It was early morning on December 29, 2000, when Gifford Shaw and Clarke Bynum bowed their heads to pray on British Airways's Flight 2069 from London's Gatwick Airport to Nairobi, Kenya. They weren't supposed to be on this flight; they'd missed a direct flight to Uganda because of winter weather delays in London. But now finally enroute to their two-week mission trip in Uganda, where they would be speaking to Sudanese refugees, Gifford, 45, and Clarke, 39, repeated the prayer of a lesser-known Old Testament figure named Jabez.

Found in 1 Chronicles 4:10, Jabez's prayer reads: "Oh, that you would bless me and enlarge my territory! Let your hand be with me, and keep me from harm so that I will be free from pain." After making these bold requests, the two men from Sumter, South Carolina, quickly fell asleep in their business-class seats, two rows behind the cockpit.

Not quite an hour later, Gifford woke up as the Boeing 747-400 cruised at 35,000 feet over Sudan with its 398 passengers and crew. The first five and a half hours of the eight-hour flight had been smooth and uneventful, but it had been dark outside; now that the sun had risen, Gifford peered out the window at the African landscape.

He'd been to Africa once before, in 1993, working for the same group he hoped to help on this trip, African Christian Training Institute, which recruits and supplies workers to meet various ministry needs in East Africa. Henry Krabbendam, a professor at Covenant College (Presbyterian Church in America) in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, and Gifford's friend since his days at Clemson University, was leading the mission trip. He was sitting a deck below in coach.

Five or ten minutes after Gifford awakened, Clarke was startled from his slumber by a nasty jolt. Gifford thought it was more than turbulence and looked out his window to see the plane plummeting. They would later learn the plane dropped 19,000 feet.

Terrified, the two men heard screams for help from the cockpit, just a few feet away. A passenger in the front row was standing, shouting that an African man had entered the cockpit. (British Airways does not lock the cockpit door during flights.) Business-class passengers sat in shock, fearing the end was near.

Clarke turned to his friend, and said, "We're going to die." Gifford responded, "I know. This is it."

In an instant, the men thought of their wives and children back home: Gifford has three daughters; Clarke has two sons and two daughters. Both had tearfully prayed with or for their children and their wives before leaving for the airport in Charlotte, North Carolina. Both were thankful for that closure. And both were ready to meet their Lord.

But Clarke, a 6'7" 210-pound former college basketball player at Clemson, felt he needed to try to do something. He had no idea if terrorists were hijacking the plane or if weapons were involved. He said to Gifford, "I've got to go."

By the time Clarke opened the cockpit door, the struggle inside was perhaps 20 to 30 seconds old. A 27-year-old Kenyan named Paul Kefa Mukonyi, a graduate student at a university in Lyons, France, later diagnosed with acute paranoia, had burst into the cockpit trying to seize control of the plane. As he fought with Captain William Hagan, 53, and first officer Phil Watson, 38, the autopilot became disengaged, causing two steep dives.

The Kenyan man had bitten Hagan on his ear and finger; the captain had stuck his finger in the intruder's eye. A third pilot, Richard Webb, 35, had entered the life-or-death mel?e just a few seconds before Clarke arrived.

The scene before Clarke was chaos. With his arms around Watson, Mukonyi, dressed in a hooded, slick-finish, black winter coat, was flailing and grabbing for the controls. Webb was bearhugging the man around his waist. Hagan was fighting off the man while trying to bring the plane out of its nearly lethal dive. (British Airways later denied that a crash was imminent. However, according to Daily Nation, a Nairobi newspaper, at least one passenger says the captain told him that in four or five more seconds the plane would have flipped upside down, preventing the pilots from ever regaining control.)

Clarke immediately grabbed Mukonyi around his neck and shoulders, trying to wrestle him down. Clarke's strength was just what was needed. With the pilots' help, the Kenyan was pulled to the floor, facing the control panel with his feet pointing to the door.

Once Clarke entered the cockpit, he estimates it took six to eight seconds to restrain the Kenyan. By this time, Gifford had gotten up and was at the cockpit door. In what seemed to be a sea of people, Gifford saw a tennis shoe and a leg. He grabbed it and started pulling.

Mukonyi was pulled out of the cockpit where the two men, another passenger, and the crew fastened his hands and legs with nylon straps. He was then handcuffed. As this happened, he was telling those holding him, in English, "If you let me up, I will show you to the others with me." There were no others, but no one knew for sure then, making the remainder of the flight extremely tense, says Clarke.

The frightened and desperate man also handed Clarke three pages of paper on which he had penciled a note in French. Clarke doesn't know what the note said, nor have subsequent reports indicated its message. The Kenyan had been acting strangely at the London airport before boarding the plane and continuously mumbled incoherently to himself while pacing the British Airways flight, according to news reports.

After the two-minute struggle, the Kenyan was carried to the rear of business class where he sat quietly the rest of the flight. The pilots restored the plane to cruising altitude.

When things settled down, many passengers came to quietly thank a stunned Clarke.

"I don't think I was in shock, but close to it. I don't remember a whole lot after that," Clarke says. "I just remember reflecting about the miracle that had just occurred."

Gifford describes the next two hours to Nairobi as the most sobering time of his life?"It was dead silence. ? every person on that plane knew God had intervened."

The plane safely landed at 10:10 a.m. local time. Four passengers and one crew member were taken to a local hospital; Mukonyi was also hospitalized. After meeting and praying with the two heroes, Professor Krabbendam continued on to Uganda. (When he returned two weeks later, Krabbendam reported that the trip was blessed by God, with many conversions in jails and villages.)

Eventually, Gifford and Clarke were taken to a hotel in Nairobi. There, media from around the world kept the phones ringing. For the two men from South Carolina, their mission trip had just begun.

Gifford and Clarke called their families in Sumter. Their wives, shocked but relieved, told them they would support them if they went to Uganda or simply came home. The two friends decided they were not prepared physically or mentally to go on. They booked tickets back to Charlotte.

They arrived in the United States mid-afternoon December 31 to their families and a crush of reporters and photographers.

"It was such a special time to see those two boys come through that door safe," says Ann Shaw, Gifford's mother.

Marian, Gifford's wife, cried as the magnitude of what had happened finally hit her.

Sissy, Clarke's wife, says, "I just remember hugging Clarke and being absorbed in his chest. ? Clarke was like a deer looking into the headlights?he was startled."

As he walked into the airport with cameras flashing, Clarke says, "At that point, I realized the episode was a whole lot bigger than I ever thought it was."

Their prayer for safety had been answered, and now the scope of their witness would be expanded beyond what they imagined possible.

In the following weeks, Gifford, a ruling elder at Westminster Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Sumter, and Clarke, an adult Sunday school teacher at Trinity United Methodist Church in Sumter, were able to testify of God's faithfulness and the power of prayer in interviews with reporters, speaking engagments at churches, civic clubs, high schools, and appearances on radio and TV programs.

They were guests on "Good Morning America," "The Today Show," "Inside Edition," "The 700 Club," and "Montel Williams." They were honored by the state of South Carolina and the city of Sumter, where a day of prayer for missions was proclaimed in their honor. And the requests for interviews keep coming.

In their appearances, Gifford, vice president of Builder's FirstSource, and Clarke, who runs an insurance agency, are quick to credit the prayers of fellow church members and other believers on their behalf. Specifically they mention their friend Dickie Jones, a 47-year-old Sumter lawyer and member of First Baptist Church. He had promised to pray for them and sent them notecards with a written prayer on it each day they were gone. The incident on the plane occurred on December 28 just before midnight South Carolina time; Jones's prayer cards for that day were amazingly on target.

For Clarke, Jones wrote: "Today. ? not only am I praying for your safety, but I'm praying that the sense of security that you feel is your confidence in Christ." Jones then wrote Psalm 23:4 and inserted Clarke's name?"Though Clarke walks through the valley of the shadow of death. ? "

For Gifford he wrote: "Today I am praying for your safety. I am praying that, like Daniel's situation, God will shut the mouths of the lions whatever and wherever they are, so you will be safe." He then quoted Daniel 6:21-23, inserting Gifford's name.

Jones says he had a mental picture that day of men with automatic weapons in the aisle of the plane but dismissed it as improbable. The Holy Spirit, he says, led him to the verses to pray for Gifford and Clarke.

"I don't think I'm a great example of a prayer warrior," he says. "I'm just a man in a little town who believes in Jesus."

Peggy McCreight, 73, a long-time family friend and neighbor of the Shaws, notes that Gifford and Clarke were faithful Christians well before the spotlight found them.

"I really believe God is honoring their quiet walk," she says. "I don't believe there's anyone in our town who wouldn't say those are two righteous men. They live it in their families, their churches, and their businesses."

From Gifford and Clarke's perspective, the real story is not their heroism but answered prayer and God's goodness.

"We consider ourselves ordinary men whom God did extraordinary things through," he says. "We thought our mission trip was to Uganda, but God's given us another mission to thousands here in the States."

Editor's Note: Because psychiatric evaluations indicated Mukonyi was mentally ill, Kenya's Attorney General Amos Wako has declined to prosecute him.

A Christian Reader original article.