Description
Appointing Elders
Titus 1.5-9
The worst moment was when we realized the pilot had no idea what to do next.
We were travelling in a light aircraft, going north from Pretoria in South Africa into Zimbabwe, or Rhodesia as it was then called. There were five of us in the plane: the pilot, our two hosts, my wife and myself. There had been some mechanical problems earlier on, but they had been fixed – or so we thought – before we left Pretoria. Now we were flying north. We crossed the Limpopo, and found ourselves over open bushland, on and on for miles. But the plane’s electrical systems had started to fail. We lost radio contact. The automatic direction finder stopped working. Even the petrol gauge packed up. All that was working was the engine itself. Without any landmarks anywhere, we were lost. Only the sun told us roughly which direction we were going in, not how far we’d come. With strong side winds, we couldn’t tell whether we were drifting east or overcorrecting; either way we might miss our destination (Harare, then called Salisbury) by a long way. We might not have realized how serious the situation was if the pilot had not turned round to talk to us. He was biting his nails, a bad sign. He explained the position, or rather the lack of it. He had no idea where we were, and in any case there weren’t any airports in the region where we could come down and get the plane fixed, or even stay the night. He handed the map back to us with an air of desperation. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you see if you can figure out where we are!’ We couldn’t...