A Good Start And A Strong Finish

This was a big week at MMS as one apprentice completed his 4,800 hours of service with MMS and another was accepted to begin service.

The Strong Finish: Shawn Bupp
Shawn Bupp received his completion certificate from Dwight Jarboe, MMS Aviation President & CEO on Wednesday. Way to go Shawn! It's always exciting when apprentices finish our program and are ready to serve mission aviation beyond our hangar doors. A typical apprenticeship lasts thirty months, but Shawn's been part of MMS longer than any other apprentice because he was called-up to for various stateside deployments as well as three tours overseas in support of the Iraq War. We appreciate the sacrifices he, his wife Donna, and their three girls have made to our country as well as their perseverance in continuing to pursuing God's call to service. This has been a very challenging five years for the "Buppsters".

The Bupps have been accepted by Harvest Aviation and will begin service at Harvest headquarters in Wachula, Florida as soon as Shawn passes his FAA exams and they raise the additional financial support necessary for effective ministry down south. The Bupps will join previous MMS graduates: Mike & Jamee Burch, Ronny & Denise Erekson, and Dan & Stephanie Leaky already in service with Harvest.

The Good Start: Andy Porter
As mentioned in the previous post, this past week I supervised the candidate evaluation of Andy Porter, a young man from England who came over as part of our training partnership with Mission Aviation Fellowship-United Kingdom. Thank you for your prayers for me, MMS, and Andy during this time. The Lord's will was clear in this and Andy was accepted for service with MMS this afternoon! Andy did very well during the evaluation and we look forward to having him back in our hangar very soon to begin his apprenticeship. He'll return to the UK on Monday to complete his orientation and support development with MAF-UK prior to coming back to MMS. Lord willing, all this will be completed in short fashion so he can return sometime this Fall.

Upcoming Trip rip
Actually, Karen and I will be back with Andy very soon, but this time we'll be over there in England. We'll be in England for three weeks. More on that in future posts!