Hard at Work

Wow. Today I just renewed our domain registration for the blog. That means that we've had this blog up for a full year! I'm quite embarrased about the ratio of entries by myself to entries by Lorah, so I'm trying to even it out a little more over the next year. I thought that I would post a couple of pictures of a major installation that I'm in the middle of right now.

When I first arrived onboard, one of the two air conditioning compressors for the top half of the ship had just experienced a major oil pump failure resulting in irreparable damage to the unit's crankshaft. Fortunately, all of the crankshaft damage was isolated to one side of the compressor and we were able to remove the running gear for that half of the machine, plug the oil passages and get the machine running at half capacity (with a little extra vibration) for a few months while we were waiting for a reconditioned replacement.

Last month, we installed and test ran the compressor. Now we are working on getting the rest of the system operational so that we can cool the ship off again. Here are a few pictures from the installation.

The old compressor

No compressor at all

 Me checking the condition of the bearings on the reconditioned compressor

The new compressor, installed!

A lot of the work that is being done onboard is not work that looks like 'missions work.' I enjoy getting to share that with people in the developed world. Often times we can overlook the ways in which we can serve God, but the fact of the matter is that no matter what we do professionally, we are the salt and light of the earth and reflecting our Father's creative, kind, loving, and generous nature points to Him in an undeniable fashion that words seldom achieve. Missions is something that you are, not something that you do, it is not dependent on location or priveledge. It's our call to be like our maker.