Tuesday, June 10, 2008

A MISSIONARY PILOT'S LAST FLIGHT


Yesterday missionary pilot George Davis has took his last flight—not in a Cessna or a King Air this time, but in a chariot to heaven.

Age and a mean disease took his life.

George played a major role in my life. In 1969 he preached the sermon that fanned the embers of a call to missions in my life into a blaze.

Later he asked me to climb into his Cessna airplane and do a speaking tour around the Caribbean and South America for a month. He taught me how to navigate and fly. This picture of George, his wife Billie, and La Gloria was taken just before George and I climbed in and took off.

That trip set the course for the rest of my life.

George urged Jean and me to contact Delmar Guynes of the Assemblies of God Foreign Missions Department to begin the process that led to our missionary appointment.

Later in our careers we served together on the board of International Correspondence Institute in Brussels, Belgium. There we began a one-on-one chess tournament that lasted for years. I seldom won.

He was a man of honor and humor and I’m sorry to lose him.

…sorry for me but not for him.

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