I am writing this from Reykjavik. If I had found a way to be successful as a writer, (financially) I would do all my writing here. There is something magical about the Icelandic culture that inspires the imagination. There is something very unpretentious about its people. We are renting a movie director’s house, I think he is famous here, but his house is very similar to our house in Anacortes, 100 years old, with simple furnishings and outdated appliances. But I love it!

I think Iceland is magical because it is the purest Viking country in the world, more so than Norway or Denmark. Pure Viking blood runs in the veins of the people here, as do their legends and sagas. Iceland is the most “read” country in the world, in books consumed by captia. Reykjavik itself, while a modern European capital, sits wedged between the sea and a vast wilderness. Not a lot of people here, maybe 350,000 in the whole country. It was a quiet country before being discovered by the Americans, who aimlessly and loudly roam the streets of this fair city, day and night, sometimes acting like arrogant jackasses.

Iceland has a special place in our lives, and it all started in 1984. I was walking down the street in Ann Arbor and in the window of a tourist store (if you remember, we bought plane tickets at such stores in the 1980s, before the internet) and there was the poster in their window of this vast green field across high bluffs with sharp drops into the dark sea. Where is that? I asked myself. I walked into the store to find out it was Iceland. I could not get that image out of my mind.

At that time in our lives, Denise and I felt called to be missionaries to Muslims in the Middle East. After all we had met there. But we were not getting traction, not a lot of mission in the Middle East. To make a long story short, and I tend to be impulsive at times, Denise coming along for the ride, I began searching for a mission that was working in Iceland. I found one. Greater Europe Mission (GEM) was looking for another couple to go to Iceland behind their first couple, who was schedule to depart within months. The purpose was to convert those heathen Lutherans into real, American Evangelical Christians.

Here’s a video clip I made yesterday at a waterfall: https://www.facebook.com/1676287964/videos/848543010122023/

I am much more honest now than I was then. Converting Lutherans was only my token reason for wanting to go to Iceland. I think most missionaries I’ve met, do it for the adventurous lifestyle rather than some evangelical purpose. But nonetheless, we signed up to go to Iceland and began our preparation. GEM required a degree in Bible, so I started seminary work. It would also mean me giving up my medical career.

About this time, we were also being recruited to go to Paris to work with North African Muslims with TEAM (The Evangelical Alliance Mission), the same group Denise and I had served with in Abu Dhabi. Then, out of the blue, a leader in the discipleship group (The Navigators) I had been involved with for 15 years called me from Lebanon. He was my spiritual hero, (before I had learned about the problems with hero worship) only reading about him in magazines. He invited us . . . well (an ominous sign) . . . just me, to meet him in Cyprus to talk about a secret mission. He did have a James Bond complex, living in the middle of the war in Lebanon, not even knowing where his wife and kids were, having put them on an evacuation bus a year earlier. He was a Rambo with a Bible-type. Dangerous.

To help us decide our future, I took a month leave, Denise and our first baby, Bryan, headed off to Iceland where we lived for a week (or two, as we can’t remember) with an Icelandic family deep in the rural fjords of western Iceland. They didn’t speak a word of English and we didn’t have a car, so it was a crash course in Icelandic living. From there, we went to Paris for a week to look at that situation with TEAM. From there, I alone flew to Cyprus for an intensive 24-hour (no sleep) meeting with this Rambo-missionary guy. He spoke like Yoda, in rhymes and tangential words that were hard to follow. After the 24 hours I still had no idea what he was talking about, so I had to ask him just before boarding my plane to Paris, “What are you trying to say?”

“I want you to come to Cyprus to start a secret mission to reach out to Lebanese refugees.” Later, after we had accepted this mission and were packed, he reached out to me again, “Please don’t bring your wife and children (we had two sons and one on the way by that time) as I found out that they just get in the way.” Why was that not a red flag for me? I think it was because I was so brainwashed that our religious group was the greatest in the world. No, I didn’t leave my family at home, but quickly found out that they were seen in Rambo’s eyes as chaff, which lead to a major conflict between us, leading to my resignation two years later, and my own disillusion with American evangelicalism. But that’s another story.

Back to Iceland.  We made one more trip to Iceland in 2016, stopping on our way to Scotland, where I had been invited to attend a world conference on headache management. That stay was only three jet-lagged days, but we did have a car and saw a little more of the country. Then, we started to plan another trip for the summer of 2019. In that trip, we, plus a Texas friend, would fly to Iceland and then jump a prop plane to Greenland and do a month trek across part of that vast landscape. In the winter of 2018-19 I was starting to train for that trek but was finding limitations in my physical work. Old age setting in? It was then I ended up in the ER as my entire life and world quickly was unraveling.

Because I was placed on hemodialysis for four hours every other day, my doctor told me that my days of traveling were over. I would never board a plane again. I knew my life expectancy was in months.

So, it is thrilling that now, four and a half years later, I have the strength to come here. I have trepidations as the last time I flew, last summer, I returned home with pneumonia and was worried at times that would be the end of me.

We invited all our adult children and their spouses. Two of our five children didn’t make it. Two of my three grandchildren had to miss the flight due to expired passports. This is the first time I would have seen them in a year. Disappointing at least.

We are having a wonderful time and I have a heart full of gratitude to be with the Icelandic people again, when as recent as last summer, I couldn’t imagine ever being on a plane again. We are blessed.

Mike