Pray for our friends, the Leedahls!

Hello all.  Sorry for the long-ish silence.  It's been a pretty rough and emotional last few days.  We arrived home on Monday evening to our kids who were pretty happy to see us, though they had been more than well cared for by our awesome friends!

Jon and Adie Leedahl were some of the many who cared for our kids in our absence.  Jon is a fellow airplane and helicopter pilot with New Tribes Mission who was training here with our flight operation on the Kodiak airplane, one of which NTM is soon to be receiving.

Unfortunately, on Wednesday, just after departing the airport to come home to Ukarumpa, he was in a motorcycle accident that injured his legs severely.  I arrived on the scene just a few minutes after it happened.  Carrie and I were able to trade off being with him and Adie for almost the whole time from when he arrived at our clinic until the airplane took of the following morning to medivac him to Cairns, Australia where the closest critical care unit is.

Sadly, the damage to his right leg was so severe that the doctors had to amputate it above the knee.  The right leg is mostly damaged in the foot, but they won't be able to address those issues for many days because he needs to recover from the trauma of the event as well as the amputation.

They have three wonderful boys, whom we have been able to care for some, along with some other friends.  They will go down to Australia soon to join Jon and Adie.

Needless to say, the Leedahls would appreciate your prayers in many areas.  As a fellow pilot who depends on my arms and legs for my vocation, I can only imagine what is going through his mind and what he's struggling with.  This will indeed change their lives tremendously in ways they likely don't even know or understand, but they are firmly focused on the Lord and the good that He will bring about through it all.  Many verses from Romans 8 have kept coming to me over the past few days.

They have a blog where they have been posting updates.  The blog is www.theleedahls.com and they are also at this link on Facebook where the posts are often more recent.

As for me, I've been perfectly normal (at least as normal as I typically am) since waking up from the procedure to remove the food stuck in my esophagus.  Thank you all again for your prayers.  Though technically life-threatening, my situation just pales in comparison to what the Leedahls are dealing with. 

Carrie and I had a wonderful several days of time together in Cairns, but it's good to be home with the bunch of munchkins, too.  They're cute.

I would post some pictures, but our computer along with our passports got temporarily lost, being treated to a boat ride down the Purari River in the bush.  We dropped some people off there on our flight back from Oz and they accidentally took it with the rest of their luggage.  Fortunately, they are coming out of the bush on Monday, so we should be reunited soon.

Gavin