"Approved"

That's right! I've been approved by the Maintenance Training department for field service. I finished up my last day of maintenance on Tuesday with the OK from my instructors to work on MAF airplanes overseas! I could definitely tell I was a little out of practice and a bit rusty in a few areas--after all, I haven't worked on an airplane for quite a while. Some of you may be thinking to yourselves, "Boy, Chris really goes through a lot of technical training to be a missionary, doesn't Joy have any training that she goes through?" Well, that's a wonderful point! And the answer is YES. On Monday, Joy spent the whole afternoon learning to cook entirely from scratch! She worked feverishly on a huge chicken potpie. Here she's diligently working the edges of the crust before baking it. I can't pronounce all the ingredients that went into that pie, but let me tell you...it was GOOOOOD!! Joy is a fantastic cook, and I have no doubt that one day all this yummy food will catch up with me!

To the left is the finished product, two chicken potpies, lots of dinner rolls, and a huge bowl of exotic fruits. Although in Africa, I don't think they will be all that exotic. Interestingly enough, the lovely lady on the left was our ministry partnership counselor; she guided us through the process of raising our ministry support for the past 10 months.

Since Wednesday, I have transitioned from maintenance to flight training. Just like the maintenance, I can tell I'm a little rusty, but it's coming back quick. I've been pretty sick the past two days, but today I felt much better, and it showed in my flying. So far I have put to good practice many of the principles we learned in ground school over a month ago. Hopefully by early next week I will have some flying pictures and maybe even some video up for you to see what it's all about. Have a wonderful weekend!