In the Presence of My Enemies (6 page)

(1981–83)

My dating life that fall was not going well. I had been in a relationship with someone whom I deeply cared about, but it was becoming clear to me that a long-term commitment was not in our future. After much anguish and discussion with my friends, I finally mustered the courage to break it off.

I was devastated. As I approached my twenty-third birthday, my future was nothing but a haze. One afternoon, Martin stopped in the office. After some small talk, he smiled and said, “The fall concert is coming up, and I wonder if you’d like to go with me.”

I was standing by the typewriter, and my face went white. (At least that’s what he claimed later.) I slowly sat down and said, “Oh . . . are you asking me for a date?”

“Yeah.”

All kinds of thoughts swirled through my head.
Do I want to get into all this again? What if it ends up like the last time? I don’t want to be hurt again.

Finally, I got out the words “Can I let you know?”

What I had no way of knowing was that Martin had heard that same line from other girls so often, in fact, that he was tired of it. He had convinced himself that the line was simply a way for them to put him off until they could decline his offer later, either in a note or through a friend.

So he had decided that if he heard “Can I let you know?” one more time, he would call the girl’s bluff and retract his invitation.

When I said the dreaded line, Martin steeled himself to say, “No, you can’t. Never mind.”

But for some inexplicable reason it came out, “Yeah. You can let me know”! With that, he turned and headed off to class.

The instant he left the building, I dashed into the office of my friends Kay and Joyce.

“Hey, guess who just asked me out?” I bubbled to Joyce. “Martin Burnham!”

“Oh, really!” they responded with big grins.
Everyone
liked Martin. He was just such a nice guy.

“Should I do this?”

“Of course! Of course!” They encouraged me to go for it.

I returned to my desk and quickly pulled out a notecard embossed with roses that I had on hand. I wrote:

Thank you for asking me [out] for Saturday night. It really encouraged me. I would love to go with you. Stop back by and we’ll talk about the time.

I sent it over to the flight department with the very next person headed that way.

That weekend, I went out and bought a new dress for the occasion, even though I rarely spent money on clothes for myself. I chose a beautiful yellow dress that had spaghetti straps and a lacy jacket.

On Saturday evening, we double-dated with another couple. During the concert, I looked down and saw that despite his suit, Martin had on cowboy boots. I got this big smile on my face.

Martin caught my expression and said, “What?”

“Oh, nothing,” I replied. I didn’t want him to think I was criticizing his outfit. It wasn’t that I thought it was funny, actually. It just confirmed to me that he was his own person—that he wasn’t going to let the laws of social etiquette dictate to him. I liked that.

After the concert, he took us flying to see the lights of Kansas City at night. As a resident assistant, he needed to be back at the dorm by a certain time, but we used every minute before Martin delivered me home.

We started dating more after that, and I quickly came to appreciate Martin’s unassuming ways. If he wanted to be the life of the party, he could. But if someone else was playing that role, he could just as easily be one of the guys. There was nothing egotistical about him. He was very confident in his talents, but he didn’t have to tell you about them. Instead, he was just quietly competent, and he was always kind to everybody in the process.

He had a cool car—a green Chevelle. He would let me drive it, which was quite a step up from my little Datsun B210 that needed to be overhauled. Bless his heart—when I told him about my car, he took it into the school shop and overhauled it himself, with some help from a friend.

* * *

The more we got to know one another, the more I learned of his interesting past. When he was a little guy, his family had attended Wichita Bible Church, a strong mission-minded congregation that held a one-week missions conference every October. The year Martin was seven, a guest speaker from New Tribes Mission made a deep impression on his parents, Paul and Oreta Burnham. Paul worked for a chemical plant and Oreta was a nurse. They already had four young children, but they began to wonder if maybe God had different ideas for them other than staying in central Kansas the rest of their lives.

The following spring, they attended a five-day New Tribes conference in Wisconsin for missionary prospects. Paul’s dad paid for the two plane tickets, while Oreta’s parents babysat. They came home more challenged than ever to venture toward overseas ministry—enough that they put their house on the market. It sold quickly, providing the funds for a year of training.

Some people said they were crazy to attempt this, given the size of their family and the fact that they were already in their thirties. But off they went to Wisconsin in their six-year-old Chevrolet packed with kids and clothes and lots of home-canned green beans. To young Martin and his siblings, it was all a great adventure. He understood what it meant to give your life to the Lord’s work, having made his own personal commitment to Christ back in a first-grade Sunday school class.

After a year of training in Wisconsin, the family headed to Camdenton, Missouri, for another year of language school. By the end of their training, the house-sale proceeds were running out. The Burnhams moved back to the family roots in the small town of Rose Hill, Kansas, just east of Wichita, where Paul took odd jobs to put bread on the table while he talked to churches about supporting their missions dream. And so it happened that in the summer of 1970, they boarded a freighter called the
Philippine Corregidor
in San Francisco’s harbor for the monthlong voyage across the wide Pacific. Martin was now ten years old.

Martin played hide-and-seek with his brothers between stacks of zinc ingots on the deck of the ship. The boys had fun flying kites off the stern and watching the flying fish alongside the railing as they soared for amazing distances.

When the family finally docked in Manila Bay, they were immediately struck by the hot and steamy climate. They were also surprised at how much English they heard. The American presence in the country for fifty years had made a difference. While Filipinos do speak Tagalog and Cebuano and Ilocano, English is the language that seems to tie them all together.

Since there appeared to be no practical way for Martin to attend school in the tribal area where his parents were working (homeschooling had not yet flowered into the option that it is today), he was sent to boarding school. He didn’t want to be away from his family, but the fact that he could fly home occasionally on a mission plane made dormitory life easier to take. It was on these flights home that Martin first found his fascination with airplanes and flying.

Mission aviation was not a luxury but rather a necessity in rural areas of the Philippines, where roads were few and rough, and waterways constantly blocked travel. New Tribes Mission, which specializes in working with indigenous people groups, was extremely dependent on the pilots who ferried groceries, medicines, mail, equipment, and people from town to short jungle airstrips. Paul and Oreta Burnham, for example, were a two-and-a-half-hour climb from the nearest road.

Martin made model airplanes out of split bamboo to thrust off the peak of his parents’ roof and see how far they’d soar. He eventually even built one with a tiny engine. As the years went by, he got himself into aviation ground school while he was still a high school student at Faith Academy in Manila. By the time he graduated in 1977, his goal was firm: to go home to America, buy a car, become a pilot, and make lots of money.

But then his dad said, “Wait a minute, Martin. We want you to do at least one year of Bible school.” Martin wasn’t happy about that at all, thinking it would just delay him from what he really wanted to do: fly.

A spirited debate raged, but in the end, he submitted to his parents’ wishes and trekked to New Tribes Bible Institute in Jackson, Michigan. He did his classwork, even though he says he was “cold all the time!” He’d grown up in the tropics where you wear shorts and a T-shirt, or maybe a pair of jeans at the most. Even shoes were optional in much of the Philippines. Martin refused to dress warmly at school, and he said the Michigan winter just about froze him to death.

Nevertheless, it was during that year that the first small spark of a future in missions was kindled for Martin. As he studied the Scriptures, he thought back to the mission pilots he’d known in the Philippines and mulled the possibility of joining their ranks after all.

The next summer, he moved (with his parents’ blessing) back to Wichita, the “air capital of the world.” In Wichita, Martin got his flight training and his Airframe and Powerplant certificate, a license that allowed him to work on aircraft. His uncle Ron Eyres got him a job at Coleman, the camping-equipment manufacturer, and helped him find an apartment in an elderly lady’s basement.

It wasn’t long before his night-school air mechanics instructor saw Martin’s potential and recommended him for a job on the flight line at Cessna Aircraft. That allowed him to join the Cessna Flying Club, which opened up all kinds of opportunities to fly.

One day, Martin received the news that a New Tribes Mission pilot he knew well in the Philippines had crashed his plane and been killed. Martin could well envision the gap in service that would leave. Who would step in to fill it? Maybe the Lord wanted him to complete his Bible studies after all.

Rose Hill Bible Church, which his family had helped start, was without a pastor at that point, and a professor from Calvary Bible College was filling in. Martin volunteered to fly up to Kansas City each Saturday and pick him up, then return him the following evening. That gave him a lot of time to talk to the man about the college’s program and the whole idea of Christian service.

One thing led to another, and soon Calvary’s missionary aviation program contacted him to say, “If you’ll come as a student, you can teach a course or two in our flight department.” And that’s how this wonderful young man showed up in my life.

* * *

One day in the summer of 1982 Martin told me, “My sister just graduated from Faith Academy, and my mom is bringing her back to the States to get ready for college. They’re flying in here; would you like to come with Doug and me to the airport?”

“Sure,” I said, excited to learn more about what this family was like.

When they came out of the Jetway, we saw that there were three of them: Cheryl, Martin’s mother, and little Felicia. I could tell that Martin’s mother was not entirely happy with him for bringing me along—after all, I wasn’t even a family member and I was taking up space that could have been used for luggage! We wound up holding suitcases on our laps.

But as the minutes ticked by, we all got along fine. We stopped at a pancake house to eat, and I sat there amused and amazed as I listened to this very practical family make plans. It was almost like a business meeting: “Okay, we are going to do this, and then this and this, and do you need anything for this . . . ?” I was watching a family that was used to living apart from one another, so they just dived right in to the necessary logistics, while Felicia played contentedly with the little coffee creamers, drinking them down one by one.

In a few weeks, Oreta and Felicia returned to the Philippines. I still wasn’t sure where I stood with Martin’s mom. When I asked him, however, he said, “You did just fine. She thinks you’re really nice.”

As Martin and I continued to date, I became more and more convinced that this was indeed a very special man. I was definitely falling in love—no question about it. And I could tell that he loved me, too.

I had planned to go home to visit my parents over spring break in 1983, and Martin decided to go with me. “Let’s take off early and meet about noon,” he suggested. “We can be all ready to start driving then, and that way we won’t arrive in Arkansas at an unearthly hour.”

I left work early, but when I arrived at the appointed place, Martin wasn’t ready yet. I thought,
This is kind of odd. He told me to be ready, and he’s not.
It was out of character for him.

Finally he showed up, a bit breathless. He apologized for being late, and we headed out of the city. By late afternoon we had traveled as far as Springfield, Missouri, where we stopped to eat at the Battlefield Mall McDonald’s. As we sat together in the booth, we had so much fun goofing around and laughing. I was talking very animatedly when the ketchup in my hand squirted all over my shirt. We laughed and laughed. I just kind of wiped it off with a napkin, and soon it was time to go.

“Aren’t you going to clean up your shirt?” Martin asked.

“Well, no, I hadn’t really planned on it. We’ll be home in a few hours, and I’ll change then.”

He got an odd look on his face and said, “You know, I really feel like you ought to wash your shirt.”

I didn’t say anything, but I was a little irritated.
You were the one who was late—and now you’re telling me to go waste more time washing off my shirt?
I thought.

I went into the rest room, squirted soap from the dispenser onto the red stain, scrubbed it off, and stood under the blow-dryer for a few minutes. I went back out. “Is this better?” I asked him.

“Yeah, I think it’s really good that you did that.”

We drove another hour or so, until we saw a sign ahead that pointed right: “Burnham 2 miles.”

Martin slowed down and looked at the sign. “Have you ever been to Burnham, Missouri?” he asked me.

“Well, to tell you the truth, yes—one time I was on my way home and pulled off to see it. There’s nothing there.”

“Well, I think I want to see it,” he said. He turned up the gravel road toward the few buildings that still remained: an old, dilapidated filling station that had gone out of business, a Burnham Baptist Church, and maybe one or two houses.