5-4-2014 Flight Delayed from London to Houston

During the final check of our 747, the ground crew spotted a hydraulic fluid leak under one of the wings.  They removed the access panels, fixed whatever was leaking, sealed up the wing and gave the plane a clean bill of health.  We took off about 1 hour and 25 minutes late, but it looks like we are making up some of that time with favorable flying conditions.  I'm glad it was fixed before our flight!  I’ve been gathering up everybody’s camera cards today and just finished getting the last set of pictures, Caroline’s, into my laptop so I can begin work on getting pictures out on the blog and then making a nice DVD for team members to show their families and to remember the trip by.  I will send all of our pictures, the good, the bad and the ugly, to the team sometime within the next week or so.  I know we’ve got at least 2500 pictures from both of our teams that we had people on this time.  I only make sure personal photos from before the trip are erased, but if someone left their camera on and took an out of focus picture of their foot, it will be there.  This way, my team can select pictures they like for whatever their purposes are.  The blog and the DVD project will require me first rating all the pictures from 1-5.  I usually only include the 4s or 5s after I run them through some basic editing in Adobe Lightroom such as cropping, making the exposures better, sharpening or adding a little contrast, etc.  I then try to get to about the 300 best pictures for the blog and maybe 400-500 pictures for an hour long DVD slide show that I produce that can be played on any computer and most TVs.  This has taken 60-80 hours to complete in the past.  These DVDs are worth it, because I make extra copies to help show others what the Vision for Kenya project is all about and they help in recruiting other churches to join us in this mission field.  I still remember my first trip to help build churches in Mexico in 2005 when I had no idea what I was getting into.  I swore then that I would do these kind of photo projects to help make new recruits more comfortable instead of them being required to take such a huge leap of faith.  While I am a firm believer in leaps of faith, if they are too big of a barrier, it’s really hard to get people to come in the first place.  Even going all the way to Africa, one of my team was so impressed by her first time experience that she’s already talking about coming again in a year or so.  Many times, once we get home, the whole experience takes a while to percolate, be digested and processed a little at a time.  Many times, people that have joined us for one trip feel the Holy Spirit tugging at them and that small, still voice of God calling them to continue with the work.  In my case, I was hooked from the very beginning.  Stay tuned as I write a few more stories about the God things that happened on this trip and as I finally conclude with a summary of what the this team accomplished and what the trip meant to us.  Thanks be to God!