When Ken was no longer able to have dialysis--it was no longer effective, and they told him he would have around three days left--all of us gathered to be with him.  He had never been afraid of anything in his life, and he wasn't afraid of dying.  He was a Christian with total confidence in the promises of God.

I told you once what he said: "I know where I'm going, I just don't know how I'm going to get there."  He was plotting vectors to fly from point A to point B just as he had done when he was flying to a target--all those years in the Marine Corps.  When ground troops depended him to arrive on target at the specific point they wanted him, at the specific moment they wanted him there.

It was pretty quiet--until the silence was broken by an airplane flying over the area.  Low.  Illegally low.  We all commented that someone was going to get in trouble for flying so low.

And then the plane returned--fifty feet over our house--the noise was deafening.  And again.  And that's when we realized who it was.  Joe Mike.  He was saying goodby in the way pilots in the military do.  With a flyover.  With a goodby.

Ken and Joe both flew in Vietnam.  Ken always said that Joe was the little brother that he had never had.

Once when I was at youth camp at Falls Creek (I was teaching all the twelfth graders in the Senior Pavilion) I had left my Bible and notes at home.  I had to have it, so Joe and Ken got in a putt-putt and flew it to me, landed in a grassy field and handed it out the window.  

They were both excellent pilots.  Joe still is.  Ken is probably directing heavenly traffic.  Plotting vectors to help the saints to arrive at their heavenly target at the precise correct moment.