Category: Grace

Tuesday, March 22, 2022

The Marvels

Of Airplanes

Fishers,

and God’s Creation

Are Everywhere to Be Seen

And Recognized

Psalm 118:24

This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.

Luke 19:5-6

When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, ‘Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today.’ So he hurried down and was happy to welcome him.

Words of Grace For Today

What do you see?

How do you see?

Can you see more if you look more closely?

Can you see better if you remember … well for instance if you remember how kind someone was to you when you most needed someone to see you and respond with kindness?

When I flew all those years as an oil pipeline patrol pilot, ‘100 mph 100 feet off the ground, bored spitless for hours always 30 seconds from death’ (as I used to say, though it was really 110 mph and often 50 feet or even 25 feet above the ground – so 5 seconds from death-, and sometimes between fields a relaxing 500 feet) we pilots knew that in an emergency landing on a busy road was a terrible option. Roads always presented a danger of an unseen power line crossing the road (and if you hit it that would ruin your day for the last time), of a big pothole (a nuisance to road vehicles, but a day-ender for the planes we flew), or a whole host of other ‘challenges’ (like bicyclists, pedestrians, wild animals or pets or livestock, or – the worst to imagine – children).

All that was scary enough so that when we did land on roads which was quite often, for bodily needs (we were in the air for 4 to 12 hours otherwise) we were very alert with wide vision before landing, and we chose remote roads, though that meant gravel and gravel can be slick as ice and snow can be in the winter.

Then when we made it safely down onto the road we knew that the greatest danger was still always immanent. You might think we could relax once the wheels were down and, better, stopped on the road, but NO! That’s when the danger was even higher yet … because if a moving vehicle encountered the plane moving on the road, or even parked on the road, the driver would not likely recognize what was in front of him or her.

When the brain receives information from any of the senses, eyes included, it takes shortcuts, built from experiences, so that it can process quickly how to respond. Seeing a plane on the road is not an experience that any driver is likely to have had even once, yet alone often enough for the brain to build a path for that information coming into the brain to result in a quick enough reaction. Worse, the brain will most likely choose one or more familiar pathways with the result that the driver will not get the impulse to react until more information pours into the brain to even more slowly dislodge the already processed results in the brain and force a new take on the data that is there.

Instead of a plane the driver bearing down on the plane may well ‘see’ a ghost, or a large animal, or a plane in the sky instead of on the road, or tractor or a car or truck, or shimmering reflections of clouds or … the sky is the limit of the possibilities. The brain simply ‘runs back to mama’ to make sense of the extra-ordinary data the eyes have sent it.

By the time the brain has run down a few memory lanes and then finally been jolted back to reprocess from scratch the information still pouring in from the eyes, so much time passes that it is unlikely that the driver will react quickly enough to avoid hitting the plane.

So the newspaper will report: “Safely landed plane smashed to bits by a pickup truck. Pilot dead in the pilot’s seat. Truck totalled when the propeller cuts into it and it’s occupants. Crash discovered hours later by farmer ….”

The planes we flew at 100×100 were marvels of technology, most of it more than 50 years old. The planes were sufficient for the job, but not at all built to hit things, or be hit by things. In that regard they were rather ‘fragile’, shall we say. Still the planes were quite wondrous for all the things we got them to do. There were no pilots among us that were not highly skilled, the top 1% of pilots … or you would get yourself killed in so many ways that did not involve vehicles hitting the plane!

God created the universe. It is more wondrous than any airplane, or any of the marvellous things we did with them, no matter how wondrous the planes may be or the skills with which we flew them. God created all the wonders of the universe, including humans, most of whom are more skilled and wondrous than God’s other creatures.

The question is: how come we humans keep trying to ‘land on busy roadways’ with our lives in this wondrous universe?

The question is: how come we humans keep missing out on seeing ‘the airplanes on the road’, i.e. the wonders of God’s creation before us?

It takes training for the brain to process what the eyes actually see. One has to practice ‘seeing Jesus’ each day. God’s gift to us all is that there are so many opportunities to practice (like pilot training, really) seeing Jesus, when our lives are not on the line. When we practice, then when the real emergencies of life come at us, we will still be able to ‘see the airplane on the road’ for what it is, and we will be able to respond as God designed us to respond. We will be able to ‘fly’. We will be able to respond with Grace.

When we do that then we easily say with the Psalmist: This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.

When we’ve gone down roads so often, roads where we destroy and destory other people to make our way taking their lives for our own gain (driving ‘fortified Hummers’ to take on even ‘moose in our way’ without damage to ourselves), like Zacchaeus the tax collector had, we pray and beg that we will ‘see Jesus’ and know what we are looking at soon enough to ‘climb a tree for a better view’.

What we can count on is that Jesus will always respond to us with grace, and say to us: hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today.

For then we can surely say: This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.