The Miracle of God's Loving Gifts

            In the spring of 1981, Betsy and I drove the Alcan Hiway and began our adventures in Alaska. To our excitement, we discovered that there were homestead opportunities available in Alaska’s back country, so we began the application process. We also began making lists of supplies we would need, dry goods, seed, building materials, etc. Most importantly, we began drawing up plans for the log cabin we wanted to build on our remote acreage. 

However, we soon learned that the Lord had other plans for us. While driving north from Anchorage one afternoon to our home in the Matanuska valley, the Lord spoke to me. He asked me to lay aside my own dreams of cabins and homesteads so that we might give our lives to the sharing of His message of Salvation. His words were so clear that I could do nothing but surrender to His will.   

For the next twenty years, we served as pastors and missionaries in places such as an Apache Reservation in New Mexico, and in churches in both San Diego California and Aberdeen Idaho. He also took us to Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, and to Islands in its South-east.  For the majority of these years, we lived in parsonages, never considering that the Lord had any other plan for us than what we were doing. It was always a good and exciting life! 

During those years, I had pursued my pilots license in hopes of flying into and reaching isolated communities with the gospel. While living in Idaho, I passed my pilots test and acquired my private pilot license. Then, with the Lord’s leading (another miraculous story), we were able to purchase a Maule M-5 210 C, a four seat bush plane aptly named a “Lunar Rocket”. Soon we were flying into small airstrips in remote communities, looking for opportunities to share the gospel.    While attending a church in the Treasure valley of Idaho, a man whom we had become acquainted with told us of a mountain community in the Central Idaho Rockies that had no gospel witness. We scheduled a flight on a Friday afternoon, and landed on the short dirt strip that parallels the town’s main street. We were in Dixie Idaho. 

Our first services went well, attracting 12-15 people, which is an impressive gathering for a town that only boasted about 20 year around residents. We continued flying into Dixie every other week end to hold services the rest of that summer. When fall came, Betsy stayed at our home in the valley while I found work in Dixie building log cabins with a logger friend. One thing led to another, and before I knew it, I had found some property about 3 miles outside of Dixie, learned some new log cabin building skills, and recognized the Lord opening a door for Betsy and I to move full time up to Dixie.

That was 25 years ago. Since then, we have purchased the 6 acres south of town overlooking the Salmon River valley, sold our home in the Treasure valley, built the log cabin I had drawn up in Alaska (still had the drawings), and begun to live the very life we had sought when we moved to Alaska in our early years.           Abraham offered his only son Isaac to the Lord as the Lord had required of Him. When the Lord saw Abraham’s willingness to give up what was most dear to Abraham’s heart, the Lord them gave Isaac back to Abraham. We often refer to our property and life here in the Rockies as our “Isaac”.  We had given this dream to the Lord, and after years of serving Him, He gave us back that dream. Our cabin and property today are even more incredible than what we had envisioned in Alaska. During our years of ministry, the Lord has provided us with, boats, snow machines, four wheelers, trucks, airplanes, and about everything else we not only needed, but often times just “desired”.  This is even more incredible when almost all of these ministries provided no income. A look at our tax returns over the years confirms this.

Today, this cabin we live in and the property it is built upon are one of the Lord’s greatest gifts in our life, greatest because it is a constant reminder of how He takes care of His children. It reminds us that as the Bible says, He will give us “the desire of our hearts”.  Our mountian home is just one of the many daily reminders of the miracle working presence of God in our lives!