Here is Randy's testimony:
"I have been a missionary serving with New Tribes Mission in Papua New
Guinea since 1994.
My primary ministry is transporting missionaries and supplies over the dense jungles of PNG to speed the work among the remote tribal peoples. That involves scheduling people, cargo, route of flights, and timing as well as flying and minor maintenance of the aircraft. The flying is done in a Cessna 206, six passenger airplane, into short grass airstrips carved out of the jungle. Some are straight and level at sea level. The airstrips in the mountains are often sloped runways built on the side of a mountain or top of a ridge.
I am originally from the state of Washington (USA) in the Seattle area. I grew up in a Christian home were God's operators' manual for life, the Holy Bible, was not only believed but put into practice. For which
I am extremely grateful! At a very young age I realized my need for a Savior and
trusted Jesus Christ's sacrifice on my behalf as sufficient to satisfy God's
wrath against my sin. Praise God for the life He gives through Christ!
All of my teenage years were used up in Indonesia. (My parents were also
missionaries with New Tribes Mission.) I lived on the island of Borneo where the orangutans grow up.
We also live in Sumatra for two years. I can excuse all of my bad habits to growing up in the jungle! OK you're right,
no excuse for bad habits. My high school education was a correspondence course so self-motivation was a requirement. One of the side benefits of that was that
I could get a fair amount of school work done in the morning, then go explore the jungle or rivers in
my dugout log canoe all afternoon! A good chunk of my spare time was spent helping with household chores like washing clothes in the river, carrying drinking and cooking water to the house in buckets, cutting trees for an airstrip, building a house, or running the rivers in our 30 foot motorized dugout canoe for supplies.
From about age 15 I realized that if I was going to be serious about my fellowship with God it would probably mean that I would be serving Him on some foreign mission field. So I began planning preparations at that time. I had a lot of interest in mechanical things because we always had something that needed to be fixed. Since the nearest repair shop was nowhere near where we lived (somewhere between 240 and 8,000 miles) we often had to try to fix things ourselves. Thumbing through a college catalog one day I realized that an aircraft mechanic was trained in all the basic fix-it skills that a missionary needed for daily life. As I've always loved airplanes I thought maybe God would allow me to have some involvement with airplanes, but at least I would have what I needed for jungle missions work. To put it in a nutshell, God provided for my mechanical training and even allowed me to learn to fly!
Airplanes in tribal missionary work are extremely valuable! One trip we took as a family from our tribal home in the middle of Borneo to the coastal town where our supplies came from was suppose to take four days to two weeks at the most. After two weeks we were only halfway to town and my brother was very sick with Hepatitis A. We flew one hour to get to town from there! The whole trip would have taken only two hours in an airplane! Airplanes greatly speed tribal evangelism!
Seeing the importance of the airplanes and the need for missionary pilots I spent years training to fill a spot.
Now (since 1994) I am filling a spot in Papua New Guinea. My primary ministry is transporting people and supplies, enabling missionaries to stay in their jungle homes teaching God's word to tribal people, administering medicine, teaching literacy, and translating the Holy Bible into the tribal language.
Until God gives me further direction I plan to continue in this ministry. He will be coming back soon to take children out of the way! Until then I want to be busy in His work!"
Multiple languagues
