Greetings Easter People!  While the Easter Tree is still up in our living room, I imagine that in most of your cases, the candy, baskets, eggs and other accoutrements of the holiday have been safely stashed out of sight one way or another.  While Easter doesn't seem to have the same afterglow that Christmas does in terms of the holiday feeling, our fervent hope is that the Risen Christ of Easter is more powerfully alive in your lives than ever before.

Well, welcome to the eye of the storm, a brief respite in the midst of our spring travels.  The week before Easter, I was at Liberty University to help perform a safety assessment of their up-and-coming aviation department.  Wow, what a growing enterprise that is!  Five years ago, they had five students in the flight department, and today they have about 270!  Our Mission Safety International (MSI) team of three interviewed 25 people in the course of two days and spent the third cranking out the final report.  Needless to say, it was not a relaxing week in the Blue Ridge Mountains!  Then last week, I was out to Ohio for our regular semi-annual visit to MMS Aviation which does a terrific job of "preparing people and planes for worldwide Christian service".  They teach new mechanics their trade while repairing or refurbishing mission aircraft.  It's a terrific way to have two very effective ministries going at the same time.  They have more repair work to do out there than they can shake a stick at, so it's always good to stop in to make sure that they're doing their work well and safely.  You'll enjoy watching a video about some of their repair work done on a mission aircraft at http://vimeo.com/2916131.

 But the hectic part of the storm still lies before us.  Gail and I leave later this morning for two weeks of ministry work in Alaska (with a short stop in California on the way).  We'll be leading an MSI team scheduled to do three safety consultations and a safety seminar in the course of the two weeks, so we'll really need an extra measure of grace to accomplish everything and to do it well.  Please post the following schedule somewhere prominent so that you can be an equally important part of our team through prayer and supplication:

 April 27     Safety Consultation for the Samaritan's Purse aviation department, Soldotna, Alaska (www.samaritanspurse.org)

 April 28-May 1     Safety Consultation for the Missionary Aviation Repair Center (MARC), Soldotna, Alaska.  Really pray hard for this one as it will be our first visit to MARC.  (www.marcalaska.org)

 May 4-6     Safety Seminar in Soldotna, Alaska.  We're expecting at least 35 missionary pilots and mechanics to attend this event.

 May 7-8     Safety Consultation for SOAR, Kenai, Alaska (http://www.soarinternational.org/)

One last place for you to web surf is over to the newly revamped site for the International Association for Missionary Aviation (www.IAMAnet.org/), of which MSI and GBGM are both a part.  There are a lot of neat stories and good information about missionary aviation, including a recently posted page about our United Methodist pilot Gaston Ntambo (http://www.iamanet.org/2009/03/gaston-ntambo-national-missionary-pilot-congo-africa/).  We can rejoice together at what God has accomplished.