Learning to Soar

Learning to Soar

Thirty two years ago I started to sense an increasing level of discomfort in my life and work. I was a young Air Force Colonel with aspirations to be a General, serving as a Chief Circuit Military Judge with responsibility for handling some of the most difficult criminal trials in the Air Force. My wife Betty was a nurse with a high profile job in the federal government. We had two teenage children who presented us with the normal adolescent challenges. We were good Christians and held various leadership positions in our small neighborhood Baptist church. I had been ordained as a deacon. I had accepted Jesus as savior at age 13 but never fully surrendered control of my life and work to Him. Betty had sensed a call to serve God as a missionary nurse when she was a young teen, but life had gotten in the way. Life and family have a way of doing that.

I flew one chilly day to Michigan to try the case of a Lieutenant Colonel who was a Chaplain charged with raping another officer’s wife. It was a tragic case all around. The accused had been counseling a woman who had suffered traumatic brain injuries in an auto accident, and she was severely incapacitated. Somehow their counseling relationship turned into a series of sexual encounters. The accused had almost thirty years of honorable service, including isolated tours in Vietnam and the Philippines, with no prior infractions of any type. For reasons that struck me as inexplicable, he elected to be tried by a panel of senior military officers, and my role was limited, almost to that of a referee. I had empathy for him, the panel had none. They would have had him before a firing squad had that been an option. I did the best I could to ensure justice to all parties, but the sentence imposed by the court panel was extremely severe, way more than I would have imposed. I was really discomforted by this experience. My warm nest was starting to feel very foreign, almost unnatural.

On my flight back home to Washington, I was praying silently, crying out to God. At one point, I heard a quiet voice that to this day I know came from God. It was one word: “Retire.” I plaintively sought a further word, but none came. When I arrived home, I shared my experience with Betty, who looked me in the eye with a smile and asked: “So are you finally ready to let God take the controls? I can still recall that turning point in our lives, as if it were yesterday. We prayed that weekend, and on Monday I submitted my retirement application. I had no idea what steps would be next. The following Sunday, a woman in our church approached me and said “I hear you are going to retire from the Air Force.” I was incredulous. No one outside my wife and the Air Force personnel center knew. How did she know? I asked her how she knew, and she just smiled. I asked her why she mentioned it, and she said her boss wanted to interview me for a job. “Who’s your boss?” I asked. She said the Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division at the Justice Department.

Thus began a series of steps that could only have been ordained by God. In several weeks I was hired by the Criminal Division’s Office of International Affairs, promoted quickly to a supervisor for all cases involving Asia, and then “loaned” to the American Bar Association for a new program to assist the former Soviet republics in rebuilding their legal systems after the sudden collapse of the USSR. While in a small new country called Kyrgyzstan, I was introduced to desperate but resilient people undergoing real hardship, and encountered American Christian missionaries who willingly shared that hardship in the service of God.

I accompanied the former Prosecutor General and now Chairman of the new Constitutional Court on a tour of the country. The people I met were all warm and friendly, and some told me I was the first “live American” they had ever seen. My mind started wandering to thoughts of dead Americans when they clarified they meant other than on television. In one small town, I met a lawyer who had served as a Judge Advocate in the Soviet Army in the former East Germany at the same time I served in West Germany. I learned that some Kyrgyz had left the country and now were living in stairwell type apartment units on the base where I had served in Germany. Small world, I thought to myself.

On Thanksgiving Day in 1993, I had a full schedule of appointments, which was my norm. I remember one was to help draft a law on civilian control of the military, and another to help establish environmental crimes. But the one I will never forget was with the nation’s President, who was a distinguished astrophysicist. He asked me when he would know that legal reforms were taking root. My response was he would notice two changes. “What might they be,” he asked. First, I answered, a very powerful but corrupt political figure will be arrested, prosecuted, convicted and sentenced to prison. And the second, when pedestrians have as much rights as drivers. He smiled, well understanding my reply. Every day I watched in amazement as drivers would speed up when they saw pedestrians in crosswalks, as if they enjoyed putting them in fear for their lives.

One night I had a dream. In my dream, all the very poor people were dressed in robes and fine jewelry, while the rich were starving, shivering in the cold, and miserable. Awaking from this dream, I was troubled. God had brought me to this desolate place, given me personal relationships with senior government officials, and now what? I turned on my small short wave radio and quietly scanned eight different bands, searching for English language programming. Suddenly I was listening to a worship service from Wheaton College, and the message was simple: if you are a follower of Jesus, you are a missionary. Stop resisting and making excuses. God calls ordinary people from all walks of life, and empowers them to do extraordinary things. I knew this was God calling me to serve Him in Central Asia.

When I finally left the young Kyrgyz Republic to return home, my car was escorted to the Kazakh border by a convoy of a dozen cars filled with judges from the new Constitutional Court and the Supreme Court. There must have been thirty men and women altogether. Parked on the roadside in freezing sleet and snow, my friends placed lamb, bread and vodka on the hood of one of the cars, and the toasts began in earnest. There were tears, hugs and even men kissing me on the lips. “Please come back to help us,” was the message and refrain. I will never forget that precious time. I vowed to myself, one day I will return here with my wife. This is God’s plan unfolding.

After some anxious moments in the Moscow airport, where customs officers tried to shake me down for a bribe, I said a prayer, gathered my strength, waved my official passport and said “Ya Amerikanski Procuror General” and walked past the befuddled customs officers. I barely made my flight and arrived back home just before Christmas, excited and wanting to share everything with Betty and my church. We started praying for direction. We asked people in our church to join us in that prayer. Then the Attorney General asked me to go to Haiti and serve as the Coordinator for the Clinton Administration’s Justice Reform Project. Again, I witnessed extreme poverty, hopelessness and turmoil. The pace of my work was frenetic, and the tropical climate managed to cause me serious intestinal problems. But we persevered as long as possible, and progress was made in ways that eventually stemmed the flow of refugees who were landing on Florida beaches daily. I returned to Washington but still knew in my heart that God had other plans for my wife and me.

I left the Justice Department and started to explore practical options for returning to Central Asia.

After prayer, Betty and I joined a medical missions trip to rural Kyrgyzstan. While ministering to mothers and their young babies in a tiny village, Betty knew this is why she was born, for such a time as this. We started researching possible ways to enter and live in the country. Next thing we knew, an older man in our church told us about our denominations’s mission agency and God made a clear path for us to meet their senior leadership and develop job descriptions tailored to our experience to move to Kyrgyzstan. Our neighbors and even some Christian friends told us we were crazy to leave all that we had in Northern Virginia and especially our children, who by now were just getting finished with school and looking for jobs. But we picked up and left.

What an adventure, the kind we never could have imagined! We moved to the most remote city in the entire country, learned the heart language of the people, and saw God move in miraculous ways. We saw a crippled boy walk and run, a clinically dead pastor brought back to life, we walked into areas where we knew no Christian had ever been, ever. I was made team leader, and then opened a small law office in the capital city. Betty still operated a medical clinic in our “home” city of Naryn, five hours from the capital and at very high altitude. Back and forth we travelled. God called several local lawyers to saving faith and they joined our law office. Jesus was recognized as our senior partner. The system was corrupt to the extent that we often faced requests for bribes in order to secure lawful goals for our clients. We always stopped pushing and started praying, and invariably obstacles were removed, and we were able to secure necessary actions by government officials for our clients. We were a not for profit firm, but we managed to make enough money to cover our expenses and invest in the local community.

Fast forward. We were being led to move to Istanbul and assume regional roles, when Betty started having health issues. We returned to Richmond for a season. Around 2008, we came to a young church called Redemption Hill. There is a lot more to His-story, but Betty fought a valiant four year battle with a rare cancer, and she was promoted to glory on 25 January 2012. I had sensed a call to be an elder at RH, and was ordained in 2011. We led a community group (“the Fan Community”) that multiplied several times. Betty’s witness was amazing. Her faith was contagious and much stronger than her cancer. Her physical remains lie in Hollywood Cemetery, where her gravestone is a call to missions.

I had a rough path after Betty’s promotion. She was much stronger than me. God graciously brought sweet Mary Lou into my life and we are still finding ways to serve His Kingdom. Please, don’t make the mistake I made. Don’t try to retain control of your lives. Don’t worry about your family or your children. God loves them much more than you ever could. Give the controls over to God and then get ready for a truly exciting ride, one sweet step at a time.

Little known fact: I was in Afghanistan when I first learned of Betty’s cancer. Both of us were in Iran the year before we deployed to Kyrgyzstan. I had lived in Iran as a boy, and felt a strong affinity for Persian speaking peoples. Then God brought us the opportunity to sponsor an Iranian pastor and his family who had sought and secured asylum after having been imprisoned and tortured in Iran for living out and sharing their faith. Today we are partnering with this dear brother in a global ministry. Betty’s gravestone includes a beautiful poem we “discovered“ on a paving stone in the old Armenian church in the beautiful city of Esfahan. Many experiences, no coincidences.

Note: my dear brother Avery Willis, long time missionary and author, wrote a wonderful book while he was a cancer patient with Betty and me in Houston. It is called: “Learning to Soar: How to Grow Through Transitions and Trials.” I was privileged to be included in it, under a pseudonym (at pages 48-49). All about when God stirs your nest, prompting you to soar to heights you never would have realized. My wings are a bit tired now, but we are still soaring, and trying to serve others in need.