Most of the time, Alaska isn’t the first place on your mind when you think of a spring mission trip. However, Aaron Payne, Columbia Adventist Academy chaplain, has convinced many students that it makes for a great adventure.
This year's March trip was the fourth trip since 2015. Each mission trip has included a week of prayer, visiting shut-ins, working in soup kitchens and building cabins, helping single moms and others in need by painting, repairing and improving homes, splitting and delivering wood and other mission activities.
It isn't all work, however, as ice fishing, sledding, snow machining, visiting the reindeer and muskox farm, attending an ice sculpture festival and antique car museum, hiking on the Butte and trips to Chena Hot Springs and Denali all add to the winter experience.
However, this generation of students isn’t the first to make Alaska the recipient of CAA’s love and an expression of reaching across generations.
In the ‘50s and ‘60s, several students from Alaska chose to make CAA their home away from home. During the 1967–1968 school year, ASB chose to raise funds to send a mission plane to the Alaska Mission to make life easier for remote villages.
The ASB letter-writing campaign and other fundraisers proved to be successful. The plane — a Cessna 180 — was purchased and the cowling was painted, “The Spirit of Columbia,” before being flown to Alaska where it served for several years.
The ways God has used and continues to use academy students to enrich and bless the lives of others throughout CAA’s history are fascinating.
Just as many of the details of The Spirit of Columbia remain unknown — hearsay is it crashed into a glacier after three years, with both pilot and passenger miraculously surviving — likewise many of the stories have been lost with time.
We look forward to heaven and a big reunion of all generations where we can hear the stories of history, put all the pieces together and see what we already know through faith. God truly is weaving a beautiful tapestry.
The memories of Columbia Adventist Academy's week of prayer presented in Alaska in 2019 are still sweet and are fueling the drive to once again engage in short-term, post-pandemic mission work.
This photo of the CAA mission airplane is in the 1968 CAA yearbook with the caption, "An encouraging flyover."
Columbia Adventist Academy students were deeply invested in initial efforts to raise funds for aviation mission work in Alaska. The 1968 school yearbook has this photo of students participating in a letter-writing campaign fundraiser in the gym. This heart for mission work in Alaska continues today in the form of short-term mission trips.
