Life Is A Gift, Part 1 with Pastor Alden Ho

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] i forget what country i was in but i know it was in the continent of africa i hopped into a taxi and i was heading to my speaking appointment and the guy who was driving looks in his rearview mirror and you could tell he's staring at you he's kind of eyeballing you because it's kind of obvious i'm not from around there and he says to me you from china typical response you get you know um and i said no i'm not from china and then he says but you chinese that was a good guess you know because there's a lot of us out there and i said yes but you're not from china i said no where are you born i said singapore oh you live in singapore no so where you live i live in the united states oh so you american no i'm canadian so you have canadian wife no american wife at this point i i was fearful of giving him any more answers because i wanted to get to my destination safely and he was looking more in the rearview mirror than he was at the road so you kind of know a little bit about me i was born in singapore my parents and i always get this it's so interesting people hear me on the phone and then when i walk in they're not expecting me you know they're expecting a white person and they see me and then they say oh your english is so good that's all i know really and so i was born in singapore my parents immigrated from singapore to toronto canada just before my second birthday i grew up i want you to understand you're not going to hear a testimony of somebody who was a murderer who spent time in prison who did drugs who stole a vehicle who did prison time no i was just a very very good laodicean now you laugh but that's a painful laugh because many of us are that way you see i grew up in an adventist home my father had the morning watch at the table every morning for breakfast but as he read the watch there was no discussion there was just the reading of it we prayed and off you go that was it my devotional life was not really very good i didn't go to academy i didn't go to an adventist school although they were all there because you know my parents had this saying you know the kids there are no better than the kids at the public school you've heard that before you might have used that excuse as well and so my parents sent me to public school and i went from kindergarten all the way up to grade 12 but because i'm from toronto canada we had the bonus round of grade 13 in high school yeah some of you don't break your neck there grade 13 it's considered first year college if you were coming to the us so that was good i grew up playing the piano since i was five and a half years old i was playing the piano and i see a lot of filipinos here my piano teacher was a filipino for 13 years you may have known the name pastor poblete and it was his wife that was my piano teacher and so by the time i was 10 years old i was playing in church playing on the piano my dad was a choir director i was in choir i did everything in church accept one thing study my bible when i went to high school i was really involved in music so i and i'm glad i kind of went to public school because you see in the advent school if you wanted to play an instrument you had to go and you had to rent that instrument and that's the one instrument that you could rent but because i was in public school i could play all kinds of different instruments in grade four i picked up the violin along with the piano that never went away and so i played violin for grade four five and six and then my parents moved we moved to a different school and they didn't have string instruments anymore so the music teacher says well what would you like to play i looked around and i said i want to play that it was the tuba it was bigger than i was and then she looked at me and she says you have to take that home every day to practice i said well let's not do that one let's i looked for the smallest case possible and there was the flute and i said no that's for girls so i picked the next smallest case and that was the clarinet i didn't know what it was it was just small i said i'll take that she said okay here you go i came back the next day i had it already put together and that evening i was already playing music with it no instructions just put it together and i figured it out from there i went on to high school and i still played clarinet all the way through and then i now had a selection of all these different instruments my dad had a trombone and baritone at home so i could play some of those and i started playing bass clarinet and alto sax and tenor sax and baritone sacks and then i learned to play marching percussion i had a wonderful time playing all these things and so when i graduated from high school i thought i want to be a piano technician i want to be able to tune pianos and look at all those things and that was the goal but then god had other plans i went to um made a decision to go to union college and i studied music education at union college i i changed and i wanted to become a music teacher in our academies to be able to teach piano voice clarinet but still god had other plans i was so burnt out in music when i was at union college the uh my advisor gave me a lot of credits 21 and a half credits for that semester i had 13 classes i was working two other jobs i was the the pianist for the voice teachers i had to practice two hours every or 20 20 hours a week i had to practice on the piano i was burnt out needless to say my gpa was like 1.75 a friend came along and she said why don't you go as a student missionary said not interested then she said those magical words she says you get to take a year off of school and i said what now i'm interested i'm all ears tell me more about it she says well you could go to korea because she was in korea and i thought okay well i'll go to korea then there were other options you know there was japan open i wanted to go to china learn some of my heritage but i didn't want to go to japan and chinese koreans are actually sorry i don't want to offend any korean people if they're here if you're watching or anything like that but koreans are really chinese they just don't know it i'll prove it i'll prove it if you go to korean and you ask them what their formal writing is not the korean alphabet which is 23 characters but if you look at korean formal writing guess what it's chinese where do you think korea is located it's a peninsula off of where oh you're americans geography is not your forte peninsula off of mainland china is north korea and south korea just in case you didn't know sorry i don't mean to be backing american education but it is pretty good i went to korea i had a problem on the plane it was a small problem do you remember the name elder dick baron how many of you remember that name yeah only couple hands do you remember how tall he was fred how tall he was yeah he was about six eight he was the youth director for the north american division and uh somebody came to me on the plane now i'm at 35 36 000 feet and they said these words to me they said halden what are you preaching for i mean what are you teaching for your bible class and i looked at them and said i don't have a bible class they said yeah you do i said no i don't they said you're going to korea right i said yeah i'm going to korea they said well you have a bible class and i said no i don't they said go and ask elder baron i said fine i walked out of the economy section he didn't fit in the economy section so i had to go to business class and elder baron he stands up towering over me and i said so and so says that i have to teach a bible class in korea that's you know it's a negative with a negative that's not right is it he says why yeah you're going to create and you have to teach a bible class now if there was such a thing as a hijacker i wanted to hijack the plane get me back home you understand why i mean what what if what if i came to you brother and i said hey guess what next sabbath you're preaching how would you feel no sir right that's how i felt i didn't want to teach a bible class do you know why because i didn't know my i mean i knew my bible i had verses memorized you know like um in the beginning god created the heavens and the earth you know for god so loved the world and yea though i walk through the valley of the the shadow of death yeah you see those are the bible verses i had memorized i walked into my first bible class and you have to understand now i'm 19 years old i am teaching professional people english conversational english these are doctors these are lawyers these are nurses these are really professional people who are way older than me now there's one thing you have to understand about people in korea they esteem teachers higher than doctors do you know why because you pass on knowledge that's very important so even though i'm 19 you they greet you like you're very old in case you're not familiar they don't necessarily shake hands well they do if you go over there because you're american but if they were koreans they if you're young you know it's just kind of a a nod like that but if you're a little bit older then it's a little bit deeper bow but if you're like quite a bit older then it's more it's not in worship it's just out of reverence and respect so they would come in and they would i mean you're talking a 70 year old man coming up to me doing that that's really esteeming your position as a teacher so i walk into the bible class and the students are there the professional people now just so you understand they pay for the english classes but the bible classes are free why because we want to get them to understand about christianity about our doctrines which i didn't know very much about so they ask you questions and they started this one guy i'll call him the troublemaker he starts asking me all these questions and you know what frankly i freaked out i ran out of my classroom i went to my cl my friend's door and i knocked on his door he's asking me this he says and he says i said what do i tell him he says just tell him you'll study it and you'll get back with him tomorrow why didn't i think of that so i went back and i started studying it and i came back and i the next day i bequeathed him of all my knowledge looked at him do you understand says yes said good then he asked me another question at this point i learned to say i don't know so i went to study it again and i did this over and over and over with the same troublemaker finally after months and i don't know why he chose my bible class why don't you go to somebody else's bible class go bot i mean go ask them questions i think the holy spirit put him in my class for a reason one day i gave him the answer and then all of a sudden after i spoke everything that i had learned i noticed something strange happening my mouth was still moving and i looked at him and he's going like this i'm looking at my mouth and it's still moving and i said to him do you understand what i just said he says yes i said praise the lord tell me what i just said because you see for the very first time in my life god had spoken through my mouth and it was a foreign experience somebody the pastor is there because you had to preach every two months the semester there was every two months and you had to preach i and i think i probably stole one of doug batchelor's sermons or marks sermons somebody's sermon i stole but then you had to start writing sermons and the pastor came to me says you need to be a pastor someday and i looked at him and says no no i don't want to be a pastor here walk into this i don't want to be a pastor i came back and i switched majors i said forget it with music i was burnt out with music i was so involved with photography now because i went to korea in the mid 80s and i was there during all the student riots do you remember the student riots that were going on and guess what do i look like i'm a korean yup what do you think happened yeah i got in trouble for doing nothing just because i look like them but i wanted to get into photography so i went to andrews university they were offering a media technology class of that time period with emphasis in photography and that's what i wanted to study was photography when i graduated with my photo degree i had already interviewed with a company in chicago to work for them in photographic sales a professional photographic company that was selling top-end photography equipment and that was a wonderful opportunity the day i graduated uh just let me back up a month before i graduated they called me and said we've got a management shift so the position that we were going to offer you is not available anymore now i'm scrambling what am i going to do because you see i'm a canadian if i don't get a job here then guess what i gotta head back home and i'm about to get married i had my stuff hanging up my senior portfolio hanging up in the gallery and this guy came and he came to visit me and he said what are you doing when you graduate alden his name was tom pangborn he had he was an adventist pastor but in the early 80s he threw it all away because of a guy named desmond ford so he was no longer keeping sabbath and he came to me he said so what do you do when you when you graduate i said i don't have a job he says i want to hire you to do what he said well we're up in northern michigan and we photograph sailboat races we photograph golfers in the wintertime we photograph skiers and then we process it all and i thought that sounds really adventurous i like that that would be good so i graduated from andrews the next week i got married to my wife lynn and then i started working for tom up in northern michigan we would our primary job during the summer time was to photograph sailboat races for what reason because then we would sell the pictures to the sailboat owners so they can hang up these huge monster pictures inside their offices to be able to show off how much money they spent on their beyond and it worked out pretty good until one weekend the weekend was september 4 a number of years ago we took off from the airport it was a 172 cessna tom was an experienced pilot and when we took off it was a windy day he said you see a cessna is a four-seater plane it's very very tight in the front it's even tighter in the back but you're practically shoulder to shoulder with the person since he's the pilot he sits on the left side i'm the co-pilot i'm on the right no let me rephrase that i'm in the co-pilot seat i don't know anything about flying so i you know that thing that goes in and out i've always wondered why do they have two of those in the plane i mean and then you get in the car and there's only one of those and sometimes your wife keeps telling you go here go you just want to say here you drive but you can't do that see in a plane you could do that here you fly so understanding since i'm not a pilot what i did is i took my seat and i loosened the seat and i slid it all the way back that way i'm not in that position there there's a reason photographers like a 172 cessna it's because the wing is actually up high you sit in the fuselage the wing is up high because when you turn and you go to photograph you don't have the wing in your picture does that make sense wings don't buy pictures do you understand so the wing is up high there is a support bar but you just have to make sure you're not in the support bar so what i did is i slid my seat all the way back now i want to show you a couple pictures of what this looks like if this all works properly but this is the position that i normally am in that's where i started and this is the position that i am in when i slide all the way back it's a few inches but it makes a big difference you see in the bottom right corner you see that little uh support beam there that's the thing that you don't want to get in your picture at all so you have to be very careful that when you take pictures you're not getting that in the picture at all so in the process of doing that we're flying and we go around the first boat and i'm shooting with a very well you probably may not understand it's a pentax 6x7 it's a big camera it takes a big lens you don't there's no motor drive you know it's not like a phone like this you actually have to it several times to advance it and so it's big it's heavy i have that holding in my hand now in order to photograph out the window you'll notice that i took the window and there's a hinge there because the window normally only opens a few inches because it's hinged at the top so in order to me for me to be able to photograph without any obstruction i undo the hinge i slide it all the way up and i take a wooden dowel and put it up there to shove that window up against the wing now i have an unobstructed view that's ideal for taking pictures i'm in there we're taking pictures and everything's going well we go around the first boat and when we take pictures uh we always bank the plane to the right why because i'm seated on the right side if we bank this way what am i taking pictures of clouds clouds are like wings they don't buy pictures either so we always go this way and we would just fly round and round and everything's fine however that day was a very windy day it was so windy so sometimes you're fighting the wind pushing this way then you have a headwind sometimes it's pushing you this way here you've got a tailwind pushing you so it's a constant fight going around in a circle tom says you done i said yeah i've got the shots so that was his signal for me to go to the next plane or the next boat and so he would fly there sometimes i would have to change the film get things ready and then we start doing our circle again we did the second boat then he went to the third boat in between the third and fourth boat i noticed he did something on the dashboard that he had never done before he hit a switch on the dashboard from what i understand that switch is to lower the flaps like you're preparing for landing guess what i i didn't know that or else i would have hit it back up because we're not getting ready to land we're over the water we started on the fourth boat we were banking like this and then all of a sudden he lost lift when you lose lift it's the thing that goes over your wings it's because you're going too slow and when you're going too slow the wind the wind doesn't go over the air doesn't go over your wings like it's supposed to to keep you up in the air and so what happened was he lost lift and we went from this position to this position so now when i'm looking out the window i'm really looking straight down so what do you do when you lose lift if you're high enough in the air and you fall you can eventually start the motor back up and everything goes fine and you pull out of it it's kind of like in a roller coaster how many of you are roller coaster fanatics can i see some of you yeah you guys are the crazy people out here you know there is a process of craziness because some of the roller coaster people like the front area how many of you are the front people see these are the daredevils that are like that there's like me first right they're the crazy ones ah they're going like this then there's the people who like roller coasters that are more the conservatives they're sitting in the very back if you're going i'll follow you later right so when you are in a roller coaster you know that when you come down you can see the tracks and eventually you'll what you'll go back up not in a plane sorry no tracks doesn't work that way we fell what happened was he stalled it this way he tried to correct we went this way and then guess what we dropped we're only at 400 feet there's no room for error we were still in this position very much like when you see birds out there and they go diving in the water they don't kind of skip skip a lot they go straight in that's exactly what happened we went straight into the water we hit with so much force that the left wing was bent back 45 degrees and up 45 degrees we hit so hard that we blow out all the windows of the plane we were only in the air for about 15-20 minutes you could be in the air for hours and hours so that meant the the wings which are the gas tanks had no air in them they were all full of fuel still so when we hit we went right in on impact the only thing that was showing up was about five feet of the tail wing that was still sticking out so imagine this for a moment i'm inside the plane we hit with so much force that now i get slammed right up to the front of the plane because remember i slid my seat back remember in the old days when you had the seats where you slide back not the motorized stuff and you had to kind of wiggle it a bit to lock it in place i didn't lock it in place so in the impact my seat went all the way forward passing all the locks just slammed me up there that steering yoke i it wasn't there anymore i broke it off with my chest that gauge my left foot got caught on so my left foot got crushed in that gauge and then not only that but then my head kind of went into the dashboard as well you can see the bottom of the seat the pat the pilot seat it's further back than the co-pilot seat this is the actual plane you see it's kind of dusty that's not dust that's debris the silt from the water because they had to pull it out we hit almost hit the sailboats that were racing and when we hit all i remember saying is i gotta get out i mean they say that your life flashes before your eyes if you're ever in a life or death situation yes it flashed before my eyes and it just kind of said look you just graduated you just got married why is this happening to me and then i remember saying i gotta get out it's a good thought when you're in underneath the water i lifted the door handle to go out didn't move i pushed it didn't move what i didn't realize is that in the impact not only did we the engine to the left but we we squished everything which was including my door now tom's door popped open but unbeknownst to me tom was killed instantly remember if your spouse is sitting next to you and you're touching shoulders that's how close we were why him why not me and i realize life is a gift [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Sacramento Central Seventh-day Adventist Church

Views: 387

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: CcooXCslvpo

Length: 28min 30sec (1710 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 18 2021