They Love the Plane!

The children came running up to the plane, lovingly stroking and patting their hands over every surface they could reach.  “They love the plane,” says pilot’s wife Ruth Patton. 

That really touched her heart.  Her husband, Charlie, has worked long and hard to fly in this end-of-the-world region of Brazil.  It took three and a half years of residence in Brazil before he could even get his Brazilian pilot’s license.  Charlie and Ruth sometimes felt like placeholders for a mission flight service that might never happen.    

Then came the breakthroughs.  The plane got its approvals and paperwork.  Charlie received his long-awaited license.  Finally he is flying in this region where lack of flight service has resulted in languishing work to reach people who need Jesus.

So it’s understandably satisfying to Ruth and Charlie that the children in the tribe are so enthralled with the airplane.  It’s helping them.  It’s sustaining the missionaries who are bringing them God’s story. 

“But then [the missionaries] told me the ‘other side of the story,’” says Ruth. 

“The Marubo are looking at the plane as something that is going to bring them stuff. … They are not seeing the plane (yet) as something to help a ministry.  They see it as something to make them better off in a material way, only.”

But Ruth and Charlie and the missionary team know why the plane is really there.  Work that has suffered because of lack of flight service can now progress.  Missionaries can be freed up to deeply learn language, to study the way the people think, to prepare the soil for the Gospel to really take root. 

Pray that the Holy Spirit will break through the materialistic expectations of the village.  “At this point they are more like the ones who came to Jesus only for the loaves of bread and the fish,” observes Ruth.