelbarrows and lots of helpers to load and transport their goods. Hand over hand, the food and water came up out of the boat. We tossed the boxes and bags from person to person and stacked them into the many wheelbarrows, and then the villagers carted the treasures back to their makeshift homes. Groceries were piled in and around each tent until there was no room for more.

Then the community leaders pointed proudly to their new warehouse, and we began to direct the supplies there. After a short time, I stuck my head inside the door, where the workers were singing and laughing with joy as they stored and stacked goods to the ceiling, working their way toward the door, not even leaving an aisle.

I watched with curiosity as the available space in the warehouse became less and less. Since the bodega had more space than the entire craft and we had already given out a considerable amount to the villagers, I thought that we must be near the end of the supplies. But it was strange. The cases of food and water just kept coming up and out of the boat and into the storehouse.

As we worked together, the villagers shared stories of their three days of terror. First, they heard that the hurricane would pass them by. Then the storm made an unexpected turn and took a path directly over this lush tropical dive island. Without warning, the sea began to swell and roll in on them until a massive wall of water enveloped the community, taking every house built on stilts above the sea and smashing it to bits against the mountain. Then, as if caught between the sea and the huge mountains, thirty miles south on the mainland, the storm stayed station- ary and wreaked it's fury for more than three days, causing almost total destruction. The rain poured down relentlessly, and the wind blew with fury. Some people fled to the hills. Others pressed themselves against the ground to keep from being swept away by the violent gusts as one home after another lost its roof and collapsed. As each structure fell, the terrified villagers dashed from house to house, trying to avoid the debris slicing through the air like knives, carried along by two hundred mile an hour wind gusts. They huddled together in the houses that remained stand- ing. When a building was packed full, still more petrified villagers would come rushing toward it through the wind blasts and debris. Those inside would shout, "Don't come here. Too many are in this house!" The desperate people outside would run in panic to find another place of refuge as they ducked and dodged the lethal airborne shards. But the villagers were anxious to tell us with awe and excitement that one house was entirely different.

They began to unfold the most extraordinary story of a North American who had built a home in Mangrove Bight. When the storm started to blow, this man took shelter in his home near the beach. When he spotted anyone outside, he opened his front door and waved them over, calling out, "Come in here! Over here," simply refusing to turn away anyone. Finally, the house was packed wall-to-wall, and it was standing room only, full of frightened, hungry, thirsty, wet, and exhausted people. By the storm's end, more than three hundred people were in the home, pressed body to body. At last, in search of solitude, the man gathered up his most prized possession, his tools. He shoved them into a closet, climbed in on the top of them, closed the door, and locked it.

When the storm wound down and the wind diminished, people ven- tured out to check the damage and search for loved ones. They found huge piles of rubble everywhere—glass, cement, coral, wood, and steel all twisted together into great masses—every tree snapped in two, and almost every building washed out to sea. Incredibly, the North American's home was left standing. It was the only home left standing. The man who had called out to save everyone, saying, "Come in here. We have room for you," that man's house was not even damaged. His windows were intact, the roof hadn't lost a shingle, and the home looked as good as new. Every- one was stunned. How could this be? The house of mercy had borne all that the terrible storm had thrown at it and now stood alone in the midst of complete destruction. All the people praised the great heart of a special man who turned away no one, and they gave glory to the Lord who pro- tected him, saying this was the house God's hand had spared!

In the hours and days that ensued, the villagers had taken note of missing people and tried to determine who may have been killed. Before long, every member of the community had been accounted for, and the residents were grateful to say that no one had lost their lives in those three terror-filled days in October when all was lost but all life spared at the village of Mangrove Bight.

As we continued to off-load goods into the warehouse, I heard some of my crew members say quietly to one another what I had been thinking: "There can't be anything else left in the landing craft. The warehouse is bigger than the boat, and it's almost full!" Someone hollered down the line, "How much more is left in the boat?" Not wanting to disturb a miracle in the making, I hollered back, "Don't answer that. Just keep sending what you have."

Finally, the villagers backed out of the warehouse because there was no room left to stand as goods tumbled out the door. One of the men called out, "The warehouse is full." At the same time, a crewman hollered from the deck of the boat, "That's all. We're finished." People were standing in line with bags in hand and nowhere to put them. The boat was empty, and the warehouse was full. I laughed as I thought about the good measure that had been pressed down, shaken together, run over, and poured into our laps. How biblical is that?

With fires burning bright, stomachs full, food stacked high around each camp, and the bodega packed to capacity, a spirit of joy ran through- out the village, and music rang out in praises to the Lord.

One by one the crew began to quietly explore the remains of this once prosperous English-speaking fishing village. As we walked through the rubble and saw the massive devastation firsthand, I knew how much the cargo we had delivered would mean to this hurting community.

Sondra and I have talked about our experiences in recent months and years. We have talked about the deep contentment and intense satisfaction we feel when we know we are where God wants us to be, doing what He wants us to do...

This wasn't our first experience with natural or even man-made destruction. It wasn't the first time we had seen the hand of God moving strong and in so many different ways. It had all started a few years back when we accepted an invitation from Jesus to do something remarkable.

In the book Jesus & Company Part 1, we recount the extraordinary story of how God gave us a vision to get a ship, fill it with supplies, and sail around the world, giving goods to people in need. It tells the amazing story of the four and a half turbulent but remarkable early years as the Lord overcame every obstacle and brought the vision to pass, providing all we needed through what can only be seen as miraculous provision. Jesus

& Company Part 1 tells of the maiden voyages to Central America with our first ship Spirit, a sister ship to Spirit of Grace, and the Spirit's historic third voyage to the Soviet Union, arriving in port only a few hours before an unexpected event that shook the world.

But Jesus & Company Part 1 was just the beginning. Now we bring you Jesus & Company Part 2.

CHAPTER 2

UNEXPECTED FRIENDS

It was Christmas 1991, a short time after the Spirit and her crew returned from the Soviet Union. The USSR was in the process of disbanding, and within days the Russian Federation would become an independent nation. I heard that a group of Russian businessmen had made a sailboat entry into the America's Cup race to be held in San Diego and that the 50,000 pound boat, Age of Russia, was being flown to the United States aboard an Antonov 124. This massive aircraft is one of the largest cargo airplanes in the world, capable of lifting hundreds of tons of cargo, and it has a fuselage that opens at both ends so trucks and semitrailers can actually drive in one end, drop their cargo, and drive out the other end. The plane carries up to ninety men in the tail section alone and has a tremendous range.

Someone called to tell us that the Antonov would soon be landing in San Diego to deliver the sailboat and then planned to return to Moscow empty.

We phoned the sponsors of the flight and left a message that we would like to backload their chartered aircraft with gifts for orphanages and the poor in their country. The sponsors returned our call, excited by the message we left, and said they would be happy to share the charter. The flight had cost them $420,000, and they would split that with us. But, they said, the plane was on a tight schedule and had to return to Russia right away.

Fortunately, we had a large selection of toys and tons of dehydrated food packaged and ready to go. The cargo could arrive at the airport within hours, but there was still one problem. We didn't have any money, let alone $210,000, and we didn't foresee having any significant amounts of cash in the near future. Still, we prayed and pitched our idea, telling them we were willing to donate tons of food and toys without charge to the poor, the needy, the children, and the hungry in Russia. We couldn't share in the cost of the charter, but I said, "Why fly an empty plane back to Russia when the need is so great? Let us fill the flight." Their reply came back quickly: "Load the plane."

The sponsors were not joking when they said we had to move fast. We had only a few hours to load the trucks, move the supplies from Los Angeles to San Diego, file the international paperwork, and make arrange- ments for distribution on the ground in Russia. We didn't think it wise to send the supplies off without an escort, so I planned to accompany the cargo in order to make sure the food and toys were delivered to where we wanted them to go.

I called two friends, Tom Miller and Tom Hayek, and told them about the mission. First we would circumvent the globe, flying backward around the world, enter Soviet airspace from the far north over Siberia, and land in Moscow. We would distribute the toys and food and then fly out through Europe on the Russian commercial airline Aeroflot and arrive home to the United States. I asked Tom and Tom to consider going with me if they didn't have anything more interesting planned. Right away they both said yes; they wanted to go. The three of us grabbed our passports, headed for the Soviet embassy, and obtained special expedited Russian visas, and then off we went to San Diego.

Our trucks arrived at the airport, and the cargo was quickly loaded aboard the plane. The two Toms and I boarded the large Antonov and met the all-Russian military crew. We were joined by a U.S. Air Force pilot who we learned was required to fly with us while the Soviet plane traveled through American airspace.

The crew brought up the ramp and prepared for flight. The Antonov rolled onto the tarmac but then came to a stop just when we were in position to block the main runway. It sat rumbling for more than half an hour. I found a crewman who spoke English and asked him what we were waiting for. "They didn't give us anything to eat," he said. "We want food, hot food. We're hungry, and we know the Americans have plenty."

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Apparently we were holding the runway hostage until we received deliveries of food. Soon a pallet of Kentucky Fried Chicken in boxes and buckets arrived, along with pallets of Coca-Cola, several kinds of soup, and a large number of ready-to-eat dinners. Then came sandwiches, more drinks, and many cases of M&M's chocolate peanut candy. When we had finished taking on this gigantic picnic, the crew was satisfied, and we were ready to fly. We lifted off just above the skyscrapers, turned, and headed for Anchorage.

When the Antonov arrived in Alaska, we dropped off the U.S. Air Force pilot, and I got off the plane to see how cold it was. It was so cold that the air actually hurt. I asked one of the ground crew how cold it was. He said he didn't know, somewhere below zero. I asked, "How do you breathe? It hurts." He said, "We don't. Hold your breath." I turned around and headed for the opening in the plane, and with each step, my body got stiffer. It was then that I realized that Alaska was really made for Eskimos.

We filled the plane with fuel and took off for Moscow, where that night at midnight, Russia returned to being an independent nation, and the USSR ceased to exist.

As we flew over Siberia, I could see nothing but white snow. Every direction below us was white. When we were four hours from Moscow, the pilot informed us that we were switching our landing to a military airport instead of the civilian one originally planned.

We made our approach to the runway, and the landing gear engaged. I checked my watch. It was five minutes to midnight. The landing doors opened as multiple sets of wheels came down and locked into place.

The plane touched down. The wheels rolled and rolled and rolled out into the forest for miles before turning and coming to a stop in an isolated place. I checked my watch again, and it was now a few minutes after midnight. A historic event had taken place as we landed in Russia with hundreds of tons of gifts from Jesus with love. When the wheels of the giant plane had touched down on the runway, we had landed in the Soviet Union, but by the time the aircraft had taxied to a stop, the country was the free and independent Russian Federation.

The military crewmen loaded up their duffle bags and prepared to depart. Our hosts strongly suggested we take a taxi to our hotel, but I knew that if we left the cargo now, its destination would be out of our hands. We declined the invitation to leave, bundled up, and settled in for the eighteen-hour wait until the trucks arrived to unload. The doors of the plane burst open; we felt a blast of subzero air and saw several small trucks approach the plane. Many of the soldiers who had flown with us from the United States disembarked, hopped aboard the trucks, and drove away.

A few minutes later, the doors opened again, and twenty young soldiers with AK-47s came running and stumbling onto the airplane. They were excited to get out of the freezing temperature and into the warmth. Once settled inside the plane, each one of the men first took note of and then stared at the three of us. We were an unusual sight. It was minus who knows what outside, and here were three Americans dressed in jeans, tennis shoes, and ski jackets. The soldiers seemed to be thinking, Who are these silly cowboys who have come to Moscow to freeze to death?

More trucks rumbled up outside the plane. The doors opened, some of the soldiers went out, and others came in. We knew many soldiers were outside, but the ones inside didn't want us to look out. We tried our best to talk to the men, but we knew from working in Leningrad a few months before that each group had a political officer assigned to them. This officer watched them closely, and if they appeared to be too friendly to us, they could get themselves in a lot of trouble. So instead, the young soldiers gave us their most serious stares, as if to say, Don't even try to take a smile from us. We will shoot you.

The soldiers were only allowed to be outside for a short time because of the extreme temperatures, so every twenty minutes the door would open, all the young men outside would come in, and the young men inside would go out, surround the plane, and stand guard.

Someone explained to us that word had gotten out to the public about an Antonov with donations of food and toys arriving from the United States. It was a new day in Russia with more freedom of the press, and the soldiers really didn't know exactly what they were supposed to do. They didn't know if the change in the political structure would cause a break- down of law and order, and they were afraid there could be great interest in this cargo from the public. Since they didn't know what to expect, they felt safer to behave as they always had, like Red Army soldiers. So they had put extra guards on duty at the base and taken the plane out to a lonely, undisclosed location to hide for eighteen hours until they were sure there would be no trouble. I had never seen so many weapons in my life, and we felt very protected.

As the hours passed, we watched each group of soldiers inside the plane pace around and stare at the cargo boxes with no idea what was in them. Periodically, they would look us over, and I thought they were wondering what these Americans were doing aboard their plane. In Russia, every- thing was on a need-to-know basis. Apparently they didn't need to know what we were doing and had not been told.

I kept an eye on the soldiers as they walked by the pallets of food and then glanced over at us. They passed by the fried chicken. We knew they could smell it, and we could tell they were hungry. They strolled by the Snickers, Hershey Bars, Juicy Fruit gum, and Coca-Cola. They all knew about Coke but were afraid to get too close. They looked over the M&M's but had no idea what they were.

The door flew open again, and someone brought in a five-gallon metal bucket of potato soup—lunch for all the soldiers. Someone told us later that lunch for the soldiers was always hot potato soup. The men gathered around, each with a cup in hand, and stared sadly into the pot of broth. As one man took a ladle and stirred the broth, I peered into the pot and couldn't see any actual potatoes in the bucket. I may have spotted one piece near the bottom, but I wasn't sure.

I felt sick to my stomach. Our country had so much, and the Russians had so little. I crossed over to the pallets of food that had been loaded onto the plane in San Diego, picked up a box with five pieces of chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, coleslaw, and biscuits. I opened up the box and held it in front of the chest of what appeared to be the leader. He said, "Nyet, nyet," and pushed it away. He looked at the others and said, "Nyet."

We had an entire pallet of delicious fried chicken and no one to eat it, while the soldiers were hungry and had only warm colored water for their meal. This is terrible, I thought. What are we going to do? Then I had an idea. We would have lunch with them. I told both Toms to grab a dinner box; we opened up our meals, took out a piece of chicken, and made a show of smelling it. We started to eat, making noises as we did like "Mmm," rubbing our stomachs, and saying enthusiastically, "So good."

I spotted one young man who seemed friendlier than most and sat down next to him with my box of chicken. As I slowly savored a drum- stick, I slipped the open box between us and nudged him to take a piece. He resisted at first but finally couldn't stand it and grabbed some chicken. I watched him with interest as he ate. It seemed as though he had never tasted anything that good, and he couldn't eat fast enough.

After some time of the two Toms, the friendly soldier, and I licking our fingers and making noises, one by one the rest of the soldiers dove into the pallet, and it was every man for himself. They each grabbed a box, opened the small containers inside, and spoke in Russian to one other about the items as they tasted them. There was plenty of food, so all the soldiers could enjoy until their buttons popped.

By now, only the political officer refused to participate. We've got to get this guy to eat some chicken or candy so he doesn't turn the others in, I thought. We pulled out some Cokes and started drinking them. The men were hesitant at first, but my friendly Russian soldier grabbed one and chugalugged it. Before long, everyone got up and grabbed a Coke. Finally, the political officer couldn't stand it anymore and snatched a candy bar. Soon everyone was happy, talking, drinking, and eating. We couldn't understand what was being said, but we knew they were excited.

Then the ultimate—I cracked open a bag of chocolate M&M peanut candies, popped a couple in my mouth, and offered some to one of the soldiers. He eyed the colored pills I had in my hand and was reluctant to try one. I think he wondered what kind of drug I was trying to give him. I kept popping them in my mouth and then offered some to the friendly soldier. He took one and put the candy in his mouth. As he started to chew, the young man looked at me with a smile. He took the whole bag out of my hand and started to make the rounds, offering M&M's to each of his friends. He seemed to be saying, "Take one," in Russian. The other soldiers cautiously tried one piece at a time and loved them. It was candy like they had never tasted. They soon found the pallet where I had gotten the M&M's, took bags, and stuffed them into their coat pockets. I thought to myself, I think we've just won the Cold War. It's raining M&M's, communism has collapsed, and capitalism is in.

The door flew open again, and in walked the outside division commander. By this time, the smell of chicken permeated the plane, and empty Kentucky Fried Chicken boxes were scattered all around. The commander looked at the container of potato broth that remained full. He looked at the soldiers. He looked at the empty boxes of chicken, and he grunted. The inside division officer grabbed a box of chicken, opened it in front of the commander's face, and said something encouraging to him in Russian. Soldiers were filing in now, covered with snow dust from head to foot.

They glanced around the room at the platoon of happy comrades, spotted the chicken boxes and empty bags of candy, shook their heads, and smiled like they had caught their fellow soldiers with their hands in the cookie jar.

When they spotted their commander sinking his teeth into a juicy piece of Kentucky Fried Chicken, they exchanged looks, and each one dove for a box of food. They grabbed Cokes and then chocolate bars. Soon the soldiers who had been inside with us were telling the "new" guys all about the delicious M&M's. The commander pointed to the door and ordered the first platoon out. Each man grabbed his gun and headed out to stand guard with pockets full of fried chicken and candy.

They had never had an opportunity to enjoy "all you can eat" and even more. Later, everyone had finished eating all they could manage, and at that moment the soldiers were so full of food I think I could have whipped them all. Now the atmosphere was relaxed and quiet. In fact, the silence was deafening in this isolated area of a Soviet military base in the middle of the night. It was broken only by the rotation of the troops every twenty minutes.

Someone had given me a high-quality Sony Walkman in San Diego before we left the States. I had with me a tape of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and one of Russian language praise and worship music. These soldiers may have been high tech in their knowledge of weapons and warfare, but they had never had access to anything like a Sony Walkman— high-tech rock 'n' roll. In light of their newfound freedoms, I knew these young men would soon experience many new things, some good and some not.

I popped in the praise and worship tape and offered the headphones to the friendly Russian experimenter. The soldier glanced at the political officer and then shook his head, probably afraid I was trying to feed him propaganda. I assured him the best I could that this was something he really needed to hear. I persisted in offering the headphones to him, suggesting he should try them, even for just a moment. The soldier reluctantly slid the headphones over his mink hat, and I watched his face light up as he heard the music. He took the earphones off, looked at them, and looked down at the little Walkman. He put the earphones back on his head and then took them off again, his mouth and eyes open wide; he was clearly overwhelmed at the full stereophonic sound that penetrated his ears. He had never heard such sound in his life. He couldn't believe the symphony of music pouring into his head and continued to look with disbelief at the tiny box creating this extraordinary noise. It was like being in the midst of a fine orchestra.

First the soldier's head nodded up and down. Then his foot tapped. Then his body started to move along with the music, and finally he danced around the deck of the plane, shaking his head with excitement. "Da! Da!" he said in approval as he listened to the lyrics lifting up the Lord. The young man smiled at his friends, pointed at the headphones, and then pointed toward them and laughed. A few of the men moved toward him and lined up to have a chance to hear the Walkman. Each man took a turn listening to the music, clearly amazed at the clarity and depth of sound, until finally the batteries ran down and quit.

The young men had never expected a night like this and were having so much fun. The soldiers must have been thinking, Who are these three crazy Americans flying in with a plane full of toys, food, and every good thing we have never tasted? They have a complete orchestra in a little box and gladly share everything with us, even the music that is talking about their God.

The Toms and I decided to get some rest. We crawled on top of the boxes, lay down on the cargo nets, and fell fast asleep. Sometime later, I woke up with something cold pressing against my leg. I opened my eyes to see the barrel of an AK-47 in front of my face. As my eyes focused, I saw a soldier cuddled up to me with his gun barrel between us. I pushed away from it, and as I did, I felt another soldier on the other side of me.

Here we were on a military base in Moscow, surrounded by a platoon of happy, content, and sleeping Soviet soldiers on an airplane full of food, toys, and Russian language Gospel literature. How had such a thing come to be? I smiled to myself and fell back asleep.

I woke up a few hours later to the sound of the aircraft's rear door dropping open and a rush of freezing air blasting in at us. I looked outside to see a long line of trucks ready to receive the cargo. As the soldiers worked at unloading the airplane and loading the trucks, I went outside and set up my video camera because we wanted to get some shots of the long line of trucks loading supplies. I set the camera on the tripod, turned it on, and let it run.

When all the cargo had been loaded onto the trucks, three personnel trucks with canvas-covered beds arrived to pick up the forty soldiers who had been protecting us and guarding the airplane. As the young men climbed aboard, some of them held up the canvas to peer out at me. I was watching the truck pull away when suddenly some of the soldiers slapped the side of the canvas and yelled at the driver. I wondered what had happened. The truck abruptly came to a stop as the tailgate dropped, and several young men jumped out and ran toward me. Soon all of the trucks were stopping and dropping their rear gates, and the soldiers jumped out and ran toward me. I crossed out from behind the camera to meet them. The first one to reach me was my friendly food tester, his arms outstretched. He grabbed me, hugged me, and kissed my cheeks as he said something in Russian. Before long, I was being held and kissed by many of the soldiers, some of whom had tears in their eyes. They had met the ugly Americans and fallen in love with us! And because I had crossed in front of the video camera to meet them running toward me, the lens captured this beautiful farewell as a heartwarming keepsake.

Later in the day, we were invited to the military base headquarters, where we spent remarkable time with the commander, a four-star general who had a degree from Stanford University in California. The commander spoke impeccable English with a distinct West Coast accent. We learned he had served as Mikhail Gorbachev's interpreter in negotiations with President Ronald Reagan. One would have thought for sure that he was North American.

I had used my still camera to snap photos of MiGs (Soviet jet fighters) hidden in the forest all around the base. That was probably not smart of me. While we visited in the commander's private office, my brand new still camera and long lens, along with all the pictures I had taken, disappeared right out of the commander's office, never to be seen again. Fortunately, I carried the video camera on my hip with the tapes in my pocket and was able to take them home with us.

After our meeting with the commander, we were taken to the Red Army Hotel in downtown Moscow to wait for the delivery of the toys and the food we were to distribute. The Red Army Hotel was a special hotel only for military officers, but we were invited to stay there. By Russian standards, this hotel was really uptown.

I had a leather bag I always carried in a stranglehold because it contained $5,000 in cash and all of our passports. Credit cards were not useable at this time in Russia, so we had brought a lot of cash in order to buy our tickets home and pay expenses while in Moscow. I had the case with me as we sat in the lobby, waiting for our room. After a few minutes, we were escorted up a spiral staircase to the second floor and taken to a two-bedroom suite with a kitchen and living room.

We settled down on the living room couch and talked about how wonderful it was that we had been blessed with such a fabulous place to stay, especially in light of the housing shortage in Moscow and the fact that at this time the ruble was almost worthless. Russians working full-time jobs earned less than the equivalent of ten U.S. dollars a week.

At the mention of money, Tom Miller said, "Where is your bag?" I thought for a moment. "I don't know. Where is it?" A panic gripped all three of us. Tom tried to remain calm. "Where did you have it last?" I said, "When we were in the lobby."

All three of us flew off the couch as if we were on a set of springs. If the situation hadn't been so serious, it would have been funny, like a slapstick comedy, as the three of us big guys, each weighing two hundred pounds plus, converged on the front door in a mad dash. We pulled at one another, trying to be the first man out. I don't remember who got through the door first, but we were in an absolute horse race, full speed ahead, down the circular staircase and into the hall where the hotel staff quietly swept floors and dusted the furniture as guests milled around.

The three of us rushed around the corner in unison and sprinted down the long hallway toward the lobby. Much to our relief, we found my brown leather bag exactly where I had left it. I quickly unzipped the top pocket to find, safe and secure, our passports and every dime we had left in it.

The Toms had teased me about the bag prior to this incident. They had referred to it as my "purse" and wanted nothing to do with it, but now both Toms helped me tend my bag. For a fleeting moment we had imagined ourselves in Moscow with no money and without papers. The incident had left a big impression on us as with shades of Oliver Hardy, Lou Costello, Jerry Lewis, and the Marx Brothers all rolled into one, we bolted through the lobby of the Red Army Hotel.

We enjoyed the few days we had in Moscow. Our suite on the second floor was located over the main entrance, and since it was early January, everything outside was white with a beautiful coat of fresh snow. The hotel faced a park downtown, and one night at about midnight, I opened the balcony door to gaze outside. The trees had not one leaf on them, and a gray haze blanketed everything, creating a strange but enchanting beauty. Suddenly I saw an image that will be etched in my memory forever. A Russian officer emerged through the trees, dressed in a military uniform jacket, riding pants, boots laced up to his knees, and a Russian mink hat. He held a bottle of champagne and two long-stemmed glasses. On his arm was a stunning blonde woman in a lovely white gown. Although no music played, they elegantly danced and twirled in classical ballroom style. They silently weaved their way through the park and toward the Red Army Hotel. I had never seen anything so romantic and beautiful.

As they moved closer to the street, I clapped for them and said, "Bravo. Bravo. Beautiful." The officer glanced up at me, smiled, and tipped his hat. Then as quickly as they had emerged, the graceful couple disappeared, dancing back into the trees.

As I stood on the balcony and appreciated this beautiful side of Moscow, I thought of the moments I would have missed in so many places I never thought I'd have gone had I not chosen to serve my Lord. There is such deep joy in serving Him. I love You and thank You so much, Lord, for all the special things you have allowed me to experience.

When the Lord called us into service, I owned a polo club in Southern California. It was a wonderful life. No one could have designed a better job except God. But had we chosen to stay in the security of the club, we would have missed it all—feeding a hungry child, helping a sick man become well, the chance to wrap a blanket around the shoulders of an old lady freezing on a mountaintop, left to think no one loved her or even cared. We would have never led an army of young men and women into battle to help the needy, the poor, and the lame. We wouldn't have crossed oceans with large freighters filled with wonderful gifts from God. We wouldn't have filled an Antonov plane full of every good thing for the poor or had the opportunity to tell the Russians that Jesus loves them. All of these things would have been so easily missed had I taken the safer path.

I thought about the young faces on the Antonov, the sight of the soldier's first bite of fried chicken, his first taste of M&M candy, and his wonder at the powerful worship music blasting from that tiny little box. I remembered the Antonov's touchdown in Moscow, the plane rumbling and rolling for miles to a place deep in the white snow-covered forest. I thought about home in Los Angeles, where food to supplement 150,000 meals was going throughout the city to feed the poor and bring prayer into needy homes. I knew in Galveston our ship was loading thousands of tons of humanitarian aid for missions around the world. The Lord had allowed us to arrive with the first airlift and a hand of love on that momentous day in Russian history. As we had celebrated independence with Latvia the prior August, we had now celebrated the start of a new era in Russia. And the only thing I'd had to do to be part of all this was to say yes to the Lord and mean it—an inexpensive ticket for a priceless ride. In the next few days, we distributed the cargo, delivered toys to the orphanages, and enjoyed a couple of Big Macs at the new Moscow McDonalds, where the lines were three blocks long.

With our job complete, we went to Red Square to pass out Gospel tracts and Bibles. The response was overwhelming. The crowd pressed in against us and ripped the literature out of our hands. They quickly studied the tracts, handed them to someone else in the crowd, and rushed right back for more.

A lovely young woman named Elena who served as our interpreter told us that a few days earlier in a town outside of Moscow a minister had created a large crowd as he passed out Gospel tracts. When the man ran out of literature, the crowd had grown angry. The Russians, so accustomed to being deceived by authorities, thought he was trying to keep all the tracts for himself. "The people hit him in his head and knocked him down," Elena said. The minister got up and ran into a nearby store to hide. As the angry crowd took rocks and broke out the windows, the man narrowly escaped through the store's back door. I told her that I'd heard of being persecuted for the Gospel, but until then I had never heard of being persecuted for running out of the Gospel.

As we left Moscow and headed off to Europe, I reflected back on what an extraordinary week it had been. Tom Miller, Tom Hayek, and I arrived home after flying around the world backward on the Antonov 124. I thought that may have put us a day ahead or behind everyone else, but I wasn't sure which.

Many wonderful things had transpired in Moscow. Only ten days ago I had been working in our warehouse in Los Angeles and hadn't known what was about to take place. When you are employed by God, you just never know what amazing opportunities might be set in motion by the very next phone call. We had no idea that the Lord was only a few hours away from allowing us to fly around the globe backward with the first humanitarian airlift into Russia, delivering hundreds of tons of cargo to feed people we didn't know and had never seen. We delivered thirty thousand toys to orphanages and tons of food to hungry families and passed out thousands of Gospel tracts.

CHAPTER 3

EVEN OUR VERY LIVES...

The Lord put it on our hearts that the next target would be the con- tinent of Africa. We finished loading supplies, taking on stores, and completing all the preparations necessary for a transatlantic crossing. Then we set sail for our first mission to Africa. We were headed for Angola, a Portuguese-speaking country on the southwestern coast that in the mid-1990s was governed by a one-party republic.

The ship's director, Jamie Saunders, was an amazing young man God had sent in the beginning of the ministry to be with us in the hard times and through many raging battles. As I look back, I realize this young man was a personal gift from the Lord at a time of terrific need. He brought with him a beautiful Cajun wife from Louisiana named Debi, who had been pregnant with their first son, Regan, when they arrived to join the ministry. Jamie had a profound grasp of the Word along with an uncanny ability for practical application. He thought so much like Sondra and me that the three of us quickly became a formidable weapon. We stood together as one and watched our God do things around the world about which I think few men dream.

Jamie brought the Spirit home from the Soviet Union with a great victory at sea. Now like a gladiator, he along with his brave crew, who he counseled, loved, and led, headed into the hardest battle we had ever fought.

Angola was one of the most destitute nations in the world. The people there lived in deplorable conditions, and the mission would prove to be heartbreaking. In the midst of their great need, the Spirit was one of a few lights of hope as Jesus moved through the land with a new hospital and gifts of food, clothing, and the Word of God.

After thirty-five days at sea, the Spirit and her crew arrived in the port city of Luanda. Delays started immediately. The paperwork took days. The stevedores didn't report for work. The cranes broke down, and the trucks didn't show up. Every day brought something new to slow our progress to almost a complete stop.

This was a dark place indeed, and we found ourselves there in a desperate hour. Many large ships sat at anchor in the harbor. Most were newer and had at one time been nicer than the Spirit. Having been detained by port authorities for one reason or another, these ships had been anchored for so long that their crews had been forced to abandon them and leave the country. Then the vessels had been looted, robbed, and stripped. The captain of a ship docked just ahead of the Spirit had been stabbed and its first mate murdered.

When the crew got their first glimpse of life in Luanda, they witnessed widespread hunger, voodoo rituals, an out-of-control AIDS epidemic, and a life as lawless as the West at its wildest. From the wheelhouse, the crew was able to observe most of the cargo operations in the port. They shot videos of one truck after another being stripped of the contents and robbed. Port personnel informed us that a ship could count on only two- thirds of her cargo going out through the front gate in the hands of its rightful owner, with the rest being lost to thieves. We didn't want any of the goods we had worked so hard to deliver going to those who would sell it to the highest bidder, so the crew fought hard to make sure the supplies went directly to the church organizations that would take it to poor families, the elderly, and children. For the most part, we were successful.

As the team in West Africa struggled desperately to off-load, Sondra, her brother Ray and I and our small team in Los Angeles carried on with the food ministry, Storehouse One. The program distributed goods through a hundred local groups and had grown to produce enough food to supplement 150,000 meals a week. Thousands were being fed and receiving prayer, and lives were being transformed as people accepted Christ and started to learn of the Lord's plan through discipleship. In addition, we sent eight forty-foot containers of dehydrated food to the Vineyard Church for distribution to people in need in St. Petersburg, Russia, every month.

A short time later we received an interesting call from a representative of a very large Christian broadcasting network. "We're taking an evangelical team to Russia and would like to do two big crusades, one in St. Petersburg and one in Moscow," the caller said. "We would like you to distribute food to each of the thirty thousand to fifty thousand attendees of these meetings like you did last year when you took your ship to the Soviet Union. We want to offer a bag full of food with a Bible inside to everyone who comes to each service. Can you help us?"

As we talked, I learned that our job would be to supply and transport the food to Russia and be ready to distribute it during the events. This was a huge undertaking to accomplish in a short time. Before we responded, we calculated how much food would be needed, the shipping required, and the amount of time it would take to get it there. We thought about a plan to hand out the bags and how to enlist the large number of people required to distribute the packages to tens of thousands of people who would be streaming into the stadium at a rapid pace. We had learned from experience that security was a big issue; we had to keep strict control on the operation, or order would break down in a flash, and the crowds would create a food riot. We knew too that the Russian "babushka" mothers and grandmothers could be very assertive. They were a terrific handful all in themselves.

As we reviewed the event's timetable, I realized there was a scheduling conflict. I had accepted a speaking engagement at a convention with head of the Vineyard Church, John Wimber, which was being held in Reno, Nevada, and after that a series of meetings in Australia. These meetings would take place at the same time we would need to be in Russia. Still, it sounded like such a great opportunity to advance the Kingdom, and we didn't want to pass it up, so I proposed that Sondra go to Moscow without me.

Sondra froze, stunned for a moment, and then quickly thought over what this meant. "You realize how difficult this job will be," she said. "We have to time the shipping of goods perfectly. One slipup and they won't arrive before the crusade. I'd have to hire and rely on Russian people we don't know, and it's likely the workers we hire won't even show up. Don, you are aware that in Russia, it could only be the grace of God if there is not a series of mishaps... No, I just can't do it without you." She paused and then said with a sigh, "But if you say go, I'll go." I assured her that with God, she could handle it. And so the biggest of all feeding pro- grams—the organization, logistics, and shipping of food and supplies; the arrangements for the cargo to be picked up at the port, trucked to a ware- house, and securely stored in both Moscow and St. Petersburg; the hiring of Russian interpreters; the employment and training of workers to bag up tens of thousands of packages; the coordination of distribution; and the security for each big event—would fall to Sondra and her team of two. I called the broadcasting network and said, "We'll do this. No problem."

I went on to Reno as Sondra and crew members Rex and Cindy Sayles headed off to Moscow. The Russian Air Force invited them to be guests at the Red Army Hotel and gave Sondra the same suite they had given the two Toms and me. They guarded her so carefully that even our interpreter, Elena, had a hard time getting through security.

Sondra, Rex, Cindy, and Elena picked up and organized the food, hired Russians, sacked up bags, and trained the staff to smile, be nice, hand out one bag to each person, and keep the lines moving.

A steady stream of people flooded into the stadiums to enjoy the Power Team dazzling them with demonstrations of sheer strength and muscle, breaking bats, ripping phone books, and busting big ice cubes with their heads. They were followed on stage by men who preached the Gospel with passion. When it was over, the mission was well worth the effort as each attendee left the stadium with a smile, a Bible, and a big bag of groceries. Best of all, thousands left with Jesus Christ in their hearts.

By the time we finished off-loading in Angola, the ship had been in Luanda for three long months. It was a job that should have taken less than a week. I received a call from Jamie. With a huge sigh of relief, he said the ship had made official clearance and was preparing for the thirty-day sail across the Atlantic. Jamie said the crew was overjoyed to be getting underway. This time they were headed for Lake Charles, Louisiana, and from there to Eastern Europe and then back to West Africa.

There was great spiritual fruit from the mission to West Africa even though there was strong opposition to the church by the leading communist elements. Before the ship arrived, the communists had spread stories in the press that Friend Ships and the organization receiving the goods, Manna Church, were frauds and would never have help for the people. So when Spirit arrived and delivered the cargo, it was a defeat to the enemies of the church, and Manna Church was able to establish five new churches in key cities as they distributed the humanitarian aid. Although the government was Marxist, the officials were completely cooperative, telling the head pastor that they welcomed the church back into Angolan life because they recognized the people had lost something valuable when the church had been taken away from them, something only God could provide.

We had sailed into one of the earth's darkest spots with a torch of light, but it seemed that now Satan was going to make us pay. Several days later, on Good Friday before Easter Sunday, Sondra and I had just arrived at our cabin on the old tugboat we called home in Los Angeles. We were grateful the ship had finally completed the African mission and was on her way home. We had just sat down to relax and enjoy the victory when a devastating call came through a ham radio operator. It was Jamie, who told us that shortly after sailing from Luanda, the ship's chaplain, Doug Ford, had fallen ill with flulike symptoms. Doug thought with a day or two of rest, he would recover, but as time passed, the illness grew severe.

The ship was halfway back to the States and in the middle of the Atlantic. Onboard was a wonderful doctor who sailed with us full time to care for the medical needs of the crew. Dr. Roy had delivered thousands of babies during the course of his career. Now in his seventies, he was every- one's favorite baby doctor. Unfortunately, tropical diseases were outside the range of his expertise. Dr. Roy became troubled by Doug's lack of response to medicines he administered. As the patient showed little signs of recovery, the crew prayed and locked hearts to believe for his healing. But on Good Friday, our much-loved chaplain died in Jamie's arms. The crew performed CPR and prayed intensely, this time for life to return, but Doug was gone.

We had never suffered a loss of life in the ministry. We were all deeply grieved and shaken to the core. What happened next will be hard for you to believe, and you may choose to dismiss it as coincidence or superstition, but we'll tell you exactly what took place and allow you to make your own decision.

After Doug died, our good friend Pastor Roger Siratt called to tell me that he had been praying for us and that God had shown him a black cloud around the ship. Roger said he realized we were under a heavy spiritual attack. Later, I got a call from Carlos Ramirez, who was the executive director of Verbo, one of the largest denominations in Central America. Verbo had sent twenty young people from their Guatemalan church to serve as crew aboard Spirit, including a young man named Vinicio. Carlos told us that a few days earlier, a prophet he knew to always be accurate had called him to say Satan had assigned a spirit of death to the ship. But the man saw a hedge around Spirit that could not be penetrated. He said the prayers of the crew and the hedge had kept Satan at bay. I asked Carlos if he would call the man back to see if he had heard any more from the Lord, because it seemed that now, because of the death of our chaplain, this hedge had been penetrated.

As the crew prepared to bury Doug at sea, a spirit of fear gripped several people. Some began to hear voices telling them they would be the next people to die. A few became ill with flulike symptoms. Jamie himself suffered with a fever of well over one hundred degrees. As the fever burned, Jamie heard a voice say to him, "You've served the Lord. Why don't you just give up now?" The Holy Spirit immediately let him know that the devil was trying to steal his life. He dragged his body out of bed, forced himself to his feet, and started to pace up and down the halls of the ship, commanding the enemy to leave. Finally the fever broke, and Jamie quickly recovered.

Later we learned that Doug had died of cerebral malaria, which he had contracted in Angola. We were told that it most likely came through a mosquito in Angola that had to have been female, and only one out of three million carried the virus. The deadly virus took thirteen days to incubate before the symptoms manifested, and it could quickly overcome the body.

On the morning of Easter Sunday, Doug was buried at sea in a moving ceremony. A deep mourning descended on the entire ministry, but Carla, Doug's widow, asked instead for a celebration of his productive, fruit-filled life.

Then, as the ship continued to sail through the Atlantic, Vinicio, the young Guatemalan and one of the most evangelical crew members aboard ship, fell deeply into flulike symptoms similar to Doug's. The ship still had at least eighteen days left before it would arrive in the United States, and that was if the weather was just right, so they put out a radio call asking for any possible assistance, and a few nearby ships responded. As our vessels approached one another, they drew in close, shot a line to our ship's deck, and passed over medicine they thought could help. But nothing brought Vinnie out of the sickness.

It seemed like they were on the legendary slow boat to China, going the ship's top speed of eight to ten knots in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, when we learned that Brazil had one of the finest tropical disease hospitals in the world. We set the ship on a direct course for Fortaleza, not sparing a single horse. The captain ran the ship as fast as she would travel, and the officers worked with vigilance in the wheelhouse on a dead straight course, making sure no valuable time was lost. While racing with every ounce of energy toward Brazil, the crew worked the engines day and night for maximum speed. They labored over each valve to make sure it was producing full power.

When Jamie called to tell us what was happening, we were able to locate and arrange for an emergency helicopter to fly to the ship from Brazil. It was to pick up and carry Vinnie to the hospital as soon as the ship came within two hundred miles of shore. The helicopter had no way to carry extra jet fuel, so that was the limit of its range. The Spirit raced toward the rendezvous point with all the power they had in order to save Vinnie's life.

After a short time, I received a call back from Carlos. He had talked again with the prophet, who told him we needed to send a message to the crew that the Lord had shown him another authority that now had permission to operate aboard the ship. There was a hole in the hedge of protection, and they would find it at the first porthole on the left side of the ship, facing the bow—the port side. He said through this porthole, an invitation was being issued for evil spirits to enter the ship. He said to look for an item made of wood that resembled an American football. The prophet said this object had no place on God's ship and needed to be destroyed.

Our only avenue to get this information to the crew was through the ham radio, to which people around the world would be listening. We needed to convey this message carefully, or we knew the listeners would think our fear and grief had made us crazy. We were able to pass the warning along, and a few hours later the ship radioed back to say they had received the message, the porthole was secure, and the item had been found and destroyed.

Our curiosity ran wild. What was this item? What was wrong with the porthole, and what was the prophet talking about? We would have to wait to find the answers.

When we eventually found out what had actually happened, we were horrified to learn that one of the young men on board had become acquainted with a warlock while on the mission to the Soviet Union. The warlock had taught the man techniques for drawing power through pentagrams. While on the return trip from Angola, the crewman had painted a pentagram on the glass of the porthole in his cabin, the first porthole on the port side of the ship, and he had practiced what the warlock taught him.

While another member of the crew had visited a village to look for keepsakes, he had purchased a very old and scary-looking witch doctor's ceremonial mask and brought it back to the ship, thinking this would be a good souvenir from his African journey. The ship's doctor, who shared a room with the young man drawing pentagrams, saw the mask. He asked that crewman if he could buy it, saying he would love to have it in his office as a keepsake of his trip to Africa for a point of conversation. The crewman agreed. The mask was wooden and shaped like an American football. So when the ship received our strange message, they found the pentagram and got rid of it. They located the mask and threw it over- board, along with every other souvenir obtained in Angola.

Now you might be thinking that no scribbling on a window or wooden object used in satanic rituals would have any authority over a child of the living God. Prior to this incident, I certainly would have agreed with you. As I said, we are telling you this story just as it happened. It is up to you to decide what you believe. As for me, nothing linked to the dark side will have a place in my home or on my vessels ever again. Ever.

The ship pushed day and night for Fortaleza as Vinnie fell into a coma. The Verbo church had a ministry in Rio de Janeiro. When the pastor, James Jankoviak, heard about Vinnie, he flew into Fortaleza in order to meet him when he arrived and take over his care. As dusk approached, the patient was barely breathing. As the ship got within two hundred miles of Brazil, the helicopter lifted off to fly toward the meeting point. Night was falling, and the sun setting, so when the aircraft reached its fuel limit and the pilot still couldn't locate the ship, he sent a radio message that said he was turning back. Just then, one of our crewmen heard the faint sound of a helicopter and shot off a flare. The pilot caught a glimpse of it, located the ship, and raced to the Spirit's landing deck. Vinnie was rushed to the landing pad and carefully lifted into the helicopter. They took flight and disappeared into the night. In a heartbeat, Vinnie was gone.

We prayed that our good friend and brother would pull through as the captain turned the bow of the ship and set a course for Lake Charles, Louisiana. We waited to receive news of Vinnie. A short time later, we were devastated to learn that he had passed away.

Doug and Vinnie had served God with all their hearts, and we loved them dearly. Their loss was a blow beyond words. The Lord had always protected us, always delivered us, always made the way when there was no way—and now this. There was simply nothing we could do about it, and we knew our lives were not our own. We had no choice but to accept this terrible thing that had happened and go on.

Once we had thrown the mask overboard and gotten rid of the pentagrams, we had no further incidents. I was certain the chaplain's wife, Carla, and their two children would leave the ship as soon as they arrived back in the States, so I sent word to ask what arrangements she would like for us to make for the family. The message I got back surprised me. Carla said that God had not called Chaplain Doug Ford alone to serve Him. He had called the entire Ford family, and they had no intention of abandoning their post. Until He called them away, she said, they intended to stay where they were.

When the ship arrived in Lake Charles, we thought for sure we would lose most of the crew. What a horrendous ordeal they had endured, but although deeply heartbroken, nearly the entire crew stayed on. They carried with them now, however, the solemn knowledge that even our lives may be required of us.

In the next few years, the Spirit made two more voyages to West Africa, visiting Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, some ports more than once. In each nation, we delivered supplies to Bible schools who utilized their students to distribute the goods and minister to people throughout the region. Liberia and Sierra Leone were embroiled in civil wars, and at times stray bullets forced the crew to take cover while working the deck. In Sierra Leone, the crew participated in crusades in which lines to receive salvation stretched for more than a mile, and sixty thousand people prayed to receive Jesus as their Savior.

Every port where the Spirit and her crew traveled, they ministered to mariners on ships from other nations, the church received thousands of tons of goods to distribute, people heard about Jesus Christ, and the Kingdom of God was advanced.

We met ferocious storms, faced mechanical breakdowns, dodged stray bullets, had passports confiscated, and had guns put to our heads, but the Lord brought us though it all. The loss of our brothers at sea on the return voyage from Angola had been devastating, but the crew grew in strength and tenacity. They worked even harder than before, making the enemy pay for what he'd done as Jamie, my right hand and armor bearer, led them again and again into battle.

I praise God with all my heart that I could be a part of Africa, and I am so honored with the opportunity to serve my Master, Lord, and Savior, the Holy One Himself. Had Sondra and I chosen not to respond to the call to serve God full time, we would have missed out on the opportunity to have a part in sixty thousand people coming to know the Lord, hospitals and clinics being built, and people receiving food and clothes. We wouldn't have seen the child with a bowl of cereal and joy dancing in his eyes or the hundreds of trucks loaded with food, clothes, and medicine moving toward God's children.

It's frightening to think that for the security of a horse ranch and the joy of chasing a little white polo ball on a beautiful grass field, we actually could have sacrificed the chance to be a part of all these superb events that are so pleasing to God and help to fulfill the journey He has set before us.

CHAPTER 4

A MOMENT IN TIME

In April of 1992, there was trouble at home. A jury in Los Angeles acquit- ted four police officers of using excessive force while arresting a black man named Rodney King after he led them on a high-speed chase. The brutal beating was documented on video tape, so people were outraged because they had a hard time understanding how the all-white jury was able to acquit the LAPD officers. The black community in Los Angeles exploded into violence with widespread looting, arson, assault, and even murder. Many people were killed when angry mobs formed in one poor neighborhood after another. Sondra and I spent the nights standing guard on the roof of our office building, watching to see if rioters would make their way into our area of the port.

In spite of the chaos, we continued to go into downtown Los Angeles to pick up food that could be used to help people in need. As the food truck made its way slowly through town, our guys couldn't believe what they saw: smoke-filled neighborhoods that looked like war zones with burned out smoldering buildings, some still in flames; smashed and over- turned cars; rubble in the streets; angry young mobs roaming through communities, dashing in and out of busted storefronts; police in riot gear, marines, and national guard Humvees patrolling the streets.

With the supplies we picked up, we were able to provide food to the military teams as well as to poor families. After a few days, the riots settled down, but the city was traumatized for years to come.

The ship Spirit was in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where the crew was loading for Eastern Europe and a return trip to West Africa. This year would prove to be a busy one as we made multiple voyages to Albania and Croatia, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Ghana. We loaded supplies in Lake Charles, Baton Rouge, and Amsterdam.

As the ship sailed for Eastern Europe, a massive hurricane named Andrew made landfall in the United States and came ashore near Miami, Florida, in Dade County. Sondra and I flew to Miami to meet with church friends and talk about how we might help with the hurricane relief. The devastation we saw in Homestead was heartbreaking. Andrew had left 250,000 people homeless, millions without power, and more than 80,000 businesses damaged or destroyed. As we drove into the communities to offer help, we found people on their porches, still caked in blood from injuries sustained in the storm.

By this time the ship was sailing past Florida, so I radioed the captain to pull into the harbor, drop anchor, launch the shore boats, and send everyone ashore to Homestead except for a small handful of trusted watch officers. There we set up camp with the army's 10th Mountain Division and formed a fast friendship. We worked together to accomplish a great deal in a short time as we joined together with Miami-based church members from Verbo Christian Ministries. Together we helped build tent cities and distribute goods. A few weeks later when organizations began to flood in and much of the first responder work was complete, the crew returned to the ship, weighed anchor, and headed for Albania.

We had serious concerns about sailing the ship to Albania because only a short time ago the nation had erupted into chaos. We had seen news reports showing thousands of Albanians commandeering a vessel not unlike ours and forcing the captain to take them to Italy. But we believed the Lord was sending us there at a critical time in their history. So in spite of our reservations, we were excited and grateful to go.

Albania is in Eastern Europe and sits next to Greece, Montenegro, Kosovo, and Macedonia. It is located across the Adriatic Sea from Italy. Although rich in natural resources, living conditions there were closer to those in some of the world's most destitute nations than to those of its European neighbors.

Sondra and I flew to Albania as the ship was at sea. We arrived at the airport in the capital city of Tirana, where we were picked up by a relief worker and taken to the home of an engaging Albanian family to spend the first night. When we arrived at their humble home, the man of the house invited us in to dine with them. He seated us at the dining table and told us his wife and daughters had worked all day to prepare their very best food for us. In a carryover from long-ago Muslim traditions, women were not allowed to dine with men, but an exception was made for Sondra as a guest. According to their tradition, the man's wife and daughters served us and then sat across the room to wait.

I found it difficult to live with this particular custom, but it appeared to be a situation beyond my control. We were served a bowl of soup they had worked so hard to prepare. Sondra and I exchanged an apprehensive look, as there in the dish staring back at us floated the large eyeball of a sheep.

I knew they had sacrificed to prepare this meal for us, and it was impossible to refuse the special gift of love, so I made a quick excuse about eating on the plane and having stomach trouble. Sondra managed to gulp down a bite or two. We concentrated on drinking the juice we were served, but every time we emptied our glasses, the hosts filled them up again until the relief worker told us that Albanians are so hospitable that they refill any amount of food or drink a guest consumes. After that, we left our plates and glasses full. We didn't feel bad about being light eaters because we knew what we left would be enjoyed by the woman and girls who had prepared the meal. We dug out some chocolates we had in our bags and presented them to the children as gifts.

The next day we checked into a hotel, one of only two in the city. Although it was a good hotel, power was intermittent, and the bath water was so brown that we didn't dare use it. We sat in the lobby and waited to meet with several people we'd be working with to distribute goods. After a moment, I looked up to see a frail, hunched-over women who appeared to be about eighty years old struggling down the stairs with a huge, heavy suitcase, and trailing behind her there was a fit, handsome young man who strolled like a peacock and smoked a Marlboro. Apparently the woman was working as his bellman.

Without thinking, I jumped out my chair, ran up the stairs, grabbed the suitcase out of the old woman's hand, and carried it. I set the case on the floor in front of the man, and he looked at me, bewildered. I smiled at the woman, who looked back with deep, soft eyes and a look of gratitude and relief on her wrinkled face. I returned to my seat, but a moment later, the scenario took place again. Every so often, an old woman would come struggling down the stairs with the large piece of luggage belonging to a businessman. Each time this happened, I couldn't help but jump up and run to assist. The men were always confused, and the women were continually grateful.

When the people we were to meet finally arrived, I explained what had been happening. They laughed and told me I was destined to become a very tired man while in Albania because here the women, even old women, carried out the majority of the manual labor while the men spent their time on more "intellectual" pursuits.

For more than forty years, this nation's three million people had suffered under the rule of the most severe form of communism the world has ever seen. At first the People's Republic of Albania aligned itself with the Soviets. Dictator Enver Hoxha, initially an admirer of Joseph Stalin, eventually switched his allegiance to Communist China. Albanians had no access to international news or any information other than what was issued by their government. They explained to us that no foreign travel was allowed. Religion was illegal, and all church property was confiscated by the government. It was illegal to own or drive a private car. The Albanians told us that permits were required to own even a typewriter or a refrigerator. Political opponents were placed in forced labor camps or executed. If dissidents hid, their relatives would be jailed or tortured, and these laws were strictly enforced by the secret police through regular raids. Dictator Hoxha was infamous for executing people, even members of his own administration. Some Albanians told us that if he awoke one day after having a nightmare that a member of his staff had rebelled—let's say it was a man who parted his hair on the left—the dictator would line up all the men on his staff who parted their hair on the left and have them shot. They said that if a citizen complained because he or she had gotten only two of the six eggs he or she was due, that person faced one year of imprisonment for each egg about which they complained, and the life expectancy in prison was only four years. The people told us that anyone found with a Bible was jailed, sent to a labor camp, or worse. Someone told us about a girl who had somehow gotten ahold of an Elvis Presley poster. Even something this insignificant had resulted in her father going to prison.

Enver Hoxha died in 1985, but his brutal government carried on until civil unrest forced the administration to hold an election. Only then did things begin to improve for the Albanians; however, the immediate result of the change of government was the collapse of state-run businesses. This led to crippling unemployment and widespread corruption.

The Communist government had cunningly controlled the masses with overwhelming paranoia, creating the illusion that Albania was the most beautiful and prosperous nation in the world. The rest of humanity, the government told them, planned to attack them at any moment and take away what they had. In particular, they were led to believe that American soldiers, the marines, and paratroopers were going to invade.

Because people were restricted from receiving any information other than what they were told by their government, they had no idea that the vast majority of Americans knew nothing about Albania and that almost everyone everywhere, even in nearby Yugoslavia, enjoyed far better living conditions then they did.

On the drive between Tirana and the port city of Durres, there were extraordinary sights, including thousands of concrete pillbox bunkers constructed outside every home and scattered throughout the farmlands. These had been commissioned by Enver Hoxha, who had ordered the construction of hundreds of thousands of these bunkers. They faced west, where Hoxha told the people that one day the armies of the Americas would enter and strike them.

Even more surprising than the sight of the many bunkers was the endless sea of concrete pillars topped with sharp arrows in every area of open ground. There were millions of these impaling rods erected in every piece of farmland and open stretch of land. Hoxha had ordered them built for the sole purpose of skewering foreign paratroopers he insisted would one day drop in to seize their prosperous nation and do away with their people.

Albania was entirely different from anywhere we had ever been in the world. The dictators had been so effective in isolating the people that almost all knowledge of religion had been successfully eradicated. The church had been originally established there by the apostle Paul, who had preached the Gospel with signs and wonders in the city of Illyricum, located in what is now central Albania. In later years, the Ottoman Turks occupied the nation for five centuries and forced most of the people to convert to Islam. If a family happened to pass down memories of religious traditions, they were much more likely to be Islamic than Christian.

When we asked the Albanians about their religious beliefs, most would say they were Muslim. Then they would ask us to explain the difference between Islam and Christianity because they really had no idea what it meant to be either one. When we asked people if they had ever heard of Jesus, most said no, but some thought they had and that he was a sports figure.

We had many unique and unforgettable experiences in Albania. Only a few weeks had passed since the change of government when the ship arrived in Durres. I sat on the Spirit's navigation bridge and looked through the glass of the wheelhouse toward the bow. I saw the rocks and ruins of an actual Roman amphitheater where gladiators had fought only a few hundred yards away and began to imagine the trauma, fear, anxiety, and torture that must have taken place there. I thought about the blood-stained sand that would have soaked the ground of the arena. It was terrible to think about.

Someone explained to us that this particular coliseum was one where the Emperor Diocletian fed Christians to the lions. The lions tore apart their bodies to the cheers of the crowd. It was sobering as I realized the sacrifice that had been paid just a stone's throw ahead of the bow of the ship. Many of my brothers and sisters in the Lord and their children had paid the price for the opportunity we had now, almost two thousand years later, when the doors opened wide for us to deliver shiploads of mercy in their time of need, from Jesus with love.

On our first day in port, when the ship had cleared customs, I welcomed aboard an unusual visitor. He was an older man of apparent high authority, and I sat down in the mess hall to talk with him. The man was curious about what we were doing there, as they had not seen an American ship in generations. I explained why we had come to Albania and about the gifts we had brought for the children, the elderly, and the poor. I told him how we all worked without pay, even the captain and all the ship's officers. He listened carefully and seemed sincerely amazed that anyone would do something like this out of the goodness of their hearts. He had never heard of such a thing.

I explained the reason for our kindness. I told him about our great and gracious Lord Jesus, who had provided everything and spoke to us in our hearts to come here. He continued to listen closely to what I said and asked many questions. I could see this man was thinking deeply about what I was telling him.

He looked me in the eyes and confessed with emotion that he was the ex-chief of the secret police. He had imprisoned and prosecuted many innocent people. How could God forgive him, he asked. He explained that after President Hoxha died and the election came, the department heads that had committed most of the nation's atrocities had simply switched their hats around and took on new titles. His new title was the minister of tranquility.

The minister said he was certain that a man like him could never be forgiven by God. I explained to him that one of God's most important leaders, a man named Paul, had ordered the imprisonment and death of many Christians. When Paul realized the truth and accepted Jesus, he was forgiven and became one of God's greatest apostles.

By this time, the eyes of the minister were full of tears. He asked what kind of a God could forgive him. I told him he had only to make a decision. This was difficult for him to accept, but as he left that day, he promised he would think seriously about what I'd told him.

In the next few days, we off-loaded thousands of tons of supplies. They were picked up and quickly dispersed by local organizations throughout the country. The need was huge and the goods greatly valued, but distribution was complicated. Trucks were limited, since there had been only a small number of vehicles in the entire country, and all of those had been government owed. Useable roads, especially to small villages, had not been built because there were so few vehicles to travel on them. Many rural communities were not accessible at all by road. We utilized every truck we could find, and then a ministry from Switzerland brought in helicopters to distribute cargo to remote villages. Some of our teams flew out with them and were able to participate in ministry as villagers gratefully received the gifts of food.

When communism fell, the Albanians had taken ownership of what- ever was in their possession at the time. They naturally wanted to own cars, so they had begun to import them by the thousands from Italy. People traded farms and property for old clunkers they could use to get around the countryside and towns. For more than forty years, no one except a few government officials had learned to drive, and although the new government now offered drivers' education classes, the cost to attend and qualify for a license was about a year's wages. So the average man drove without a license and learned to operate a car by actually driving it. In the first few months of free Albania, several thousand cars were imported, and they filled the streets, driven by people who didn't have the slightest idea of how to drive. They raced through towns and the country- side, abruptly slamming on their brakes without slowing down or giving warning. Many incessantly beeped their horns. They did this not to signal a problem but so people would see them and see that they were driving a car. Others would spot a person walking on the sidewalk and veer their cars across the street in order to run up behind the pedestrian and blast their horns to scare the person just for the fun of it. It was like thousands of children running wild in bumper cars, only these were dangerous auto- mobiles. There were many deadly wrecks, after which friends would roll big boulders into the middle of the road to mark the spot where their family members or friends had died. You can imagine how many more boulders would have to go out onto the road as drivers plowed into the first ones set out as memorials.

It was about a forty-minute trip from the port city of Durres to the capital city of Tirana. Because of these road conditions, the drive was one of the scariest we had ever experienced. When we arrived in Tirana, Sondra and I were advised that while on foot, we needed to keep in mind that drivers would just as soon motor on the sidewalk as the road. It was wise to gauge the distance of the trees by the side of the road so we could dash behind one for safety when a group of horn-honking cars approached. In fact, we were advised to avoid walking on the sidewalks altogether.

The regular police had quit their jobs for fear of their lives, so with the import of thousands of cars, the country brought in farm workers and issued them police jackets, whistles, and signs. The country had obtained some U.S. stop signs printed in English, which of course the Albanians couldn't read, and there were no speed limits yet. Everyone drove as fast as they wanted until the faster cars had packed up behind the slowest moving ones, all honking their horns. The new traffic police stood in the middle of the street, terrified, until most of them finally threw down their stop signs and ran for their lives.

When we had finished off-loading the ship's cargo, the crew helped coordinate and participated in exciting evangelical crusades in the capital city of Tirana. Attendance at each meeting increased every night. The first meeting five thousand people came. The second night ten thousand came and the third night eighteen thousand! We estimated that three quarters of all who attended got saved. Roger Siratt had arrived by air to be with us in Albania. Roger is a gifted pastor, evangelist, and musician and one of our closest friends. He had traveled with us around the world and encouraged us through every trial. He was excited to learn that veteran missionary Brother Andrew would be speaking at the crusade. Brother Andrew was well-known for smuggling Bibles into China, and Roger was anxious to hear what he would have to say to the Albanians. He gathered up a group of crew members who had remained at the ship, and off they went to Tirana to attend the meetings.

Roger and some of the crew arrived at the auditorium and were able to go inside, but some crew members waited outside because the crowd was so huge that not everyone could fit in the building. Thousands of people remained outside with them, pressing in and trying to get a chance to go in or at least hear what was going on.

The meeting hall was packed, and the air was charged with excitement. As Brother Andrew walked onto the stage, he received a warm welcome from the Albanians. They had no idea who he was, but they were happy to have a man of God talk to them. For decades they had been told nothing about God except He did not exist. The people knew now that the Communist government had lied to them about everything else, and they were certain they had been lied to about God. This was their chance to learn the truth.

Brother Andrew approached the microphone and called out in a loud voice, "Albania, God is not dead. He is alive!" The crowd erupted into cheers. What did these dear people need to know more than those few words after decades of deceit? The minister of God cried out in a louder voice, "Albania, God is not dead. He is alive!" The crowd roared as Brother Andrew continued to repeat passionately that God was not dead but alive.

The Holy Spirit fell on the crowd. Many burst into tears and accepted the love of God, and miracle healings erupted throughout the crowd.

The people who hadn't been able to fit in the auditorium were milling around the front of the outside steps. Some were on crutches, and others fortunate enough to have wheelchairs of sorts. Inside the auditorium, Brother Andrew continued with his message as outside some of the crew got the idea to pray for the sick, and they started to preach. Others in the crowd joined in to translate. The Holy Spirit fell outside the meeting as He had inside the hall. Healings began to take place. People who couldn't walk started walking. People who were blind cried out that now they could see!

Albanians are passionate and enthusiastic people. They became so excited about the miracles that the crowd started to yell out requests for prayer. With tremendous zeal, they pressed in toward those who were preaching, wildly shouting at them.

The crew members couldn't understand what was being said and thought the crowd had become angry. Frightened, they leaped from the steps, forced their way through the people, and dashed through the park, nervously hiding behind trees and checking out the distance between them and the great mob crying out for prayer and chasing them down.

They ran toward the street, where a few old one-lung taxi farm tractors went pop-pop-pop as they made their way slowly down the road. These tractors had been manufactured as field plows and were without brakes, so the operator would ride on a four-by-four with a small shelter overhead and drag his feet along the ground to bring the machine to a stop.

Making their escape from the rushing crowds, the fleeing crew members ran to the tractors and negotiated a quick deal with each driver for a ride to make their escape. We all laughed when the crew told us their stories and we learned that the crowd had actually wanted only prayer.

The team was so grateful to be a part of this unique period in Albania's history. They felt such a deep satisfaction in their hearts knowing that at the seaport only a few hours away from the crusade and a short distance from the place where Christians sacrificed their lives for the sake of the Gospel sat the great ship Spirit with an expression of God's mercy pouring out of her holds to meet the desperate needs of the people He loves so much. What an extraordinary privilege to be with the Albanians and how humbling to be a part of this exceptional moment in time.

Once the crusade was over, we visited with some of the ministers involved in the Tirana crusade. One was the pastor of a church in South Australia. He visited the ship and saw some of our most important needs firsthand. Forklifts were critical to our operations. We didn't have as many as we needed, and the ones we did have were old and worn out. Also, a law had been passed that required us to purchase a survival suit for each crew member. These are suits you would get into if the ship was sinking and you would soon be in the sea. The suit would keep your body temperature warm and give you a good chance of survival in cold water. The pastor knew we were sweating out this purchase, as each suit was expensive, and we needed sixty of them. He had a small congregation but returned home to Mt. Gambia determined to provide us with three brand new forklifts and sixty survival suits.

When the pastor explained the situation to his sincere church members, they grabbed hold of the vision and ran with it. They fasted and prayed. They gave until it hurt. They asked friends and neighbors for money and did anything they could to raise funds until they had collected tens of thousands of dollars for us to purchase three beautiful new diesel Toyota forklifts and sixty survival suits.

When I received the check, I was floored by their overwhelming generosity. We were humbled by this sacrificial love, a clear demonstration of what a united group of people can do for the Lord when they make a decision to do so, whatever their size.
CHAPTER 5

A NATION AT WAR

After completing missions to Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Ghana, the great ship Spirit returned to Baton Rouge and loaded for a return voyage to Albania. This time we would include Croatia, a part of the former Yugoslavia. They had been a satellite state of the Soviet Union until it dissolved, and the region was now divided into the four states of Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia.

Because of the country's popularity with tourists, Yugoslavia had stayed open to the West even when under Communist rule in order to profit from international dollars. In comparison to some of its neighbors, like Albania, the former Yugoslavia remained prosperous although now war torn by a brutal conflict between several parties. Our mission was to bring aid to help the people streaming into refugee centers, escaping the violence from around the country.

One of the young men on the crew was named Gunter. He had joined the crew with a group of twenty Guatemalans from the Verbo church. He was very bright and in the initial stages of learning to speak English. While living in Guatemala, Gunter had attended a school to study the mechanics of diesel engines. Ah ha, we thought, This young man shows good learning ability with English. He's very sharp, has training, and has some experience as a mechanic for truck engines, and with that Gunter was selected to be an engineer over all our equipment, including the two-story Nordberg main engine with cylinders so large that one could stand on top of them inside the engine.

As the ship set sail from Baton Rouge and made her way down the Mississippi and out to sea, we started to have trouble with the watermaker—a critical piece of equipment that converts sea water into useable fresh water for drinking, cooking, showers, and laundry. Gunter tried repeatedly to fix the machine, but no matter what he tried, it would not produce water. He thought to himself that we'd have no choice but to go into a port somewhere to purchase water because we were not going to be able to make any for ourselves.

By this time we were in the mid-Atlantic, so the opportunity to go into a port would not arise for quite some time, and besides that, Gunter realized we didn't have the money to pay the many port fees necessary to do this even when it did become possible. Our tanks had been filled to capacity prior to sailing, but they just did not hold enough to complete the voyage to Eastern Europe without making water, particularly with the large crew we carried. Still, we could not continue to sail without a supply of fresh water, so this was a serious dilemma.

As a final measure before going to bed, Gunter laid hands on the watermaker and prayed for God's intervention, but he went to bed with little faith that his desperate plea had changed any of the bleak circumstances. However, the next morning a crew member who was not working in the engine room and didn't know anything about the situation with the watermaker approached Gunter as he ate breakfast. He told him that he had a dream in which he saw the engineer praying for a piece of equipment. Now Gunter sat up tall and stopped eating to listen carefully. The crewman had his full attention as he described a piece of equipment that sounded suspiciously like the watermaker. In the dream, the crewman said, Gunter laid hands on the machine and prayed. As he did so, an angel appeared and put his hand on the equipment too. When the angel's hand made contact with the watermaker, it sparked.

That was all Gunter needed to hear. He leaped from the table and ran down to the engine room. Much to his delight, he found the watermaker producing good, useable fresh water and depositing it into the tanks, replenishing all we had used. From that time on and for the remainder of the trip, the watermaker continued to produce good, useable water.

When the ship returned home, Gunter got a new copy of the water- maker manual. He took the equipment apart to clean and perform maintenance on it and was stunned to discover that the components had been connected backward in a way that made it impossible to function. Apparently, prior to the voyage to Eastern Europe, one of our novice mechanics had installed the equipment incorrectly, and it should never have been able to produce one ounce of water let alone function for months. Gunter was astonished. He shook his head in disbelief and said, "Thank you, Jesus! What other explanation could there be?"

Just prior to our arrival in Croatia, President Bill Clinton announced he was going to send the U.S. military into Bosnia. A warning was issued that all U.S. flag vessels in Serbian waters could be subject to confiscation. Since we were headed straight for those waters, we called the authorities to clarify this and were told we probably would not be confiscated unless they found us carrying weapons, but it was likely the ship would be boarded and searched by the UN. We sent a message to the crew so they were aware of this possibility.

One morning, just outside the Croatian port, at about five o'clock in the morning, two rubber dinghies carrying French UN Marine commandos in full gear approached the stern of the ship at high speed. Forty yards away was a fully equipped naval battleship with 200 mm cannons and sixteen short-distance missiles pointed in our direction.

The soldiers directed the crew to let down a rope ladder so they could board. The crew did as they were told, and the commandos climbed up the ladder, weapons in hand. They ordered the crew into the mess hall and then moved into position, blocking each exit. With everyone packed into the hot mess hall and the commandos holding them at gunpoint, the atmosphere was tense and uncomfortable.

The tension held for hours as the soldiers inspected the ship from one end to the other. When Jamie's youngest son, six-year-old Nathan, asked innocently if the commandos' guns were real, it brought smiles and a little relief. When the soldiers demanded to know if we had any weapons aboard, Jamie's eight-year-old son, Regan, confessed, "I have a gun," refer- ring to a squirt gun he had stashed in his cabin.

After they were satisfied that the crew had nothing aboard except a couple of squirt guns, the commandos demanded to inspect the cargo. We routinely worked hard to utilize every inch of available space in order to make the most of the thousands of gallons of fuel we burned at sea, so when we loaded the ship, we stuffed the cargo holds wall-to-wall and floor to ceiling. There are generally no aisles and not even enough room (hopefully) for a mouse to get around.

When they showed the soldiers the cargo holds, they saw there was no way to climb in and check what was actually in there, so they looked over the pallets as best they could, spotting diapers, food, and many other harmless items. Finally, the commandos started to relax. One of the crew offered them a cold drink; they accepted and started to visit, allowing the crew to snap a few pictures with them. Finally, the crew was given permission to carry on with our mission, and the soldiers disappeared onto their rubber dinghies as quickly and quietly as they had arrived.

Sondra and I flew in from Los Angeles to the Croatian port of Split to meet the ship. We were amazed at the outstanding beauty of this nation. It was completely unlike the countries we normally were asked to assist. It looked much like southern California. We checked into a hotel that, although nice, had no power because the dam had been blown up some months before. We called the ship on a handheld radio and were surprised when they responded loud and clear, anchored just a few miles off the coast. Within a short time, the ship was able to pull into port.

We tried to coordinate with Samaritan's Purse, a humanitarian organization directed by Billy Graham's son Franklin. Their teams were working high in the mountains of Serbia, but the Serbian forces had cut off the roads, making it impossible for us to reach them. So there we were in Croatia with a shipload of needed goods, everything from diapers to Cup O Noodles, blankets, and building materials, with no one to receive the supplies. Because Split was a small but busy port, the authorities directed us to a facility about forty clicks south named Dugi Rat. It was two miles north of a village called Molly Rat. These were charming little places, just like from a fairy tale. The Spirit sailed to Dugi Rat, where the crew tied up the ship and waited to off-load as soon as we found an organization to receive the goods.

A team went out in search of someone to help. They visited refugee camps, and there they found hundreds of people sleeping on wooden floors, each person right next to the other with no privacy at all. The centers housed mostly women and children because most men were fighting at the front. Many people had to flee on foot, leaving behind property that had been in their families for generations. Some had been forced to walk through minefields in order to arrive at the refugee centers. Whole families had lost contact with each other. The camps were running out of supplies and had a desperate need for food and medical supplies.

People were in deep despair with no homes, splintered families, and nothing left. Soldiers told the team how this war was so especially heart- breaking because people who had once been friends were now forced to fight on opposite sides of the battle.

We heard about a Catholic relief organization known as Caritas that was operating most of the refugee centers, caring for thousands of dis- placed people. Their representatives approached us to tell us they could make good use of the supplies we had brought. We agreed to help them. In the next few days, the crew off-loaded several thousand tons of food and medical supplies into trucks provided by the United Nations and into the capable hands of Caritas. The priests, nuns, and relief workers were among the most efficient, professional, hospitable, and loving people with whom we had ever worked. They treated us with respect, thankfulness, and honor. We deeply appreciated the sincere hospitality of Caritas and felt confident that the goods we delivered would be utilized in the best possible way to meet the physical needs of people in desperate need. And when the distribution was complete, Caritas gave us a lengthy and thorough accounting of how they had distributed each item we had entrusted to them for the victims of war in Croatia.

One day during the mission, I decided to go inland with some fellow relief workers. We traveled to a place where UN tanks were cutting a road to bypass the normal highway that had been cut off by the warring factions. It was a dangerous area with snipers all around. I sat in the backseat of a truck behind one of my friends, who was in the front seat with a flak jacket. I wore nothing except my T-shirt, but I thought if I positioned myself behind my friend then when we came under fire, the bullets would have to go through him, his flak jacket, and the car seat before reaching me. Of course, this plan was fatally flawed because snipers were able to shoot at us from any direction. Fortunately, that didn't happen. That same day, warehouses full of some of the humanitarian aid we had delivered were blown up and destroyed.

While I was off with my friends, the priests arranged to bring a bus to the ship. They loaded up Sondra and nearly our entire crew to treat them to a day off by taking a visit to beautiful Medjugorje, which was famous among Catholics for reported supernatural sightings of Mary, the mother of Jesus. It was a peaceful trip until the bus turned a corner to make the final approach to their destination. There they ran into a roadblock where Caritas priests waited to flag the bus down. They reported that quite unexpectedly Medjugorje had come under heavy attack. The crew would have to return to the ship.

On another day, the team was able to complete their visit to Medjugorje. They spent the afternoon with the Caritas staff and worked alongside them to supply people's needs. Then they were honored with a special meal prepared and served by the resident nuns.

When we had completed off-loading the goods we had brought for Croatia and were preparing to get underway, a priest in senior leadership with Caritas came to the ship to address the crew and thank us for all we had done. He presented us with a beautiful painting of Jesus, an image of the Lord's face formed by a collage of people known for their sacrifices to improve the lives of others. He told us we were like the followers of Jesus who had walked with him as He climbed the hill, carrying the cross on which He was crucified. We were there beside them, the priest said, to help them when they needed it in their greatest time of trouble.

The Spirit departed Croatia and sailed for Europe. In Amsterdam she picked up another large load of humanitarian aid to be divided between Albania and Croatia.

Here is an article published in The Advocate, a Baton Rouge, Louisi- ana newspaper in October 1993:

SHIP TAKING RELIEF TO AFRICA DOCKS IN BATON ROUGE Author: MELISSA MOORE

Date: October 12, 1993

Sondra Tipton has come a long way from the Beverly Hills polo club her husband owned nearly a decade ago. "We became Christians and we started praying for something to do for the Lord," she said. The idea that came to her husband Don Tipton was to "collect surplus products in the United States, things that will be a blessing in other countries," she said.

She now adroitly climbs the steep stairs of the mercy ship Spirit, explaining its history and the renovations they made to it after founding the Park West Children's Fund. The fund owns the Spirit, which has been at sea almost constantly for the past three years. Spirit traveled to Nicaragua in August 1990 "and we've been on the move ever since," Tipton said. Spirit docked in Baton Rouge Sunday afternoon and will stay here at least a month loading up for a trip to five countries in West Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Gambia.

The ship can carry 5,000 tons of relief supplies and will take food, medical equipment, textbooks and other items collected by the relief groups Feedthe Hungry and Living Waters, Tipton said. The trip to those African countries is expected to take about four months. On its way back to the United States, the Spirit will stop in Guatemala for a couple of weeks. Many of the nearly 50-member crew is from Guatemala, she said, but others come from the United States, Mexico, Angola and Albania.

Derida Gjakrosa, a 26-year-old Albanian woman, joined the Spirit crew just six weeks ago, after its second trip to her country. Deciding to make the two-year commitment wasn't tough for her, even though she had never left her home before. "It wasn't me. It was God that made the decision. He just spoke

to me and I said, 'Yes, Lord,'" Gjakrosa said. Gjakrosa said she worked for two weeks with the group on its second trip to Albania, but it took a long time for the paperwork necessary to allow her to travel to be completed. She's enjoyed her work so far, and being away from her family hasn't been as difficult as she thought it might. "It's been hard for me but God's doing everything easier for me," she said. "It's wonderful to have so many brothers and sisters," she added, referring to the rest of the crew.

Spirit's trip to Albania was eye-opening, Tipton said, because the country had been almost completely closed to outsiders for so long. The country has 750,000 bunkers, a tribute to the paranoia of the dictator there, she said. Also, many fields were filled with long spikes erected to protect the Albanian people from possible invasion by paratroopers, she said. But the trip to Albania couldn't top the Spirit's 1992 trip to the Soviet Union. They arrived on August 18, 1992, just hours before the coup that ultimately led to the dissolution of the USSR. "We saw the statue of Lenin torn down by the people. We saw the end of communism. It was pretty exciting," Tipton said.

The Spirit, which is 338 feet long and seven stories tall, has also made several trips to Central America, Africa and Croatia, Tipton said. They deliver supplies to local churches which distribute them to individuals, she said. Most of the cargo for the Spirit's trip to Africa is already on its way to Baton Rouge by truck and rail, Tipton said, but food for the crew, especially meat and fish, are still needed, as is help making repairs to the ship. The crew has been at sea for almost an entire year and is also in need of medical care, including immunizations for their trip to Africa, she said.

Anyone interested in donating time, supplies or work should call Bethany World Prayer Center's Missions Department at 774-2000,Tipton said. Bethany is sponsoring the Spirit's mission locally. Having docked once in Lake Charles and now in Baton Rouge in preparation for their travels, Tipton had high praise for the people she's met here. "Louisiana has been the warmest state so far," she said.

CHAPTER 6

SPIES IN DISGUISE

Little is known to U.S. citizens about Cuba because although Americans are technically permitted to travel there, we are not allowed to spend money in the country. That makes it virtually impossible to visit. It all started after the 1959 revolution, when Fidel Castro nationalized the property of U.S. citizens and corporations. Since 1960, the United States has carried out a financial embargo on Cuba.

We always had a desire to take aid to our neighbors in Cuba and help the underground churches meet the needs of their people. This desire was intensified when a few hours after passing through the Panama Canal on the way to Riga, Latvia, Spirit hit a heavy storm and decided to change course. The new course would take the ship near Cuba. As we came closer to the coastline, the crew took hundreds of empty five-gallon buckets with lids, opened them up, stuffed them with Spanish Bibles and Gospel tracks, and securely sealed the containers. When the winds and tides were favorable, they would cause the buckets to wash up onto the beach. So with prayer and faith that they would fall into the right hands, the crew launched the pails into the sea. We knew the Cubans valued five-gallon buckets and would be sure to investigate when they spotted them.

We never heard any more about the containers, but we felt certain they washed up on shore all the way down the coast.

Special permits need to be obtained in order to travel to Cuba and to spend money there, so Sondra and I applied for and received authorization from the U.S. State Department to go to Cuba and look into the possibility of bringing in humanitarian aid. We made arrangements to meet up with evangelical pastors in Havana. Since there were no regular flights from the United States to Havana, we flew to Kingston, Jamaica, to get our Cuban visas and go in from there. This was a route often used by Americans who were not granted official permission as we had been. The Cuban embassy in Kingston and the Cuban immigration office would accommodate this type of traveler by issuing a visa and entry without stamping the passport so there was no evidence of the visit.

We went in search of the Cuban embassy in Kingston and were followed by local Rastafarians harassing us for money. We found the building down a lonely avenue with no foot traffic. We had to laugh when we saw a very prosperous-looking gum and fruit vendor stationed directly across the street from the door of the embassy. He had a clear view of everyone who entered and exited the building, and he kept a keen eye on the door. Since this was the worst possible place for a street vender to encounter customers, it was obvious even to us that his true business was with the CIA.

We went into the embassy and talked to them about going to Havana. We didn't mention we had permission from the United States for fear of being denied entry by the Cubans. We applied the normal way people do without authorization, and the Cubans accepted us, believing we were socialist Americans. As we left the building, the fruit vendor stepped out from behind his cart and looked directly at us. He was obviously snapping our photograph, so I paused for a moment against the wall, turned to the right and then back to the left to make sure he had a good mug shot. I smiled and waved as we walked on.

The airline to Havana was Air Cubana. Their aircraft was small, Russian, uncomfortable, and in a state of scary disrepair, with plenty of anti-American propaganda stuffed into the back pocket of each seat. When we arrived in Havana, immigration was quick, and customs was surprisingly a breeze. Our bags were not even inspected. The pastors met us at the airport, and as we talked, they confirmed what we had suspected. The Cubans were suffering tremendous hardship.

The nation of Haiti had long been considered the most impoverished nation in our hemisphere, but because statistics gathered and released by Cuban authorities were suspect, there had been no way to realistically calculate their circumstances. The pastors told us the true situation: the average wage in Cuba was only three U.S. dollars a month, and goods were severely rationed. By comparison, Haiti was doing better.

We were fascinated by Havana. The city was filled with decaying remnants of the Spanish occupation. The streets were narrow, the ceilings high, and the buildings incredibly ornate. The people were lovely and reminded us of the Nicaraguans with stately European influence. Everywhere we looked there were American cars from the 1950s. Since the embargo had been imposed, U.S. cars were no longer imported, so these relics had been preserved in pristine condition. At this time, people were issued only a quart of gasoline per family per week, so the young men would start off by pooling their gas and riding in their classic cars near Revolution Square in the center of Havana. They would cruise along until the car ran out of gas. That didn't take long with those gas guzzlers. Then some of the young people would stay inside the vehicle while a group of friends climbed out and pushed them down the street. It was so funny to watch them having such a good time pushing one another, first up and then down the avenue.

Occasionally, people we passed on the street overheard us talking to one another, and if they spoke English, they would inquire if we were Australian or Canadian. When we told them we were from the United States, they would laugh, thinking we were making a joke because so few U.S. citizens were ever seen there. Once we convinced them we were from the United States, some expressed their distrust of and anger with the Cuban government. They would speak to us in hushed voices, never saying Castro's name aloud for fear of being overheard, but we learned when they would cross their chests with their hands and touch the opposite shoulder with their fingers, this meant they were secretly referring to Fidel.

We attended several church services with the pastors. One took place outside a church, and we watched with delight as members arrived with trumpets, saxophones, flutes, guitars, fiddles, and even buckets, pots, and pans to use as instruments. The Cubans were talented, and everyone seemed to play something in order to make a joyful noise to the Lord. The Holy Spirit fell upon them, and the church grounds were saturated with singing, worship, joy, and excitement rarely seen in our churches at home. We enjoyed the praise like no other. Some people worshipped as others served up big bowls of soup to all who attended the meeting, sharing what little food they had. I was so impressed with their expression of the Gospel. It was simple and fresh, open and exciting. The pastors told us revival was flourishing all over Cuba.

The church members were eager to hear from a North American. I personally thought they were better left without our Western influence, but the pastors insisted I address the crowd, so I spoke, never mentioning that we had any hope of bringing a ship to Cuba. I told the story of how God had miraculously raised up the Spirit and our ministry to bring aid because He loves people so much and wants to help them in their time of need. The Cuban believers praised the Lord and cried because He was so gracious to help the Central Americans, Africans, Russians, and Europe- ans. We were moved to see such unselfish purity in the church, which is rare and enormously beautiful.

The pastors were gracious and hospitable. They seemed grateful we were trying to help them but pessimistic that the government would agree to allow us to ship in goods. Still, I tried to plan things out, asking how many and what size of trucks they had and how many others they could borrow. I explained that the ship carried hundreds and even thousands of tons of supplies. They told me one of the parishioners owned a pickup truck, and one of their cousins owned another one they were certain they could use.

Moving onto another subject, I said we would need to bring the ship into a port and asked if they knew anyone who owned a private dock, realizing that the Cuban government would not be excited to help us bring goods to the church community. "Only one," they replied and told us it belonged to the Catholic Church. The evangelical pastors thought it would be even harder to get permission to use that dock than it would to use the one that belonged to the government. "The Catholic Church has an embassy. They own their own docks. They have their own longshore- men, warehouses, and many big trucks," they told me. "Great!" I said. "Let's go talk to them."

"They won't let us through the front gate," said the pastors. "We don't speak." I said, "Let's go talk to the Catholics. Where are they located?" The pastors all shook their heads. One pastor explained again, speaking slowly, thinking that I must not have understood what he said the first time, "We cannot go and speak to them."

I realized that for some reason they were afraid to talk to the Catholics. I thought, This can't be. I said, "Please take me to them. I believe they will listen to me. I want to speak to the head person. I must speak with the cardinal." The pastors were still hesitant but agreed to take us to the main office of the Catholic Church in Cuba.

Early the next morning, we met up with the pastors, and they took us to the monastery and nervously accompanied Sondra and me into the office. We explained our situation to the receptionist and asked to speak to someone in authority. We were taken into a room where several men stood in black robes. I told them all about trying to bring the Spirit ship to Havana but that we had nowhere to dock, needed longshoremen to unload the ship, warehouses to store the goods, and trucks to distribute to the churches. I told them the cargo would belong to the evangelicals but that we needed their help.

The pastors had been justified in their fears about how we would be received. The atmosphere was so thick that we needed a sharp sword to cut the tension. I had never experienced anything quite like it before. When I finished speaking, the man who appeared to be in charge said, "And why would we do this?" I responded, "Because it is good for the poor, good for the people of Cuba. It will advance the Kingdom of God." There was an uncomfortable silence. I realized I clearly hadn't gotten through to them and had better try another approach. "I'll tell you what. Are you able to communicate with Catholic Relief in the United States?" "Yes," they said, "we frequently do." I said, "Please call them and tell them about our visit and that I'm asking for this favor. We'll come back tomorrow morning for your answer." The head man started to speak, but I interrupted him to say, "Please don't answer me now until you've spoken to them and told them it's Don Tipton with Friend Ships and the Spirit ship." The cardinal agreed he would make the call and that we would meet at the same time and same place the following day. I really didn't know if calling the United States would make any difference, but I prayed it would.

We left the office and headed back to the church. The pastors seemed to be a little disgusted with me on the way home because I hadn't listened to them. "We told you. They will probably turn us into the Central Committee, and this could mean big trouble for all of us." They had been in this country a long time and knew the perils and dangers of exposing oneself to the Central Committee. "The Catholics and the Protestants have never been able to communicate, as you can now see. We don't get along. We are opposed to each other in every way." "I'm sorry to hear that," I said. All the pastors agreed it had been a bad idea to go, but they said they would pray for the best.

I thought I should explain some of the background of this relation- ship between Friend Ships and the Catholics so the pastors would better understand my reasoning. "In Nicaragua, during the time that Danny Ortega was in charge, the famous, beloved Catholic cathedral constructed in the eighteenth century and located in the city of Leon, one of the biggest cathedrals in all of Central America, fell into terrible disrepair and was crumbling. While Spirit prepared to sail on our initial mission, the Catholic Relief office in the United States heard that we would have the first American flagship going into Nicaragua in many years. They came to us and asked if they could buy space on our deck to send cement, plaster, lumber, and tools—all the things needed to repair and save the Leon cathedral. We told them we would be happy to take the supplies but that there would be no charge for our Lord in any manner. The Catholics were aware that we were evangelical and so were quite surprised at our willingness to help them save their cathedral.

"Then, when we took two shiploads of goods to Eastern Europe, the Catholic organization Caritas approached our team and said that they needed the supplies we carried, as they were operating large refugee centers and housing thousands of people. The priests said they would distribute the humanitarian goods and give us a complete record of how everything was utilized. They explained too that one of their most famous places of pilgrimage, Medjugorje, was located in the hills of Croatia. Here Catholics believed that in 1981 the Virgin Mary appeared to six children. A cathedral there had been damaged by the Bosnians, and they needed building materials to restore it.

"So the ship's crew delivered millions of dollars' worth of food, clothing, and building materials to the priests and their staffs for distribution and use. We returned for a second mission, and in the end, two shipments were delivered to Caritas in a great time of turmoil," I said to the Cuban pastors.

"Now we have brothers and sisters in need here in Cuba, and we have Catholics with the ability to help us meet these needs. If they are the kind of people I suspect they are based on our history of working together, I think we may have a good response. It will be interesting to see what happens with the shoe on the other foot. My hope is that these men will prove to be all I believe they are. We'll find out what the priests have to say tomorrow."

I thought I may have just stuck my foot in my mouth and with one big stupid move blown all the credibility and hope I had of encouraging these men. I may have been writing checks spiritually that I wasn't able to cash, but I knew I served One that could. I just hoped what I had done didn't make Him look bad tomorrow.

The next morning at 10:00 am, we returned to the Catholic head- quarters. As we pulled the car up in front of the building, nuns were waiting outside the door to welcome us. As we entered the building, all the men we had met with the day before were there, but this time they were smiling from ear to ear and greeted us as if we were long-lost brothers who had found our way home. This was something the pastors had never seen—warm and friendly Catholics in Cuba at the highest level.

The priests ushered us to the room we had met in yesterday, but today they had rolled out the red carpet and set a festive table with food and glasses of wine. I had to chuckle to myself. They were truly charming. Our Pentecostal friends choked at the sight of wine. I don't think their lips had ever touched alcohol, and now the Catholics wanted to toast. The pastors mumbled to one another, trying to decide the right thing to do about drinking the wine and probably not sure if it was a glass of friendship or laced with poison. They may have taken a little sip to be polite. I'm not really sure. They just couldn't believe the priests were eating and drinking alongside them with friendship, laughter, handshakes, and conversation as if we all were real brothers in the Lord.

The priests told us they had called the United States. Catholic Relief had asked them to assist us in any way they could. They had been praying and discussing this matter and said if we were successful in obtaining the government's permission to come to Havana, this would be their response: we could tie up at their docks at no charge; their longshoremen would do all the work of unloading without a fee; the freight warehouses would be available for our use without cost; and their trucks and drivers would deliver the cargo to wherever the pastors designated as they saw fit, and of course it would be free as well. In addition, their staff would help with unloading the cargo, and they would render all assistance requested from the pastors. They said it would be their pleasure to help.

I watched with a grateful heart as we witnessed the hand of the Lord in action when the leaders of these two organizations shook hands in friendship. They broke through a distrust that had existed at the deepest level for decades. It was melting away as if it was never there. Even I was overwhelmed with the Catholics' generosity, their great and gentle hand extended with love. I wasn't sure exactly what the priests were thinking, but the pastors were happy to have God establish something new and fresh. The pastors and priests decided they would make an application together to the Cuban Central Committee. Sondra and I returned to the hotel to wait and see what happened.

After a few hours, the pastors came to report that the officials at the Central Committee had demanded an explanation about how these two groups of Christians were now coming jointly to bring aid into Havana. One of the two organizations had political power, and the other had spiritual renewal. The government had been secure in the fact that the pastors and priests never spoke to one another, and they were unhappy to find them together. The atmosphere had been cold and heavy.

"Do you actually think you are going to bring the Friend Ships American flag vessel Spirit right into Havana? Do you think we don't know who those people are?" the government officials had asked. "They are just Friend Ships," the priests had protested. "They are a charity of Christian people who have helped in Albania, Croatia and Bosnia, Angola, Nicaragua, and around the world to sustain us in our time of need, to help the poor. They are coming here to help these Protestants. We know them to be genuine workers of charity who wish to help. What is wrong with this?" The government officials had said, "Do you think we are completely stupid? We know who they are. They are American CIA. Whenever communism falls around the world, there sits Friend Ships with their vessels. In Nicaragua, in Albania, in El Salvador—who is in the harbor? In Africa when Angola is fighting communism, who is in the harbor? Friend Ships! Do you think we don't keep track of this? In the Soviet Union when the communist coup fails, who sits in the harbor? Friend Ships with their vessels! Do you imagine this is some sort of coincidence?"

Our new friends had protested, "You've got it wrong. These are not American CIA. They are not government agents. They are just Christian volunteers doing good work." The members of the Central Committee had become agitated. "Do you think we are fools? Who funds them? Who feeds them and fills their ships with goods? How much are they charging you for millions of dollars in aid? It's all offered free, isn't it? Who pays their fuel bill? Who could do this? And yet they claim to have no single benefactor. How foolish do you think we are? No one sails ships around the oceans of the world, giving out hundreds of millions of pounds of goods for free.

"We know who they are. Every ship they own is an ex-government war ship. How can you be so naïve? What they are telling you is completely impossible. No one but a government agency secretly disguising itself as an aid ship could do this. They ask no one for money, yet they sail these vessels all over the world to communist countries just in time to help people as their governments fall. These nations were our comrades just a short time ago. Now they are democratic, and this ship was there to oversee their downfall.

"Do you think we should open our gates and usher them into the bay, into downtown Havana and under the guns of our old fort? Do you think we have become simple? Do you want Cuba to be next? We will never allow them to enter Cuba. Never. They are our enemies in every sense of the word. Don't ask this again."

The pastors and priests had left the Central Committee office greatly disappointed, but they had left as friends, and we know the harbor in Havana is ours for the taking. Eventually we will be there with God's supplies and His people.

Sondra and I flew home temporarily defeated but more committed than ever to bring aid to Cuba. We knew in our hearts that one day, when God's time was right, our ships would sail to help our wonderful brothers and sisters in this nearby nation.

When we returned to the States, we tried to contact anyone we believed might help us with this stalemate because of any relationship they might have with Fidel Castro. We tried everything to reverse the situation because we felt that so much ground had been taken, there had be a way to find the crack in the dike, and besides, we never liked taking no for an answer. We're just bullheaded that way.

We learned Jesse Jackson was a good buddy to Fidel. We thought if we explained to him who we were and if he was a true friend to Cuba, he would like to have them receive help and be strengthened by the Word of God. After all, he is a reverend. We tried desperately to reach Reverend Jackson using every avenue, but we never got a return call from anyone at his office.

Then we heard Senator George McGovern, the very liberal 1972 Democratic candidate for president, was acquainted with Fidel Castro, and we contacted him. The senator agreed this would be a good thing for Cuba. He graciously appealed to Castro and to the Central Committee on our behalf but to no avail. When the senator swore to the fact that we were not a function of the U.S. government and asked if we would be permitted to bring aid to Cuba, he received a vigorous and final no!

We decided to pursue permission on our own from the United States. We called the Cuban Interest Section in Washington D.C. repeatedly, asking to speak to someone about our request to bring aid to Cuba. We received no response until one day in an apparent effort to get rid of us, the official called back and left a message on our voice mail, stating emphatically, "We don't want your stinking help!" He hung up with a bang.

Since that time, we have sent several shipments into Cuba by commercial container through other organizations. Many people have come to us to offer their help, believing their connections would be able to get us in. We remain hopeful, but after hours of interrogation, each one has been turned away empty-handed and discouraged from ever trying to help us again.

Hang on though. We continue to stand in faith that one day the doors will open for us to take the ships to Cuba because we believe the Lord has selected Honduras, Haiti, Israel, and Cuba as special assignments for Friend Ships. It's only a matter of time.
CHAPTER 7

OUT OF TIME

In September of 1994, we loaded the ship in Houston and planned to set sail for our first mission to the impoverished nation of Haiti, which

is considered to be the poorest country in our hemisphere. It was spiritual warfare from the moment we decided Haiti was our next destination.

Seeing the conditions in the capital city of Port-au-Prince firsthand can be overwhelming. With a history of political turmoil, dictators, and wide- spread corruption, the country exists in a permanent state of disaster with no functioning infrastructure. Every service normally expected from local or national government is almost nonexistent. Their insufficient police force is powerless against heavily armed gangs, and there are widespread kidnappings and extortion carried out on a daily basis. There is little to no functioning sanitation or waste disposal systems. Raw sewage and mounds of refuse line the streets where children and animals alike wander through looking for food or anything of value. The people have little clean water to drink or in which to bathe or wash their clothes. Roads are treacherous. There are few jobs, and the average wage is $2.00 a day. Half of the nation's children are not able to attend school. There is extensive illiteracy, inadequate supplies of food, and extremely limited access to good medical treatment. I was sickened to learn about "mud cakes." These are cookies made out of dirt from the street that are baked in the sun by vendors and sold as food to many of the poorest Haitians, who will eat anything to fill their aching stomachs. And all this is just a two-hour flight off our southern coast.

After decades of abuse under the dictatorship of François Duvalier, known as Papa Doc, followed by his son Jean-Claude, Baby Doc, a popular uprising overthrew the regime. In 1991, Jean-Bertrand Aristide won an election to be the nation's leader. However, Aristide was prevented from taking his place as president by a coup d'état. A military dictatorship under the rule of General Raoul Cédras replaced Aristide as he went into exile. The new regime was eventually accused of atrocities, and by 1994 the United Nations had authorized the use of force to remove Cédras.

As we loaded and prepared to sail, a large shipment of armored vehicles arrived at the dock next to us. Military ships started to assemble there, and trucks, transport carriers, and more tanks were brought in each day and lined up at the gates. It started to look as though someone was planning an invasion. I decided to go over and talk with some of the officers in one of the military ships and ask them where they were headed. The officers said they couldn't tell me and joked that if they did tell me, they would have to kill me. But soon the news reports coming from the United Nations and the Clinton administration beat the drums of war. They were pointed directly toward Haiti, although the public was not informed of the covert plan unfolding for the U.S. military to invade Port-au-Prince and install Aristide as president. Ships were being readied for a military intervention as Operation Uphold Democracy was secretly implemented.

We had made preparations to bring the humanitarian aid we carried to orphanages, churches, and Christian aid groups. We had organized to have all port and customs fees waived and for the government to provide trucks. All of these arrangements, however, were with the current Haitian administration under the authority of General Cédras. As I watched the activity on the docks, I realized our mission was about to get complicated and that Castro and his Central Committee would again think the Friend Ships arm of the CIA was there to usher in the military overthrow of a nation.

I knew that we would want to arrive in Haiti ahead of any military action. We were loading hundreds of tons of supplies for the people of this poor, hungry country and didn't want to be told we would not be able to help them. I went back to talk to the officers and asked when they intended to sail. If we were behind them, it was likely that we'd be shut out of the country. The officers wouldn't answer my question directly but they did ask our sailing speed and departure date and then told me that we still had time.

A few days later, a Humvee drove past Spirit and stopped. One of the officers I had befriended was inside, and he waived me down. When I approached the vehicle, he leaned toward me and said quietly, "You're out of time."

I went back to the ship and told the crew we needed to prepare to sail immediately. Just then we received a phone call from the Pentagon asking if we had a ship sailing for Port-au-Prince. "Yes," I said, "We do." The caller inquired about our time frame. He asked our speed, our course, and to which side of Cuba we would pass.

I knew the military didn't want a relief organization in the middle of their invasion, but what they didn't know was that some of their officers had given us a heads-up. We hoped to get in just ahead of them and still be able to help the people. We finished gathering everything we could, closed the hatches, threw off the lines, and made a run for Port-au-Prince, not sparing the horses.

A few days later, an all-out invasion was averted when General Cédras agreed to step aside. U.S. ships sailed nevertheless to oversee the peaceful transition of power to Aristide. Despite our plans, when the Spirit arrived at the docks in Port-au-Prince, the American military was already there. Since the arrangements we had were with General Cédras and he was now removed from power, Spirit was held at anchor until a decision was made about what to do with us. Eventually, the U.S. military decided that they would bring us in under the War Powers Act, and as such, we would be able to carry out our work and not be charged any fees.

There was still great commotion and uncertainty with the new government officials about if they would permit us to off-load, when we could off-load, where we could off-load, who the aid should go to, and how much we would be forced to pay. The options were limited on our side because we were unwilling for the supplies to go to anyone but their intended target—Christian churches, several orphanages, and organizations engaged in helping the poor. We didn't have the money, and neither did we care to pay any fees.

During this time, one of the organizations to whom we were bringing supplies tried to force us to go to a private dock that was owned by a well-known drug dealer. There they planned to have us store in the dealer's private warehouse the goods we had brought for more than twenty orphanages, which were worth several million dollars, and they would control and disperse the goods as they pleased. We couldn't agree to this, of course, even if we had wanted to, as the supplies had already been designated to specific groups. It would have been illegal by maritime law to alter the consignment now, not to mention the great lack of character it would take to change the distribution at that late of date. Unfortunately, this was not the first time we had seen such a spirit among some of the mission and relief agencies we served. We had learned through experience that when we deal with a large amount of commodities worth a great deal of money, it can quickly expose the quality of one's character.

We stood our ground, waited to be able to follow through with the original plan, and tried to maintain peace as all around us fights raged. In the meantime, we kept busy hosting hundreds of U.S. soldiers who came aboard to attend church services and make use of our large ice machine.

Eventually we were given permission to off-load. Government trucks were no longer available to help, so we asked the church groups who were receiving goods to supply their own. This caused delays because private companies were taking advantage of the confusion in the country and charging four hundred dollars a day per truck, a large amount for many of the ministries.

The weeks wore on, and we worked patiently to complete the delivery of the donated gifts of love we had spent months collecting, organizing, and shipping to bless the widows, orphans, elderly, sick, and people in need, all without charge. As we waited, we were accused of everything by everyone, even some of the groups we sought to help.

The U.S. military had orders to appoint Jean-Bertrand Aristide as the new president of Haiti, and he was backed by the U.S. President Bill Clinton. But when this administration settled in, it became apparent that the new government was far more corrupt than the dictator they had replaced. In his initial months in office, Aristide—who had represented himself as a former Catholic cleric—regularly hosted voodoo priests at the palace, funded a national voodoo temple, and recognized voodoo as an official religion in Haiti. Regrettably, this new president shattered the hopes and dreams of a stable Haiti and continued to lead the destitute nation in an even worse downward trend. In time, the Aristide regime was ousted by an uprising too.

Eventually we were able to discharge the supplies to the groups we had intended to help, and finally the holds were empty. Five thousand tons of goods had been delivered to orphanages, schools, hospitals, and the poor, and our job was complete. We battened down the hatches and prepared to set sail, but much to our surprise, when the captain tried to pick up clearance papers from the port, he learned that Aristide's men had levied fees against us of $380,000 for the privilege of providing aid to their people.

You might be thinking that we could simply let off the lines and sail, but according to international maritime law, if a ship incurs expenses that they are unable or unwilling to pay, the host nation has the legal right to seize and soon own the ship, even hold and essentially imprison the crew. We were in a risky situation, and all of us throughout the ministry began to pray.

Fortunately, we had made solid friends with our brothers and sisters, the captains and commanders in the U.S. Navy. When they heard of the disgraceful behavior of the Aristide administration, without even asking permission of the U.S. State Department, they told us not to worry. "Undo the lines and back your ship out to sea. The U.S. military will clean up any problems left in your wake." And so we were cleared to sail by the navy and marines. We did so quickly, grateful to see Port-au-Prince disappear behind us.

We prayed and asked the Lord to please not send us back to this god- forsaken place. Of course, in His great love for all people, He did send us back to help the suffering Haitians on many other occasions.

CHAPTER 8

BUSHWHACKED!

In January of 1995, Kobe, Japan, experienced a 7.2 magnitude earth- quake. More than six thousand people lost their lives, and there was widespread damage. We gathered supplies and were able to interest Korean Air Cargo in shipping food, water, and other items to our church contacts in Kobe. Many Koreans had long harbored ill feelings toward the Japanese because of events that had taken place during World War II, so this air shipment was, in part, a gesture of reconciliation to Japan in their time of need.

The Port of Los Angeles arranged for us to obtain the donation of shipping several forty-foot containers to Kobe. We filled them with baby food and other items as a follow-up to the air shipment.

After an exceptionally active storm season, Spirit and her crew had sailed on a mission to help islands in the Caribbean that had been devastated by four hurricanes, and after that we had planned to go on to Central America. We decided to provide aid to St. Kitts and Antigua in the West Indies and then make a delivery to Honduras.

We were completing the loading of the ship when we were approached by the director of the Port of Galveston to see if we would consider making a stop at another island, St. Lucia, to deliver goods to a hospital that had been severely damaged. We agreed, and the hospital gave us a needs list, but because we were already loaded, we had little choice on what medical supplies would be available to off-load once we arrived at St. Lucia. We reviewed the inventory map that showed where the goods in the holds were located. We designated three truckloads of pallets with a wide variety of medical supplies that we could see from the cargo map would be accessible when we arrived there. The crew hoped and prayed that the items on those pallets would somehow help with their medical needs. We were delighted when the hospital staff reported later that every single item on their needs list had been found in those particular pallets, ones we had selected primarily on the basis of their location in the hold.

We completed the island deliveries, and Sprit headed off toward Hon- duras. Each day as we burned fuel, the engineers pumped up diesel from our various tanks into the day tank, and from there the engines would draw on it. We were making good headway toward Puerto Cortes when some peculiar things began to happen. The soles on the shoes of the engine crew started to come apart and fall off. They began to experience rashes on their feet, hands, and arms. All at once the temperatures on the main and small auxiliary engines rapidly increased, and we experienced serious problems in the main engine pistons such that the engineers thought the bearings were coming apart. Everything happened so fast, it was frightening, and we had no idea what was causing all the damage.

The crew worked night and day trying to figure out what was happening to our ship. Spirit's director, Jamie Saunders, thought back to how the vessel had been running solidly, as she had for years. Prior to sailing on this voyage, we had worked hard to obtain and install new pistons, bearings, and many other parts. We had painted up the engine room, and it looked and ran like new. As Jamie thought back, he realized that we started to have problems when we introduced a reserve tank into the main supply that was loaded with donated fuel.

By now two of the six main engine pistons were out of commission. We were forced to shut down and spend a week adrift in the open ocean, trying to figure out what in the world was going on. Finally, the ship was able to limp on four pistons toward Jamaica, a port far closer than our intended destination of Puerto Cortes, Honduras. Montego Bay waived all their fees for us to come in and make repairs.

Jamie remembered that the fuel stored in the reserve tank had been a gift from a very large, reputable Fortune 500 chemical company in Louisiana. We didn't usually receive gifts from chemical companies, so when they offered us five thousand gallons of diesel fuel, we had asked to have a sample we could test. When the sample was delivered, we had it analyzed at a certified lab, and the report came back that it was perfect #2 diesel, just what the ship regularly burns. We had been grateful to have help with our fuel needs and accepted the gift. The chemical company had promised there would be plenty more in the future.

We had loaded this diesel into a separate tank, and when the ship had gotten down to the last one hundred thousand gallons aboard, the engineers had introduced the five thousand donated gallons into our main supply. As soon as this fuel hit the engine, we had started to experience serious problems. Jamie wondered if something was wrong with the fuel from the chemical company, but it didn't seem possible because we had tested the sample and found it to be good.

When we reached Montego Bay, Jamie drew a new sample of the blended fuel and sent it out for a series of tests. We were distraught when we received the results. Our supply of one hundred thousand gallons of #2 diesel had been contaminated with a volatile hazardous waste substance, a product called vinyl acetate monomer. Known as VAM, the highly flammable substance is a chemical used in the manufacturing of plastics. What was delivered to the ship was anything but the #2 diesel our donor had presented as a sample. VAM was never ever meant to be used as fuel. Once introduced into our machinery, it increased the flash point of the diesel to become like that of jet fuel, causing the engines to overheat and stripping the lubrication from all moving parts. Gaskets disintegrated, everything started leaking, and the engine room deteriorated into chaos. The hazardous chemical was also highly corrosive and was destroying our metal like a horrible cancer eating its way through the ship.

Before the crew knew we were contaminated with VAM, we had continued with routine maintenance and repairs, grinding on rails and welding with sparks flying, unaware that we were sitting on a volatile one hundred thousand gallon bomb liable to ignite. But when we got the fuel analysis, we realized the chemical company from Louisiana had pulled a bait and switch on us with a sample of store-bought diesel they claimed was what they had to give us as a gift. In fact, the donor had planned to dump hazardous waste on us all along, out the back door of the plant, looking for a way to get rid of it without paying costly fees for disposal.

Nothing about this seemed to make any sense. Why would a large company do such a terrible thing to a ship of mercy that was out helping people in desperate need? We just couldn't believe anyone would be so callous and hard-hearted. We felt like rats and locusts had lain in wait by the side of the road to bushwhack us as we came strolling by doing good. And now the happy ship full of volunteer families, a vessel of mercy doing wonderful things for the Lord, had suddenly and without cause been struck with a terrible plague.

Jamie called to tell me we couldn't reclaim any of the one hundred thousand gallons of contaminated fuel we had aboard to use to come home. I was devastated. We would be forced to purchase new fuel and parts just to return to Galveston. We would need thousands of dollars. We had no money at all and were behind on our bills. All the credit cards were maxed out, and we had recently received cancellation notices from the insurance, phone, and power companies. To purchase new fuel and the needed parts was completely out of our reach.

We sought the Lord for what we could do to rescue our ship and crew as the Los Angeles team continued to carry out the work of the ministry. We gave out thousands of pounds of food weekly to the local communities, shipped a container to Uganda to help babies with AIDS, loaded a truck going on a mission in Mexico, and sent out three forty-foot ship- ping containers full of food to Russia.

The Spirit crew made the best use of their time by ministering to the local Jamaican community. We were grateful when Shell Oil in Montego Bay decided to donate 10,000 gallons of the fuel we needed. We were able to sell eighteen acres of land we had been given in Michigan and a sport fishing yacht someone had donated. My good friend Tom Miller sold a road grader and gave us the money to buy fuel. After seven weeks layup in Montego Bay, we could finally sail for home, and a severely wounded Spirit limped back to Galveston.

The hand of the Lord was clearly with us even in this trying time. As the ship approached home, she was sailing in on only four pistons. Spirit's main engine is a "direct reversible," which means when you change from forward to reverse you must shut the engine down and restart it. Under the best of circumstances with all pistons working, Spirit's fifty-year-old engine, once shut down, generally took several tries to turn over. So when the harbor pilot came out to bring us into the dock and the captain asked the crew to start the main engine, they were amazed when it turned over on the first attempt. When the harbor pilot "parallel parked" and in the process had to shift from forward to reverse several times, the engineers were stunned that on each start, it consistently turned over on the first try.

Later, when we took apart the engine and inspected it, the machinery was damaged so badly it seemed a wonder that the ship had run at all.

After returning to Galveston, we tried to contact the donor of the fuel, a man named Charlie who was a member of a local church. We wanted to get more information about the VAM and what he had done to us. We found that the large chemical company Charlie worked for had recently fired him. He had left town, and later when called into court to testify, he pleaded the fifth. We wrote to ask the chemical company to remove the contaminated fuel that was destroying our ship and making a bomb out of us. We heard only silence. They refused to answer our repeated attempts to talk.

Before long, only two crew members remained on the ship, leaving Spirit all but abandoned. There she sat, dying as the chemical continued to eat away at her steel. We didn't know what to do. We had no money to hire an attorney or any way to get this bomb off of our ship. Spirit couldn't even be scrapped with the chemical aboard, and it would cost tens of thousands of dollars to dispose of it.

We asked an attorney friend in California if he would write a letter to the chemical company to urge them to get rid of the contaminated fuel. He said he would take care of it, but time went by, and he forgot. One day he called me in a panic and said we had let too much time go by and the statute of limitations was nearly up. He quickly sent off a letter to the chemical company, demanding they take action. They responded by hiring Baker Botts, the famous law firm of James Baker, President George Bush Sr.'s chief of staff, to defend them. This was a powerful group—the same firm that defended George W. Bush against Al Gore in the Florida 2000 election recount.

Baker Botts came down on us like a herd of elephants and sued the charity for even suggesting this chemical had come from the company they represented. Soon the Environmental Protection Agency convened a grand jury about the incident. I was called to testify and told the story of what had happened to us and our ship. After I'd done so, I was asked to wait outside. A few minutes later, they told me to come back in, and as I re-entered the courtroom, the jury stood up and applauded, giving us a standing ovation for the work Friend Ships was doing around the world. I was stunned at the reaction, as was the head attorney of the EPA, who leaned over and said quietly, "If you are wondering how a Harris County jury is going to react to this news in court, you just got your answer."

During the course of the ensuing legal dispute, Baker Botts maintained that our attorney had waited too long to make demands. They said the chemical hadn't come from their client. They claimed VAM wasn't very harmful or corrosive and couldn't possibly have caused all that damage to the ship. And finally, they blamed it on us. They said we must have done something wrong to cause this situation and insisted we would never win a case against them in court.

In private, however, they told their client that it would not be wise to go into court with Spirit's before-and-after pictures. Before—a thriving active mercy ship sailing throughout Central America, the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, Western Africa, and beyond. After—engine dead, hull rusting, crew gone, cargo rotting in the holds. They convinced the chemical company to spend $1.6 million cleaning and repairing the vessel.

The chemical company paid for the contaminated fuel to be hauled off and destroyed. They had our tanks cleaned and rebuilt the engines. They would not pay to replace the valuable humanitarian supplies that had to be destroyed or the fuel that had been contaminated because in the eyes of the law since these commodities had been donated, they had no value. Of course, we disagreed vehemently but to no avail. The chemical company did agree to have the more than one hundred tons of goods taken to the dump. We watched sadly as the loads of food, seeds, and beautiful hospital equipment (now rusted and corroded) were hauled off to be destroyed.

It was a brutal six-year battle, and when it was over, the federal judge let the chemical company (with the very influential legal firm) off the hook by writing an opinion that determined that our attorney had waited thirty days too long to file. With that, she threw the case out of court.

We were frustrated but grateful to the Lord for our many blessings. The ship had been knocked out of service for years and could have been permanently destroyed. Instead Spirit was made ready to resume missions, and that was by far the most important thing.

During this turbulent time, the pressure cooker was on us. The Port of Los Angeles made us move three ships from the docks that we'd had there for years, the Port of Galveston threatened to start charging us $30,000 a month for Spirit's water space assignment, and there were many days it looked like the end for Friend Ships. But, as always, the Lord had other plans.
CHAPTER 9

THE FIREFIGHTING CAMP

We wanted to establish a base in the Caribbean and selected the island of Roatán—one of the Bay Islands located off the coast of the Central American nation of Honduras. We liked Roatán because the island sits within a half day's sail from most of Central America. English is widely spoken in the Bay Islands, which were ruled by England until 1859, and their history is rich with intrigue and diversity.

At one time, as many as five thousand pirates, including Henry Morgan and Blackbeard, had made the island their home. The current residents are a blending of the descendants of Paya Indians, African slaves brought from other Caribbean islands, Latinos from the mainland, and Americans from the South who, after the conclusion of the Civil War, were brought to the island and dropped off because they refused to swear an allegiance to the North. Today, the mix of cultures is unique and (mostly) amiable. The lush island is surrounded by a barrier reef and is a favorite destination for divers and cruise ships. Still, as part of Honduras, one of the poorest nations in the Western Hemisphere, Roatán is home to many needy families.

We hoped to establish a base to teach young people to respond to regional disasters and learn to grow food in ways that would support the mission field. I had it on my heart to create a training program that would include opportunities for the poorest young men, who make their living with machetes. We hoped to draw young people filled with zeal for God and who couldn't afford to attend school. Here they could train without charge. We wanted to nurture dragon slayers and lion tamers—you know the type—on fire and looking for a battle. We hoped for a school where they could strengthen their walk, seek God's will for their lives, develop spiritual strength and physical discipline, gain work skills, and experience relief missions. I wanted to provide a ministry where young Honduran women could recognize their value before rushing off to marry the wrong guy or make other irreversible and bad decisions. We wanted to equip God's youth so that they could go forward and fulfill the plan He had for them, advancing the Kingdom in their own countries and throughout Central America.

I thought if we had a place big enough, we would be able to grow food. We could fish with our boats and have housing for volunteer teachers. The idea was an exciting concept, but I knew that in order to birth this ambitious project it would take a shipload of building materials and equipment.

About this time, I received a phone call from the owner of one of the largest egg ranches and chicken farms on the West Coast. He said the facility was located in Hemet, California, and had several large buildings. A public reservoir was being built on his property, and the company was relocating. He said the buildings were wood framed with metal roofs and emphasized again that they were large. He asked if we would be interested in dismantling the structures and keeping the building material to utilize in our work.

We made an appointment and went to meet with the caller to take a look. As he had said, the buildings were huge with tons of wood and tin we would be able to use for the new project. They were three hundred feet long by sixty feet wide, and there were twelve of them. I knew it wouldn't be easy to send out a team to dismantle the buildings, but the opportunity to obtain so much construction material was too good to pass up.

We didn't have a place for the crew to stay or the equipment we needed to do this big job, but we decided to trust the Lord and said yes to the opportunity. We moved a team to the high desert of Hemet, where summer temperatures reach more than one hundred degrees and winters dip to below freezing.

It was early summer when we started. Our crew consisted of five hardy men who slept in an old horse trailer, pup tents, and a school bus. They made do with the tools they had, worked in the extreme heat all day long, and slept at night without air conditioning or even fans. Life for the five-man team was rough, but they worked without complaint day after day, disassembling the buildings one at a time, pulling nails and cutting, stacking, and banding the mountain of wood and tin.

As we finished up and swept the cement pads clean, we received a second phone call, this time from a man who said he owned the largest egg ranch in North America, called Egg City. Egg City was much larger than the first ranch. It had fifty buildings, each one 250,000 square feet. They were five hundred feet by five hundred feet and were built from the same wood and tin as the job in Hemet. I listened with excitement and apprehension as the rancher made us the same offer as the first caller. Dismantle the buildings and keep the materials.

As challenging as we knew this job would be, we couldn't walk away from all the available building material. It was just too hard to come by. So for the next two and a half years, our amazing team dismantled one building after another until we were able to bring all the materials home to several different storage yards. It was a task of extreme proportions, but our men were eager to tackle it. They were just that sort of exceptional, extraordinary men.

When we were finished, we had more lumber, roofing tin, nails, rain gutters, and pipe than our five-thousand-ton ship Spirit was able to carry. We dreamed of all that this material would do for the Kingdom and felt like the most blessed people on earth.

While the deconstruction team carried out their job, the remainder of the crew worked hard praying for and collecting everything we were able to get our hands on for the training center. We applied for a grant from the U.S. government and received our first one ever, a very large award to obtain used military equipment we could utilize to help us build the center in Honduras. We shopped through used equipment at military bases and selected hundreds of items and brought each one home to sand- blast, repair, repaint, and replace tires.

Now we just had to figure out how this mountain of wood, tin, and equipment would be transported from California to Central America. Spirit was thousands of miles away, and because of the chemical company in Westlake, Louisiana, the ship was completely out of commission. Only the Lord knew when we would be able to put Spirit back to sea.

Still we carried on with our plans to birth the project in Roatán. Later that year, as Sondra prayed about how we would be able to pick up and transport all the thousands of tons of equipment and supplies we had gathered in Los Angeles and deliver the materials to birth the mission in Honduras, she felt as though the Lord was telling her not to worry about Spirit coming around to California to pick up cargo for Roatán. "The ship in Oakland will be coming down to take the load."

Sondra was mystified by this because although she remembered we had gone to see two sister ships to Spirit somewhere in the San Francisco area some years before, she hadn't heard anything about those ships in years. Sondra assumed they had been sold long ago, so what the Lord was telling her didn't seem to make sense. Still, she scribbled the words down on a piece of paper and put the paper into her Bible.

Sondra hesitated to tell me what she thought the Lord had said to her, so as we were relaxing over the weekend, she asked, "Wouldn't it be nice if that ship in Oakland became available, came here, picked up the cargo, and took it to Roatán?" Then she waited to see my reaction.

"Yeah. Sure," I said. "Those ships were in Alameda, not Oakland." "Oh," Sondra said as she pulled the sheet of paper from her Bible, crumbled it up, and threw it in the trash. And that was the end of the discussion. Or so we thought.

Out of the blue on Monday morning, we received a call from a good friend who lives in Seattle, where he owns several ships. He and his prominent family operated a very successful shipping company based in Lake Union, carrying supplies from Puget Sound to Alaska. When the receptionist told me who was calling, I put my desk phone on speaker so both Sondra and me could hear him say with excitement that he was on his cell phone as he was driving over the Oakland Bay Bridge and that he had just purchased a ship called Pembina.

Sondra gasped, and we looked at one another, stunned. Pembina was the name of one of the two sister ships to Spirit we had seen years ago in Alameda. Our friend continued on to say that he had gone to an auction where the ship was for sale. He had asked the Lord to make it clear if he was to buy the vessel, and when it was time for the auction to take place, he was the only person that showed up. He won the ship for a minimum bid.

"Is that the ship in Alameda?" I asked. He replied, "She was being kept in Alameda, but they moved her to Oakland." Sondra, emerging from her stunned silence, started to whoop and holler as she dug through the trash, searching frantically for the paper she had crumbled up and thrown away over the weekend. Since he was on the speaker phone, our friend heard the commotion and asked what was going on. Sondra ran up with the crumbled paper and straightened it out to show me. I saw written, The Lord said that the ship from Oakland will come down and take the supplies to Roatán.

I read aloud what Sondra had written, and there was an uncomfortable silence on the other end of the phone. Our friend told me he hadn't been thinking of giving the ship to us. He was just sharing with us that he had bought a sister ship to Spirit and was making plans to take her to Seattle to look into using the vessel in his own business. When he had finished explaining, I said, "Of course. I'm so sorry. We didn't mean to be presumptuous." But this particular man is one who loves God with all his heart. He thought for a minute and then said that he and his wife would pray about it to see if the Lord had other plans. We waited and prayed too. After a few days, our Seattle friend called to say, "Go up to Oakland and get her." He and his wife had decided to put the ship in our name. We would be able to use her for two years, and then they would evaluate their need to have her back. Suddenly and completely by the hand of the Lord, we had another ship to at least temporarily replace Spirit. And by all reports, this one was just about ready to go.

Of course, now we needed money to purchase the required oil pollution and port risk insurance for the berth where we would bring the ship in. That was a challenge because in Los Angeles, even before we got this new ship, we had bills of several thousand dollars we were waiting for funds to pay. In Galveston at the Spirit, their account was down to twenty-three dollars. But we knew the Lord would provide. He had just miraculously given us a new ship to cover for Spirit while she was out of commission, and He had given us a mountain of lumber and tin to fulfill the new vision. What more evidence did we need of His never-ending provision?

A few days later, Sondra and I were walking the decks of Pembina. The ship looked exactly like Spirit except for one big difference. Because Pembina had been carrying loads of ammunition for the U.S. government on a private contract until just two years before, the vessel had been required to come up to the highest standards. Even now, the ship was in exceptional condition.

We had brought a small team with us from Los Angeles to take possession of the vessel. All of us were astonished when we laid eyes on her. She was like a ghost ship, as if one day the crew had just walked away, and there she sat laden with tons of spare parts and lots of electronics. Every possible thing was in its place, even down to the survival suits and life jackets, pots, pans, tools, and more. In the engine room, every drawer and each shelf was full of tools and equipment. She had recently returned from Los Angeles, where she had been used in the movie Eraser starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. The bridge still had Russian signs and flags, and the decks and holds were covered in hundreds of spent AK-47 shells.

We put in a call to the Spirit and told the team of engineers coming in from Galveston, who had intended to bring with them a truckload of tools, to only bring food and spoons. That was all the ship needed. We asked the donors from Seattle to give the ship a new name, and they decided on Spirit of Grace. They sent an engineer from Seattle to help us get started, and another engineer who had worked aboard Pembina for years heard she had new owners and came by to help.

The men quickly activated a couple of generators, and by nightfall we had running water, toilets, hot water, and lots of power. That was remark- able because when we had taken possession of Spirit eleven years earlier, it took four and a half years to activate her and to collect all that was simply waiting for us on Spirit of Grace. The Lord is so awesome.

The next day, our friend from Seattle and his son arrived. The following morning, the Friend Ships bus from Los Angeles came in with nine more crew, and the next night, a car arrived from Galveston with three of Spirit's engineers. When our friend Walt Carruthers, a chief engineer who sailed the sister ships to Spirit and Grace for decades and who had helped us enormously with Spirit, heard we had gotten another knot ship, he immediately drove down from Seattle to help.

The Lord blessed us with donations of services to update our life rafts and fire extinguishers, and we were able to get the money together to buy the pollution insurance the Coast Guard makes all vessels except them- selves buy. We hoped to sail within four days.

I started getting pressured immediately by the owners of the dock where Grace was located. They wanted moorage fees plus rent on a ware- house where her spare parts were stored. We brought in a captain and officers and sent a truck to pick up the parts from the warehouse. Foss Tug agreed to escort us out without charge, and Don Hughes, the San Francisco Bay pilot who some years before had donated to Friend Ships his wonderful tugboat, Reverence, came to guide us out of the harbor. The Lord was with us at every turn. The Port of Los Angeles agreed for us to come in, and the only real hitch was they said we would be able to stay for just two weeks. We had an enormous load we had to custom fit in the cargo holds and on deck. We knew it would take much longer.

Four days later, we were ready to sail. The owner of the pier told us that the pylons were rotten, and if we started the main engine while still tied up, we would probably pull down his dock. We didn't want to do that, of course, so that meant there was no way to test the main engine before casting off. We called in the pilots and tugs and untied the lines as the tugboats pulled us out from the dock. If the ship didn't start, it would be an embarrassing situation. We prayed and hit the switch. Thank you, Lord, without hesitation the engine turned over and ran without fault.

It was late December, and we had a wonderful Christmas present from the Lord. Grace sailed off with all fees waived and a wonderful crew aboard. Our friend the pilot navigated us under the Golden Gate Bridge and out to sea. We turned left and headed down the coast to Los Angeles. Next stop, Mt. Lumber.

Five days later, Grace arrived at the Port of Los Angeles to Berth 147, where we had a dock for two weeks. We were running out of fuel but just in time got an unexpected blessing from a Hollywood production company. We were offered the opportunity for Grace to take part in a surfing movie called In God's Hands. She would be hired to sail around for a day while the characters rode skateboards on her decks and searched for the perfect wave so they could surf. The film company would pay us $9,250. That would help buy some fuel to run our generators while we prepared to go, so we readily agreed.

Over the course of the next few weeks, the crew loaded the ship with all the materials and equipment we had gathered for Roatán. In addition to the lumber and tin, we had three bulldozers, a road grader, a dump truck, water well drilling equipment, cars and buses, ambulances, a fire truck, landing crafts, large shore boats, miles of fencing, cement mixers, printing presses, and everything you can imagine to build the training center and sustain people for years to come. By the time we were finished, the cargo bays were packed solid with lumber and supplies, and the decks were piled so high with equipment that we looked like a Haitian barge.

Sondra and I flew to Roatán to meet with the mayor and try to lock down some property in order to build the Village. Some people agreed to give us land without charge, but once we said we'd accept it, they told us we needed to pay. Others agreed to give us property, but there were serious title issues and ownership disputes. One lady said she'd give us land but later said we would need to buy her a house and a car. We returned to the States without a place to build.

The director of the Port of Galveston where Spirit had stayed for years without charge had been replaced, and we heard the port commissioners wanted us to leave. The Port of Los Angeles was pressuring us to sail, as they had another ship scheduled to come in and needed our dock. "We can see you're loaded," they said. "Please vacate the dock." We didn't want to tell them we were not able to leave because we still didn't have the tens of thousands of gallons of diesel fuel we needed or the money to pass through the Panama Canal.

Then we met the vice president of a very large Israeli shipping company, a kind and charming German man who spoke English with a lovely accent. He told me, "Don, don't worry about the fuel. I can get all you need. Our shipping line buys over a billion gallons of fuel every year. We have a lot of influence with the oil companies. It's just a matter of who you know."

I believed he would be able to help us until the moment he made that last statement. My heart sank when I heard it because I knew the well-in- tended executive meant it was literally who he knew in the oil business that would lead to us obtaining fuel, and I had learned by now that it would only be by God's hand that our needs would be met. No one would be able to take credit for God's miracles. It was who we knew spiritually that would generate fuel for us, because this vessel belonged to God.

I wasn't surprised when a few days later the vice president returned to tell me he had spoken to all of the oil companies where his line purchased their fuel and was amazed to find out they were so stingy. He apologized profusely but said he wasn't able to squeeze a drop of fuel out of these oil guys with whom he thought he had so much influence. I told him it was all right. Bad news was riding a fast horse these days. But I knew God was not done with us, and He was our only source. The fuel was somewhere. It just hadn't arrived yet.

There are times in ministry when there are many choices to be made, when we face great difficulty, and problems pile in on us. These are days when it's just not load the ship and sail, all smiles and amazing faith. Sometimes the trouble comes from known enemies, but all too often it is from friends, people you love and trust. They are who can do the most damage where you never expect it. This season was one of those times. When two of our key staff, including a captain, suddenly and unexpectedly tendered their resignations, I was distraught by what appeared to be a coordinated effort to disable the organization just as we were launching out on a new and very difficult mission.

Pressure was intense. We were short-handed. We still had no fuel. Now we needed a captain. The port staff in Los Angeles called daily to pressure us to sail. By this time, the port in Galveston had asked us to move, and Spirit was not yet repaired. We had thousands of dollars in bills; the property on the island of Roatán was crumbling beneath our feet. We didn't have permission to off-load the supplies once we got to the island, and we soon discovered that the Honduran organization working with us to receive the goods was unable to perform any aspect of the responsibilities they had agreed to handle.

Each day brought a crisis that made the last one seem pale in comparison. It was as if we were in a war zone or running a long-distance race and someone kept moving the finish line. Sondra and I were almost afraid to get out of bed, knowing some sort of major crisis was waiting to punch us in the face and try to knock us out.

Then the Lord, always the Encourager, gave us a word that He would lift Grace in His hands and take her where He wanted her to go. We watched in amazement over the next few weeks as He did exactly that. We were humbled and blessed beyond measure when our wonderful friends who always helped us in Galveston said, "God's house first," and gave us the money they had saved for years to buy a house so that we could pur- chase the fuel we needed.

We had met in passing a very professional, unlimited licensed supertanker captain with years of experience. His name was Robert Brandenburger, nicknamed Brandy. We decided to call to ask Brandy if he would consider serving as master of Spirit of Grace. When we called him, he listened to our plea and chuckled as he explained that the Lord had prepared him to be ready for service. He told us he had been waiting for the telephone to ring. The next day, Captain Brandy was settling in aboard Spirit of Grace, and we were ready to sail. The crew accepted his leadership immediately.

A few days later, Spirit of Grace sailed through Angel's Gate and out to sea. As the ship disappeared from sight, Sondra and I talked about how it felt like we had been fighting in hand-to-hand combat, but now the battle was won, and God's plan was victorious. It was a deeply emotional moment for us. My brother-in-law Ray brought Sondra to tears when he slipped up beside her and said softly, "You see? Nothing can stop God."

As we watched the boat sail away, I thought to myself, Thank you, God. With all of the wealth of the powerful oil and shipping companies you had to choose from, you selected instead to take the fuel money from a Godly couple who had been renting houses and anxiously waiting for the day they could own their own place. They took that dream and quietly, without fanfare, put it aboard the ship and sent it off, saying in their hearts, "Your house first, Lord. Greaterneed first." As we watched Spirit of Grace part the water with her propeller turning, I realized this couple had a great blessing up ahead.

Then I thought about the amazing couple who had owned Spirit of Grace free and clear, a ship able to carry thousands of tons of commodities to bless people in need. They could have easily decided to keep her and employ the ship in their company. This would have made good sense or as the world would say, "smart business." But this couple, much sharper than average, knew what they did for the Lord would be blessed, their business would prosper, and God Himself would care for their needs.

I looked at the crew sailing away with the ship and thought about the choices they had made with their lives, taking everything they had—all of themselves—and pouring it into His offering plate, saying, "Take me, Lord. I am what I have to give. Let me bless others to your glory."

We sailed from Los Angeles harbor, a classic World War II cargo ship painted military gray and still in her original state, decks piled high with equipment, steaming along at a breakneck speed of eight knots.

Soon the captain received radio calls as we passed by other ships, or should I say they passed by us. They asked what movie we were making, certain we were filming an old war flick. Others asked us if we were a Haitian flag freighter.

As the ship made her way down the coastline, dolphins surfed waves at the bow and leapt from the sea. The crew spotted whales, caught and dined on fresh tuna, and thoroughly enjoyed the lengthy voyage. Captain Brandy was loved by all with his strong yet gentle ways. He was respectful and appreciative of the systems we had put into place and genuinely happy to work with a crew of people who loved God.

I flew to Roatán to try once again to secure land. The ship would arrive in just a few weeks, and we still did not have property. I was relieved to finally meet a generous, loving couple named Arnold and Rita Morris. The Morrises had amazing land that had been in their family for many years. They agreed to sell us thirty acres for only the price they had paid for it, even though they could certainly have sold the land at a large profit. These were people of integrity with big hearts who wanted to help us help the people of Roatán. Arnold said we could pay whatever we felt we were able to afford on a monthly basis with no money down and no interest. He had a single stipulation he insisted on inserting into the purchase agreement: should we be late on payments, there was to be no penalty.

Our gorgeous new property was thirty raw acres on Mutiny Bay in a big cove on the protected side of the island, with a thousand feet of water- front stretching back to rolling hills covered with fruit trees. Another kind and generous islander named Albert Jackson, who was known to most tourists as the owner of a popular resort called Fantasy Island, also owned many other businesses, including a shipping company. He gave us permission to bring Spirit of Grace into his private dock. He gave us use of a yard to store our supplies for up to a year until we had cut roads and pads at the property so that we would be able to take our equipment in. Finally, we were donated the use of an office in the main city of Roatán by Marco Galindo, another big-hearted local businessman and pastor.

After a thirty-day sail, Spirit of Grace arrived at Roatán and dropped anchor. She caused quite a stir because not only was she the biggest cargo ship to come to the island but curiously she was recognized by some fishermen as a vessel that had made deliveries of ammunition up the rivers by the Nicaraguan-Honduran border for the CIA not so long ago.

That was interesting to us because around this time a missionary who worked extensively in Cuba had learned of our desire to take a ship there. She was a dear soul, sweet to the bone, who didn't know us but wanted to help. She called our office and told us she had true friends in Cuba all the way to the top. She asked if we would allow her to represent us to the Cuban authorities to try to receive permission for the ship to travel there. We told her we didn't think they would agree, but she insisted that she had great favor with the government and specifically with Fidel Castro and his brother. They were personal friends, she said, and asked us to please let her try. Reluctantly, we agreed.

A few weeks later, the missionary called us and told us she had gone to Cuba and tried to discuss Friend Ships coming in with our ship. At that, all of her favor, friendship, and clout had flown right out the window. She told us she was interrogated for more than twelve hours about her relationship to us and grilled about what she knew.

"So who are you guys?" she asked with irritation. We told her we were just as we appeared to be, but she was certain we must be hiding some- thing from her. The Cubans had told her we were undoubtedly CIA. They told her whenever a country was embroiled in bringing down communism or dethroning dictators, our ships just happened to be sitting in their harbors, doing good deeds throughout the country, and dealing with the opposition. They told her our plans were to bring five thousand missionaries into Havana. And they said our newest ship, Spirit of Grace, was a CIA ship renamed. The original name was Pembina.

The Cubans continued to tell the missionary that Pembina had been under the direct orders of Colonel Oliver North and used by the military to deliver guns to the Contras in Nicaragua in order to fight against the Communist Sandinistas. Now mysteriously, they said, the organization Friend Ships owned this same ship with a new name, Spirit of Grace.

The ship had indeed been named Pembina and had transported weapons. After she was donated to us, we read through stacks of papers left in the master's office and found manifests listing hundreds of tons of ammunition, land mines, automatic weapons, rocket launchers, and more. So of course, this history fed substantially into the Cuban's theory that we were owned and funded by the CIA. Besides that, they complained, we had managed to get the Catholics and the Protestants together. They told her there was no possible way we would ever be allowed into Cuba and to not even think about it!

The woman told us to please forget we had ever heard from her and to please never contact her again. I told Sondra we must really be undercover CIA agents, so far undercover that we didn't even know about it!

The property the Morrises had sold us was beautiful lush jungle, entirely overgrown with trees and bush. The land team started from the beach, slashing their way in with machetes, clearing enough land to bring in the heavy equipment. Meanwhile Spirit of Grace was made to sit at anchor, waiting for the proper paperwork to off-load as she burned hundreds of gallons of diesel fuel each day.

Weeks and then months went by, and still we had received no permission to off-load. No one from the Honduran government or from the organization who was supposed to be making these arrangements would talk to us. We tried to form our own Honduran nonprofit corporation so we would be able to import the goods under Friend Ships, but we had to fire the local lawyer we hired because while creating the corporation he had installed himself as president. Holding that position would have meant he would be free to do whatever he wanted with the assets of the organization, including selling the cargo, property, and everything else Friend Ships International owned.

I was spending most of my time overseeing the building project at the Mutiny Bay property but couldn't help worrying about the fact that every day we burned hundreds of gallons of precious fuel in Spirit of Grace's engines. It wouldn't be long before we ran out, leaving the crew, including women and children, in a dark and dangerous ship without power, running water, sanitation, a way to cook or store food—in short, completely out of commission and unlivable. Not only that but the ship would be stuck on this island with no way out. We were really in a pickle. In Los Angeles, we had recently been given a 160 foot longline Japanese fishing vessel named Kaiun Maru #8. Warner Brothers was producing a movie called Lethal Weapon 4 and contacted us to say they wanted to use the fishing boat for the movie. The location scout said they really wanted this particular boat. I asked him what the going rate was for that type of rental, and he calculated that for the length of time they needed the boat, the going rate would total $55,000. I didn't want to be greedy, and we needed the money desperately for fuel aboard Spirit of Grace, so I told the agent to keep things simple. We would ask the going rate. I explained to him that we were on a mission of mercy building a school to teach others to feed and help people and that we would need the money in advance so we could use it to buy fuel. I asked him to make that part of the deal. He said the production company would never agree. They paid after the shoot. I insisted that he ask for the money up front.

The scout called back in a few hours and said Warner Brothers told him the ship was perfect for their movie but since we really needed the money and were in a difficult position, they would only offer us $40,000 and no money up front. I felt it unfair of them to offer us less because they knew we had a need, but I agreed to take $40,000. I still insisted we be paid up front.

A little while later, the scout called back and said since we agreed to take $40,000, the production company dropped their offer to $35,000 with no money up front. "Are they serious?" I asked. "Is this their low number, or if I agree are they going to drop it again?" The scout said he didn't think they would do that. "They are just a production company trying to squeeze everyone for all they can get," he explained.

We only had a couple of days of fuel left in Roatán, so I reluctantly agreed to $35,000, but I asked him to explain that we had to be paid up front. A few minutes later, the scout called back to say, "Don, I'm embarrassed to tell you this, but they said if you only had a few days left and are in that bad of shape, they would give you the money up front. However, they are only willing to pay $25,000 now. Take it or leave it." I was exasperated by the cutthroat attitude of the production company but agreed to the deal so we would be able to buy fuel.

In Lethal Weapon 4, the script called for a fire, an explosion, and a big shoot-out aboard the vessel and then for it to run aground—pretty rough service for a ship. Having owned a polo club in the Beverly Hills area, I'd had many previous dealings with Hollywood production companies and was familiar with their standard rental contract. I knew they were required to return the "location" to the owner as they found it with no damage and in at least as good of condition as when it was leased.

When we got our copy of the contract to sign, I underlined the clauses that said the ship would be returned like it was found. They wanted to paint the hull to look rusty, so I had them insert into the contract that they were only permitted to use marine paint we could paint over later. Then I instructed our crew to videotape the condition of every item prior to the filming: the decks, which were covered with a very expensive fine- grade hardwood called apitong, the hull, the cabins, the bulkheads, and all of the equipment.

We took the $25,000 payment and wrote a check to the fuel company in Honduras. They quickly brought out trucks to fuel the ship even though it was a Saturday. Our calculations showed we would have gone dry that day at noon. God was with us, His provision coming in at the last slippery second but always right on time. The hoses went into the tanks and began to pump at 10:00 am. We had been within two hours of going black and having no fuel to return home.

In Los Angeles, I sent one of our guys over to the fishing boat with a camera to film the movie crew preparing her for filming. I had a good idea of what might be going on over there. As I suspected, they were treating the vessel like she was a movie set instead of an actual ship.

When we first got the boat, we had covered up the apitong decks with plywood to protect them because we didn't want to get paint dripped on the fine wood or have it burned from welding. In order to save time, instead of unscrewing the protective plywood and carefully removing it, the movie crew had run big steel tile removers that were like shovels underneath the protective wood, busting and ripping up the plywood. As they did so, big holes were ripped in the apitong. They welded rails and let the hot slag pour down on the decks, burning little holes all over it. They took torches and burned through our watertight bulkheads and into the water tanks so they could run propane lines to the back deck, where they planned to set off explosions and light fires.

The art department came aboard to paint rust streaks down the sides of the hull. Just as I thought, they didn't mask anything off and over- sprayed water-based paint on the decks and hull. Since they hadn't used marine paint, we would not be able to paint over it, so the hull would have to be washed off with a fire hose. In Los Angeles, however, you can't wash paint off a boat and into the harbor; everything coming off the ship had to be contained. So that meant in order to remove this paint job, we would have to take the ship into a shipyard, lift it up on a dry dock, wash off the paint, and collect and haul off the residue as hazardous waste—a very expensive proposition.

The art department wanted lots of bells, whistles, and lights for the movie, so they drilled holes in the side of our $40,000 gyrocompass, and as they did so, metal fragments poured all over the magnetic compass connections and wires. This meant that before it was used it would have to be removed, tested, and repaired, or the unit had to be replaced.

However, as the Bible says in Isaiah 58, when you spend yourselves on behalf of the poor, the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard. This is an experience to which Warner Brothers Production Company can now attest. In the end, they had to pay us more than $100,000 in damages, plus the $25,000 negotiated rental—some poetic justice for how we had been treated when they thought we were weak and in need.

Oh, and remember the couple who gave up the money for their home to buy us fuel for the mission to Honduras? For years they had been searching for a house when suddenly one came to them. It was far beyond their dreams, a home on Galveston Island with private docks and even an elevator. It was a home for the pages of House and Gardens Magazine and sold for half the price they had been planning to spend. You might say they were doubly blessed because today they own a second wonderful home and now face a dilemma in deciding which one to live in.

After having had the polo club in an exclusive neighborhood in Southern California, I am well acquainted with exquisite houses, but I believe the most beautiful home I have ever visited belongs to the Seattle couple who gave us Spirit of Grace. God has truly blessed them, for they live a life of righteousness and truly care about God's children, their less fortunate brothers and sisters.

The family was able to locate and purchase a magnificent home over- looking the Puget Sound, where their company ships sail in and out on a regular basis. With an indoor swimming pool, theatre, elevator, apartments, workshops, a gorgeous kitchen, and elegant dining room, it is as beautiful and charming as I have ever seen.

After six months, we were finally given permission to off-load our equipment and materials. We completed construction of roads and pads. We installed power, water, sanitation, and communications systems. We used the egg ranch building materials to construct warehouses, staff housing, a central building near the beach that included an auditorium with seating for hundreds of people and housing beneath for forty.

We have used Friend Ships Roatán Village as a base to bring medical aid, host seminars, provide training, respond to disasters, deliver thou- sands of tons of aid, and see many people brought into the Kingdom.
CHAPTER 10

EVEN IF THEY WERE PURE GOLD

Ever since we saw firsthand the stunning devastation of Hurricane Andrew, the Lord had planted a vision in our hearts for large-scale disaster relief. In 1998, this dream began to materialize.

It was late October, and the region was cautiously breathing a sigh of relief. No one expected a wave that formed off the Coast of Africa to become a major hurricane and then grow into one of the most powerful storms ever to form in the Caribbean. By October 22, Mitch had worked itself into a raging category 5 hurricane with 180 mile per hour winds. It cut a path through the sea toward Central America and headed straight for our fledgling base on the island of Roatán, where we were in the process of leveling hills, cutting roads, and constructing buildings. Two members of the Honduran team had recently left, and others were on vacation in the States. That left only one man on duty as Mitch approached, a New Zealander named Garry Malcolm. All we could do was pray for him.

By the end of October, Mitch had made its way to the Bay Islands in the Caribbean and stalled there for three long days, trapped by the giant mountains on the mainland and high weather patterns in the north. Its powerful winds brought a storm surge that rose more than four stories high, terrifying all of the region's coastal communities. As the powerful hurricane sat stationary, it spun violently with wind gusts of over two hundred miles per hour. There was utter destruction for miles. Roads, bridges, highways, and whole villages were destroyed.

After three days, Hurricane Mitch drifted southwest and rolled slowly across the mainland of Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. Torrential rains caused a river that crossed the Honduran capital city to widen until it was six times its normal size. Thousands of small wooden homes built on hills close to the city's center slid down the embankment, and the mudslides buried more than twenty-five entire villages. The country's two main airports were severely damaged, and even after the hurricane was gone, torrential rains continued for weeks.

Dead carcasses of cattle, sheep, and pigs floated up and down the coastal areas, polluting the fresh water wells. A large commercial sailboat had been lost at sea with all passengers and crew. The dead bodies of its passengers and crew floated alongside the animal remains. Thousands of people were killed on the mainland, millions of people were homeless, and conditions grew more desperate every day.

When it was over, Hurricane Mitch ranked as the region's most deadly storm in more than two hundred years and the second deadliest storm ever in the Western Hemisphere. With crops and livestock destroyed, water contaminated, and standing water pooled throughout the affected region, cholera, malaria, and hunger growing into starvation began to reach epidemic proportions. A huge percent of the transportation infra- structure of Honduras had been damaged or destroyed. Roads and bridges had collapsed, and the main city was able to receive aid by airplane only. Ports were damaged, and even the bridges and rails for the single train that moved down the coast were washed out. Everything was at a stand- still. So when the airport in the capital city of Tegucigalpa reopened and planeloads of humanitarian aid begin to arrive, the goods became bottlenecked. They sat outside in the open air, filling up the runaways and being destroyed by rain because they had nowhere to store them and no way to disperse them.

The Atlantic Coast of Honduras and the Bay Islands had been severely damaged but were receiving almost no support. Although our five-thou- sand-ton ship, Spirit of Grace, was in Galveston, Texas, loading for a humanitarian mission to North Korea, we felt we had no choice now but to change direction and help Honduras.

As the winds died down and the water receded, it became alarmingly clear that if we hoped to bring help to the victims, time was of the essence. So while the storm still raged, we started to collect supplies. North Americans were stunned at the intensity of Mitch and moved by the large loss of life. They were eager to help, and people began to flood us with humanitarian aid to deliver to our brothers and sisters to the south. The crew kicked into nonstop workdays to fill the ship and ready her to bring help to the Bay Islands and the Atlantic coast of Honduras.

As soon as it was known that we were planning to sail to Honduras, the phone rang continuously at the Friend Ships warehouse in Los Angeles with people offering donations. At the Port in Galveston, trucks started to arrive on the dock early each morning to off-load donated supplies. Galveston longshoremen and students from Texas A&M came to help us sort and load. Our crew, including Derida from Albania, who was in the late term of her first pregnancy, worked each night to midnight and beyond, loading the donated supplies into the large cargo holds of Spirit of Grace. The mayor of Roatán called to tell us what communities and islands were hardest hit. He told us Roatán had been damaged, but the neigh- boring island of Guanaja had been devastated. The mayor said he had checked on our property and seen damage to some of our buildings, but he had not seen Garry.

When we were finally able to reach Garry by phone, he was fine but shaken. He told us about the day the hurricane made landfall. Garry said he knew unscrupulous characters in the neighborhood were always looking for an opportunity to steal, so he had stayed to watch over the property and equipment for as long as possible. When the winds and rain were so strong he could stay no longer, Garry had sought refuge in a neighbor's home. At first the neighbors had been hesitant to let him in, but they relented as the storm grew more ferocious. Once inside, Garry understood why they had hesitated. The home was full of furniture the family had "borrowed" from us without our permission. Garry had decided he would pretend not to notice and enjoy the shelter of their home until the storm passed.

Our Honduran directors had been on break in the United States but flew back to the island as soon as they were able to secure a flight. We immediately began to coordinate with the authorities and the island ministries to bring in an initial load of five thousand tons. We asked Marco Galindo, a local pastor and businessman and a very good friend, to head up the distribution efforts and organize the church leaders to distribute goods to the communities. We sent one of the two ambulances we had on the island to the airport in order to respond to emergencies and the other out to distribute food. People began to show up at the Village from all the communities, looking for help.

We continued to collect and load as quickly as we could. Trucking and railroad companies donated their services to transport goods from the West Coast to the Gulf Coast. Yesterday's Sportswear sent pallets of beautiful new T-shirts. Churches around the country sponsored collection drives. Fire departments in Houston served as collection points for the public to bring goods. Stores boxed up products off their shelves, and the Denver Chamber of Commerce held a collection drive.

We were pleasantly surprised when a group of Buddhists brought us boxes of used clothes because they were like new and fresh from the dry cleaner. Generally when we receive donations of clothing it is necessary to sort through them carefully because much of it is torn, ripped, stained, missing buttons, and sometimes even dirty. Not so with the Buddhists' gift.

Most of the charities involved in disaster response were experiencing the same rush of goods coming in. We were all being offered huge amounts of commodities. Fire stations, churches, and community buildings were filling up with goods, and people were dropping off money, but there were very few ways to move the material aid from the States to Central America. Because the ports and harbors were damaged, commercial ships were not sailing in, and at the airport, runways were jammed like a corked bottle. So organizations started to call us from around the country, offering us what they had been given—the commodities, not the money—but frankly the money was of little value in this situation except for the purchase of diesel fuel prior to sailing and for other routine needs. If one went to Honduras with large trunks full of money, there was nothing to buy. Shelves in the stores were empty, and fuel stations were shut down. Even if you found goods to purchase, you would not have been able to move them from place to place. The only thing people wanted was something to eat, a dry towel, or some- thing to help remove the mud from their homes.

Representatives of several organizations appeared on television, saying, "Don't send canned foods. Send money. They can't open cans, as they have no openers." Actually, canned food was the perfect thing to send because it was prepared, didn't need refrigeration, and was contained in a healthy clean can. We were able to take in lots of can openers, but frankly most people we knew in Honduras were able to open a can with a machete faster than we could with an electric opener.

In the next few weeks, pallets of antibiotics, beans, pasta, tuna, dry milk, nutrition bars, flashlights, batteries, canned goods, diapers, genera- tors, medical supplies, tarps, and drinking water poured into the ship in Galveston and to the warehouse in Los Angeles.

I realized our ship was the perfect tool, and we had an ideal situation to respond. We were sea mobile with an island base strategically located in a pocket from which we could reach out to anywhere in the hemisphere. Roatán is surrounded by a barrier reef, so in order to approach our hurricane-safe harbor by sea, we enter through an opening in Mutiny Bay and sail by lush mountains and into a blue lagoon to find Friend Ships Roatán Village and its thousand feet of beach. It was just the setup we needed for our spiritual firefighting camp. With its fruit trees, gardens, lush tree plantations, and lots of wild birds and iguanas roaming the hillsides, it was a tropical paradise from which to reset and refire. It reminds me of the Nautilus hideaway in the film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. It is thirty miles from mainland Honduras, sixty miles from Guatemala, ninety miles from Belize, and a hundred and twenty miles from Nicaragua—less than a half day's sail to any of these nations.

We planned to sail the mother ship, Spirit of Grace, to Honduras, sit off the coast, and splash the large landing craft into the water. Then we would load pots, pans, propane cookers, and every good thing into the craft, sail up the rivers into villages to distribute supplies, and cook up a big pot of food.

We were anxious to load and sail. God had put us in the right place at the right time with the right equipment to move in with the love of our Lord and to His glory. We'd ring the dinner bell, serve a hearty meal, give each family a week's worth of groceries, and then break out the guitars and sing praise and worship.

Typically, when we shipped goods to another country, every item loaded in the holds had to be meticulously inventoried and recorded on a bill of lading. This was required by customs agencies in the receiving countries, and normally the document had to go through a series of departments and receive each one's stamp of approval for the items listed to be imported without charge. This process usually took weeks, some- times months. We often ran into many complicated snags and demands for bribes along the way.

Now, however, all we had time to do was empty the many trucks that arrived each day and load the goods aboard as fast as we could so the pallets would not obstruct the fire lanes on the wharf and get our operations shut down. We didn't have time or manpower to break apart each pallet, check expiration dates, count, sort, create lists, rebox, rewrap, and load the goods aboard ship. To do so would have slowed the progress of the ship and delayed our arrival by many critical days or even weeks.

Then one day in prayer, the Lord showed us that He was doing this almost without our help, like a massive ball of His energy rolling into the Bay Islands. Through the gifts we delivered, God's love would be made evident to all. That was exactly what we wanted to hear!

In light of the extreme state of emergency, the Honduran customs gave us a letter that said in essence, Just come, and don't worry about the details. They knew us. They trusted us, and they were grateful for our offer of help. The officials told us they would allow us to bring in any and all goods without a thorough list, without normal customs stipulations, and of course without charge of any kind. This was great news because we had tremendous momentum and didn't want to slow down.

We completed loading the food, water, clothes, and emergency medical supplies. We had truckloads of lumber, thousands of hand tools, and even a drill rig. The goods were valued conservatively at more than $8 million. We battened down the hatches and sailed for Roatán. The voyage took five and a half days.

As the ship sailed, I got on a plane and flew to the island in order to make a plan for distribution of the supplies we were bringing. I was exhausted after weeks of nonstop loading and tried my best to rest. The last thing I wanted to do was make conversation with the men in the seats next to me, but one of them persisted in asking me questions. Fortunately, I relented and talked to them about what we were doing because, as it turned out, one of the men was keenly interested in our mission. In time, he would grow to be one of our closest friends, biggest supporters, and a very vital part of our team. His generous donations of finances carried us through one of the hardest times we ever had, and he provided the first helicopter we were able to use in our operations. You just never know what the Lord has in mind when He arranges your seating on an airplane.

Once in Honduras, we quickly got all of our papers cleared and began to off-load the cargo. The crew hung a one hundred foot banner from the side of the ship that read From Jesus with Love in both English and Spanish. The church community came to meet us, and as soon as the first few pallets of food hit the dock, the crew worked together with them to fill bags full of food.

It was a joyful atmosphere as Hondurans, North Americans, Guatemalans, Canadians, New Zealanders, and Australians all worked together for the Lord and for the benefit of hurricane victims. We continued well into the night until we had thousands of bags loaded on trucks and ready to deliver the next morning to the hardest hit area of Roatán Island. The crew served dinner to all who had worked that day. We sang praise and worship and then finally retired to our cabins and fell into bed.

The next morning, we drove trucks loaded with food and water into the heart of Punta Gorda, where many homes and other buildings had been destroyed. A beautiful church building still lay smashed on the ground. The people had pulled the pews onto the beach and were having services in the open air. Hundreds of people who had lost their homes were now living with friends and family or had made tiny makeshift sheds to get out of the rain.

We worked with city officials to give every family who had been affected by the hurricane a supply of food and water. We cooked and served up soup as ministers preached the Good News, and the crew prayed with everyone they could. We loaded up all who came to the distribution with whatever they were able to carry home. Some families from a nearby village paddled up in dugout canoes. We filled them with as many cases of water and bags of food their boats would hold without turning over and sinking.

While most of the team carried on with the outreach, a ministry from a very poor community accessible only by boat brought their eighty-foot fishing vessel and tied up alongside Spirit of Grace so that the crew could load them up with food, water, vitamins, and all their craft could hold for the people of their impoverished village.

Later that day, we completed the day's cargo operations in Roatán, battened down the hatches, and sailed for the Honduran mainland. There we were met by a delegation that included the first lady and the vice president of Honduras, several members of the chamber of commerce, and a large contingent of military guard. The whole group came aboard the ship and squeezed into our mess hall to give sincere thanks to all the people who had contributed to this effort.

We quickly cleared official requirements and began to discharge cargo. We off-loaded hundreds of tons of relief goods to be distributed through churches and organizations, some to be delivered by helicopter to remote villages. It was like watching a miracle in progress to see pallet after pallet of top-quality supplies come up and out of the holds of the ship and be loaded onto trucks for transport to various distribution centers. By the time we were ready to sail, we had filled forty-six semitrailers with top-quality food, water, clothing, and medical supplies. One could only wonder where all these goods had come from. Surely, only the Lord Jesus was able to do this.

When we finished discharging goods, we loaded supplies that had been given to us by the first lady of Honduras onto the ship for delivery to our next port. She was grateful to find a way to transport them to people in need. The ship was still more than half full as we returned to Roatán to prepare to sail to the nearby island of Guanaja. We off-loaded food on the dock, made up thousands of bags for direct distribution to the people, loaded them back onto the ship, and sailed.

The waters around Guanaja were far too shallow for Spirit of Grace to approach land, so the ship dropped anchor offshore and set it firmly in the fifty foot deep crystal clear turquoise sea. The temperature was a comfortable eighty degrees with a gentle trade wind blowing out of the west when we splashed our fifty-foot landing craft into the ocean alongside the ship. The crew lowered pallet after pallet of food and water from the ship into the shallow draft boat to deliver the goods to a village we were told had been severely damaged.

An islander named Bob McNabb offered to help us by taking some of the crew and extra supplies to Guanaja aboard his elegant fishing yacht, Bobby Jr. The McNabbs are a prominent local family in Roatán, and Bob is a wonderful man who is always ready to help in any situation.

When the loading was complete, many crew members and some pastors who had come with us from Roatán manned the craft and sailed for Savannah Bight. The yacht carried most of the crew along with our huge soup pots and all the supplies we needed to prepare lunch for the community. Bobby Jr. arrived at the village first and pulled into a small hurricane-damaged dock. Local residents were there to meet us and help carry the cooking equipment and food supplies ashore. The pastors brought out their instruments. They played and sang as the galley crew prepared a meal. People came from all around the village to hear and join in the worship. Many told us they had not heard music since the hurricane.

Soon we had a large group assembled for lunch and a church service. After hearing about salvation, many made a decision to give their hearts to Jesus. Others shared stories of the terrifying days of Hurricane Mitch. A few had lost family members; most had huddled together in any house that was able to hold onto its roof. Many had lost all they owned. Some told us that right after the storm, their lush tropical island looked like a wildfire had raged through the beautiful green hills, killing everything. All trees were stripped of their leaves or busted in two, and the grass was dead and brown.

In a few hours, the landing craft arrived and pulled alongside the shaky dock. The village had no cars or trucks, so people lined up to receive sup- plies with wheelbarrows. The crew talked to and prayed with people in the waiting line. Men, women, kids, and dogs were everywhere, and excitement ran high as the wheelbarrows were piled up with food and water and then rolled off toward home. The mayor of Guanaja came to see what we were doing and gave us grateful thanks.

While the landing craft was unloading in Savannah Bight, a large fishing boat slipped up quietly alongside the steel hull of the Spirit of Grace and opened her fish storage tanks. The crew began dropping thou- sands of pounds of food, clothing, and water into the boat for delivery to another nearby community. As I watched from the quarter deck, I couldn't help feeling such joy thinking about the great ship Spirit of Grace the Lord had provided, its load of diesel fuel God had put on the hearts of men and women to give, the crew who had worked full of joy and willing- ness day and night for weeks without pay, Captain Brandenburger serving diligently with resolve to reach the poor and hungry in their greatest time of need, and the huge amount of quality cargo that had come from the love of North Americans who gave with such an open hand. It struck me as significant that we didn't recall a single person asking for a tax deductible receipt as they gave to the victims of Hurricane Mitch. It reminded me of the words of King David when he said he wouldn't give anything to God that didn't cost him something. This was the attitude of the donors who saw their neighbors poor and naked without food or water.

When each member of the community had received their fill, the workboat and Bobby Jr. pulled away from the dock, and a group of smiling children waved a warm good-bye! We returned to the ship, loaded the landing craft full of supplies once again, and sailed this time twelve miles around the island to the village of Mangrove Bite. That's the story we told you in the opening pages of this book.

Then it was time for Spirit of Grace to put her bow toward La Mosquitia on the mainland coast of Honduras. This was the poorest and most impoverished community in all of Central America. They had received terrific damage, but the terrain made them hard to reach. The ship would have to anchor forty-five miles from the drop-off point. Fortunately, Bobby Jr. would be our pilot boat and lead the landing craft through the difficult, trap-filled, dangerous, and shallow harbor we would have to navigate in order to bring help to the people of La Mosquitia.

The next day, Grace arrived off the coast and dropped anchor where Captain Brandy had chosen an anchorage two miles off the opening of the river at the start of the forty-five mile journey. The approach to this area of the mainland was difficult to say the least. Water broke continuously over a treacherous sandbar between the shore and the open sea. There was no safe harbor, no protection from the sea. If the conditions were just right, you could navigate a shallow boat like the landing craft, but if the seas were heavy, it was a death trap.

The first day the weather was kind. The water was still, and the captain ordered the crew to off-load the fifty-foot boat and load pallet after pallet of supplies—beans, corn, rice, sugar, medicine, clothes, and drinking water—from the ship's large cargo hold onto the landing craft. When the boat was packed and still had enough clearance to make it ashore, she sailed off with her valuable cargo to make deliveries to several locations along the coast, with the yacht Bobby Jr. leading the way.

The first supplies were received at Puerto Lempira, where church volunteers organized the goods and prepared them for distribution to a remote group of people living on the Honduran-Nicaraguan border. From Lempira, the supplies would be sent by truck and boat on a ten-hour trek up roads and rivers, where they would be received by a missionary and his team. Some of our men accompanied the load to help handle the goods and deliver copies of the evangelical video God's Story to each pastor they met along the way.

Bobby Jr. went on to deliver aid to another port as the landing craft returned to the ship. The crew was preparing for a productive day of cargo operations when the weather suddenly turned foul and made our work much harder. Trying to land pallets of heavy items like canned goods and hundred-pound sacks of food into a much smaller boat that is rolling in an angry sea is a difficult and dangerous undertaking. Nevertheless, the crew worked with diligence, determined to take as many supplies to the people of La Mosquitia as possible. The landing craft and Bobby Jr. bravely fought waves and wind to continue to deliver their cargo and were able to complete several more voyages to shore.

Over the next few days, cargo operations continued. Sometimes the two delivery boats were delayed from returning to the ship, caught behind the perilous sandbars until a break in the unstable weather. As the days wore on, the weather grew more treacherous. The waves rose with brutal strength as the ship struggled to hang on and deliver all the food she could. Fighting for every hour, we were hoping and praying for the weather to calm. When the ship's anchor started to drag along the bottom and satellite weather reports forecast many more days of heavy storms, the captain decided it was necessary to head back to the base.

Once in Roatán, we worked for three days and nights, loading trucks with goods. We filled every vehicle the islanders brought. Each morning local pastors brought their pickups, and some were able to borrow much larger flatbeds. On the third day, the trucks were dwindling, and Marco Galindo told me he couldn't get any more vehicles to come out. Every church and building able to hold supplies was full to capacity.

I asked Marco to come with me and have a look inside the holds of the ship. We climbed the gangway and onto the deck, crossed over to one of the holds, and peered into the hatch, where we saw tons of food and hundreds of pallets of other supplies remaining. Even for me, it was hard to believe the ship still held so much cargo.

Marco looked me straight in the eye. I could see he was exhausted after days and weeks of nonstop distribution. "Don," he said, "We just can't take another pallet. We are finished. We could not take another pallet even if they were pure gold, brother."

I told the crew to close up the hatches and prepare to get underway for the United States as Marco and I walked to the edge of the ship and sat down together on the deck. We stared at the large empty dock that had been swept clean, and we talked about what had transpired over the course of these past days and weeks. We remembered how when we first arrived, people had been so afraid there would not be enough to go around. When volunteers who came to help us make bags asked if they too could have food, we explained that the first priority was to reach the villages and islands most affected by the storm. If goods were left when that was finished, we told them the workers would receive some. The great majority of the volunteers had agreed with this plan, but others had pretended to be following our rules as they secretly snuck bags past the guard and out the gate. They had pushed, they had shoved, they had tried to be the first, and they had tried to get the most. A few church members had even snuck goods off trucks being loaded for other churches and took them to their own. Some locals had threatened to kill me for not allowing them to steal. Now here we sat with so much left over. Marco and I smiled. Then we started to laugh as we thought back over all the recent memories. We talked about how the great hand of God had swept through these islands and how unfortunate it was that many of the people who had been frightened we would run out weren't there on the dock that night to witness God's plenty. There was no shortage. Everyone had eaten their fill, and there were so very many basketfuls left over. We had helped everyone we found, giving them all their arms, wheelbarrows, cars, boats, trucks, and warehouses could hold, and there we sat ready to sail home with plenty of goods to spare.

But not to worry. We brought those pallets back a few weeks later with Hurricane Mitch Voyage #2. That is our great God of abundance. He sent us to the Hondurans in their time of need and blessed them with more than their nets would contain. Yes, Marco, Sondra, all the crew, and I were spent, but our joy and satisfaction ran deep. So much had been accomplished in such a short time. It felt like a wonderful dream.

As Spirit of Grace prepared to sail back to Galveston, a Christian medical ship berthed in San Diego was sailing for Puerto Corinto, Nicaragua, with an ability to carry some cargo. They called our office in Los Angeles to say they had space left to hold food. We were happy to have one more opportunity to give, and our team assembled truckloads of rice, beans, and other food items and sent them off to San Diego. The medical ship put out to sea with her belly full to capacity.

It was wonderful to think about all the food, water, clothing, tools, medicine, and building materials packed onto the great ship Spirit of Grace. It was amazing to think of all the individuals and organizations who had gathered supplies, packaged them, loaded them aboard the ship, sailed them across the seas, and placed them into the hands of people in need. It was gratifying to remember the support of the ports of Houston and Galveston, the great generosity of donors who provided fuel, the hundreds of churches and corporations who gave supplies, and the thousands of individuals who provided cargo, funds, and labor. It was all given freely. No one charged a dime. No one paid for labor. The captain, the officers, the engineers, the cooks, the crew, the truck drivers, those who handled lines and tended engines, the people who swept the decks and cleaned the ship, and others who brought medical skills—all came free of charge to spend themselves on behalf of the Lord. "Take me, Lord. Use me. Pour me out like a drink offering to your glory, Father," they said.

A few days before Christmas, Spirit of Grace sailed from Roatán for Galveston. Each crew member who was there will long remember the wonderful people who joined together to reach out from their hearts and lend a helping hand to the hurting people of Central America. With us will be the fond memory of a very special Christmas in 1998 when the Lord allowed us to be part of giving away $8 million worth of Christmas gifts to those in desperate need. We felt like the richest people on earth.

Spirit of Grace arrived back to Pier 10 in Galveston on December 29 and loaded for a second mission. In the next few months, we collected and delivered a second entire five-thousand-ton shipload of food and supplies. In all, more than $12 million worth of goods were delivered to the victims of Hurricane Mitch by the hand of God and from our Lord Jesus, with love.

CHAPTER 11

BLOW THE WHISTLE, THROTTLE DOWN

Please indulge Sondra and I as we reflect for a moment on years ago when the Lord chose us, two people without any maritime back- ground, to head up a large ship ministry. God made a simple request of us—to trust Him. And with that, we were offered the promotion of a life- time—to work for and serve the greatest, most powerful and loving force ever to exist. Can you imagine our great God with all His magnificence, offering people like us an opportunity to trust Him? How could anyone say no?

When He called us into service and sent us into a life of faith, we had only been Christians for a few months. He asked us to believe Him, to walk and live in the natural, and to step aside and watch Him perform the supernatural. We had no ministry experience and no qualifications, but we soon came to understand that the only requirement was to have a willing heart and to follow His lead in this strange but compelling dance. Friend Ships is a simple faith ministry. All of us work without pay, including the captains, engineers, ships' crew, truck and aircraft mechanics, pilots, cooks, housekeepers, laundry staff, truck drivers, groundskeepers, warehousemen, media staff, welders, electricians, plumbers, carpenters, painters, nurses, doctors, office personnel, computer experts, directors, teachers, and all the many others. We generally have about a hundred full- time believers working as ships' crew and land-based staff. This gives us the privilege to work alongside the most amazing people—our full-time crew and also people who are not full time but those God has selected to help us. They take on projects, encourage us, deliver goods, give services, donate finances, pray, and in a thousand different ways help us and hold up our hands; they are servant-hearted people who have such strong faith that they say with joy, "Let me take this part. This portion is mine."

The Friend Ships team, wherever we are in the world, meet every morning to pray, thank God, and worship the Lord before starting the day. In a way we are like a small church. We ask and require nothing of one another except to trust God with our lives and have willingness to love and a desire to spend ourselves on behalf of the poor, the needy, and those who are lost. We have no organized fund-raising mechanism, and yet this small group has ships, trucks, dozens of boats and vehicles, a ministry camp in a foreign country, a jet helicopter, and even our own port.

We gather millions of pounds of cargo; fill ships that cross oceans; respond to natural disasters; and carry out missions across the globe that bring aid in times of war, civil unrest, and famine. We provide goods and services to ease the pain of poverty, ship and airlift the blessings of God, and sometimes help to build hospitals, clinics, and schools.

For twenty-five years, the Friend Ships team in Los Angeles has operated Storehouse One. For more than fifteen years, it ran as one of the largest food distribution networks of its kind. We supplemented more than 150,000 meals each week, every month, holidays included. God was faithful to meet our needs without us having to ask anyone for money. We didn't buy a dime's worth of goods, and yet our huge cup filled to overflowing—pressed down, shaken together, and running over—as one truck after another backed up to the docks and off-loaded tons of beauti- ful goods. A mountain of food came every week as a demonstration of His power and ability to supply. Volunteer workers flocked in by the hundreds to help us distribute. Thousands of people ate the nutritious food without ever knowing that this daily miracle was taking place. We were able to give freely to everyone who asked, and we didn't have to turn anyone away.

Can you imagine how often you would have to pass a collection plate to finance such a massive operation? A handful of churches made donations, and though we really appreciated it, these gifts collectively were not enough to pay for a single telephone line. And yet it seemed that the food ministry was something God just wanted to see carried out regardless of finances.

It was rare for someone to ask, "Who is providing this?" or "How is this possible?" They only knew the tap was open, and the water was flowing. Thousands of people in need ate, hundreds of Christians were mobilized to pray with and for hurting people, churches were established, and churches were filled. It was all by the power of God. No one could say, "This is to my credit."

We are uncomfortable to boast, but we brag only about our enormously great and capable God and testify about what He can do with anyone who is willing.

Storehouse One was a huge ministry all in itself, but in addition, Friend Ships received and spent millions of gallons of fuel on the ocean highways, bringing life and Jesus to the masses. We've witnessed thou- sands of people of many nationalities, ages, and faiths come to know the Lord. It's conceivable that even some denominations would have trouble accomplishing these things, but our God is so incredible. He can do absolutely anything.

Yet it is so vastly beyond us that who can explain it? Who would even believe it possible? Not in our deepest dreams could any of this be achieved through our own power or ability, and yet without taking up a collection, Friend Ships has moved across oceans and for twenty-seven years now has carried out the impossible. No one could even imagine doing the things we have detailed in this book without our great and mighty God making it all happen.

Having read the stories of Jesus & Company Part 2, you've seen without question that we serve a great God of tenderness and love who never leaves us or lets us down. He blazes a trail for us to follow. He nurtures and matures us for wonderful things to come. He provides what we need, holds us in His arms, comforts and encourages us just when we need it the most.

The Lord is the One, the only One who can receive credit for all the wonderful things that continually take place at Friend Ships. To see it any other way would be a lie. But as men and women who serve Him, we need to know that the Kingdom is advanced with great opposition, and forceful men lay hold of it.

We require faith to believe something is possible, but that faith is worthless if we don't put it into action and be doers of the Word. James 2:14–19 tells us, What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, "Go in peace; keep warm and well fed," but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead. But someone will say, "You have faith; I have deeds." Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by my deeds. You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder.

Some of our Christian brothers and sisters have material riches. They give out of their wealth and are blessed for it. But God gives the same opportunities to others who give out of whatever they possess to maximize the Kingdom of God. How strong their love for God is to do this, and what results from their giving is humbling.

Walking out the Lord's call in faith is full of rewards, yet it is a continual challenge. If we hope to reach victory, it takes persistent tenacity. In our years of service, we've faced endless frustration with cunning co-workers and corrupt leaders. We've wrestled with Jezebel spirits sent to destroy ministries—a brutal enemy assigned to annihilate the Lord's work. We've fought treachery and deception, greed and cover-ups. We've clashed with people we loved and friends who broke our hearts in betrayal. We've wrestled with those who tried their best to rip this ministry out of our hands, convinced that God meant to give its leadership to them.

But the story of Jesus & Company doesn't belong to the enemy, and he is not going to be the one you hear about and put into your spirit. With actions unworthy of a single page, his is not the tale to tell, and he won't be permitted to steal it.

Once you experience having the Lord set a table before you in the presence of your enemies, having Him lead you into battle and be your rear guard, and knowing His tenderness and the depth of His love, one can only conclude that there is nothing else that even remotely compares; there is no other life worth living.

The Scripture tells us with good cause not to become weary in well doing. Some days you'll be barely hanging on, and other days you will be on top of the mountain and couldn't be more fulfilled. If we look to others for approval, they will love us one day and despise us the next. Even when as the Apostle Paul said we are put on display at the end of the procession for people to criticize, laugh at, and scorn, we know the only opinion that really matters is what our great friend Jesus thinks of us and how we are investing our lives.

Ours is a generation of war. The enemy only wins when we stop. If we allow worry to cripple us until we stand still, we'll never know that had we continued to move forward holding onto faith, provision would have come in our wake. The Lord's work wins if we stand firm to the finish. If we are willing to follow the path He set out for us when He formed us in the womb, He can override natural circumstances and go way beyond logic. The more we trust Him, the more He trusts us. Let that be the message you take from the chapters of this book.

When faced with dying on the cross, Jesus told Peter, James, and John that His soul was overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. He prayed, "Abba, Father, everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me." Then Jesus went forward with the most important action anyone on earth has ever taken. It was for the benefit of all mankind throughout the end of time. "Yet not what I will, but what You will." He went to the cross, and in so doing, He gave us the model for decision making. It's about agreement with the Father's will.

Our days are full of choices, and Jesus watches us make each one. Will she do the right thing or give into temptation? Will he make the Godly choice or take the easy way out? Will they respond to my call or put their own desire first? Will they bounce back from betrayal or shrink away with bitterness? Will he stand when things gets tough or faint away like so many thousands before him? These choices are within our free will.

Pleasing the Lord, following His lead, completing the tasks He selected for us to do—isn't this true riches? The world system goes awry when it says the one who gets ahead for selfish gain wins. Instead, why not work to become wealthy in a way that matters and will last? The choices we make today form the people we will be in the future, and forceful men lay hold of the Kingdom of God. What could be more prosperous than that?

Hebrews 11:1 tells us faith is confidence in what we hope for. What do men hope for? Happiness, love, peace, joy, companionship, health, security, purpose? The Scripture goes on to say that faith is assurance of what we don't see. That's why it's hard to understand why people are not beating down the door of every genuine faith-based ministry, shouting, "Let me in!"

In spite of all we consider ours, the Bible says a man really owns one thing, and it's probably not what you think. It brings up short all we are and all we actually possess. Isaiah tells us we own the breath in our nostrils. Take a deep one; it belongs to you. But the next one belongs to the Lord. Whether or not you have another is up to Him. With that final breath, you would trade all you own and all you know for just a few more. With the breaths we've been given, do we speak faith, inspire hope, and give love, or do we line up with the accuser and lay blame? Are we givers or takers? Do we curse, or do we bless?

Step back. Take a breath. See the big picture. Reach out and believe God. Do it and just keep on going. This is Jesus we're talking about. He'll cover your play. If you've got it all figured out ahead of time, it probably isn't worth doing. Pull the whistle and throttle down. Jump off the cliff with an umbrella; you'll make it if you're going for His Kingdom and doing what He's telling you to do.

It isn't about us and our glory. It's about Him and His glory. It's about what He is about doing and what He's doing with us. Sometimes the wheel turns so slowly that we don't know it's moving, but that's only because it's huge. When we look back at what God has been able to accomplish, it's then that we see the big wheel moving. Now it is turning fast and picking up speed. Now our greatest enemy is time.

Someday, maybe sooner than we think, we'll stand before the Lord and give an account of what we've done. This is the area for which we bear complete responsibility. This is where we beat the system. This is what the Lord is looking for as we make our way through the ever-important earth years.

EPILOGUE

If you haven't already done so, we invite you join us in the final chapter, forever. Tragically, some here on earth haven't made the most obvious choice, the one we are born to make. It is the reason our first breath is given and the decision that hangs in the balance with every successive breath.

God gives us the supernatural opportunity to share eternity with Jesus Christ Himself. But when we fail to regret and be sorry for our sins, for the hurt and pain we cause, and for the sorrow we bring to God and to others, when we fail to turn to and accept Christ the Savior of the world as our personal Master, we miss this, the greatest opportunity of our lifetime.

The Bible tells us in John 3:16–18, God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God's one and only Son.

Let's not allow the boundaries of our limited minds to rule over our hearts, spirits, and souls so we fail to make the most important choice, the one the Bible tells us about in Deuteronomy 30:19:

"This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the LORD your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him."

If you are reading this book and haven't chosen life yet, we implore you to do so, to believe in and follow Jesus Christ, who died for us and rose again so we are forgiven for our sins. Live with Him in eternity. Love Him, listen to Him, and hold fast to Him.

He is the One you read about in these pages, the One who has accomplished it all. We come only as witnesses to tell you from experience that God will walk with us and beside us on this earth. Why even consider going through your life without Him?

Once you surrender to the Father and make Jesus Christ your Lord, you will find all you need to grow and prosper in the pages of the Bible. The Word is alive, and when the Holy Spirit lives inside you, He is able to unfold truths you could never understand without Him.

As the Word tells us in Jeremiah 33:3, "Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know."

This is a decision of the heart, and it is the most important decision you will ever make. Invite Jesus Christ to be the Lord of your life. Listen to what your spirit man is telling you to do. Even for the brightest and best of us, this should be an obvious choice.

Christ offers us the opportunity to accept Him and turn from our sins. Call to Him. He will answer you and make available to you the highest privilege of walking and talking with Him all the days of your life on earth and into eternity.

Thank you for joining us in the adventures of Jesus & Company Part 2. We hope you've enjoyed them. See you in Jesus & Company Part 3, and best of all, see you in the final chapter, eternity with Jesus Christ.
