Terry Thompson’s Blog

It the headset turned up?  Are you on frequency?  Are you taking time everyday to get direction and guidance from the perfect Controller?   Jesus says He stands at our door and knocks, and if anyone hears His voice and opens the door, He will come in to fellowship with him (Revelations 3:20).  Determine today to reserve frequent and specific times to be alone with the Lord just to talk.  He wants to guide you in a fulfilling journey of life, both on this earth and throughout eternity.

If you have ever had in-flight radio failure, tell us how your felt and what you did.

Communication failure with God may be because you lack a true personal relationship with Him.  In such case, the only message you need to send is your acceptance of His call.  You may have so many interferences in your life that you don’t recognize Him when He contacts you or tries in a number of ways to get your attention.   Then again, you may have drifted so far out of the range of His influence that you are totally out of touch with what He wants to say to you.  As in any communication problem in the air, you need to get closer to Him, rid yourself of the interferences, identify yourself and say, “Go ahead.”  Then listen.

It’s a sinking feeling deep in your gut when it is critical to talk to someone on the radio and you can’t make the connection.  It may be your radio is inoperative.  Perhaps there is some kind of external interference. You may just be out of range.  In almost every case, though, the controller is trying to contact you, his transmission is going out loud and clear, but you are not getting the message. 

Sometimes we have the same problem in our communication with God.  We were created with a natural need to have connection with the Creator.  When we are out of regular communication with Him, we feel empty and alone.  We may have a lot of activity going on with family and friends surrounding us, but, without the supreme Controller, we feel lonely.  That’s when we need to check out our personal communications system, check for interferrence, and check on our range from the Transmitter. 

Give me your thoughts.

Deferring to God in daily living is not any more mysterious than deferring to our instruments when in the clouds.  First, we must accept the fact that our own judgment can be flawed , and that God’s judgment is perfect–our minds are not as accurate as the instruments.  Then, we pray for wisdom and consult the scriptures for application to our daily decisions–we crosscheck one instrument with the others.  When we are seeking Him through His Word and are in regular communication with Him through prayer, the decisions we make, large or small, will be aligned with His desires for our life–the instruments will keep us level and on course.  He asks nothing more of us…and nothing less.  Are you trusting Him completely?

In the airplane, with no outside visual references, we have to give our eyes something from which to reference our spatial orientation.  We replace outside references with our primary flight instruments.  We all know that the only option for flying in IMC is to trust our instruments, since we can’t trust ourselves in that environment.   The truth is we can’t trust ourselves in much of anything. Our mind and body will often betray us.  What seems right to us from logic and experience frequently turns out to be a mistake.  We can’t see and fully understand what is really out there. We need another reference that is more reliable.  Solomon put it plainly that anyone who trusts in himself is a fool (Proverbs 28:26).  As we develop our relationship with the Lord, we come to realize that we have in Him the source of all wisdom.  As our faith in the instruments rather than in our senses has proven successful, our faith in God rather than ourselves proves equally successful.

The instrument phase of my Air Force training included a session in the Barany chair named for Dr. Robert Barany, an Austrian Nobel Prize winning physician.  Dr. Barany’s early 20th century experiments led to the discovery of the vestibular system of the inner ear as the source of our sense of balance and body movement.  The Barany chair was mounted on a rotational axis.  The instructor would spin the blindfolded student in one direction, then slow the rate of rotation.  The student would feel the sensation of stopping and beginning to turn in the other direction.  It provided a lasting impression of the fact that you can’t trust your own sense of movement when you have no visual references. 

It is a physiological fact that we can’t trust our own senses without some form of reference.  We also can’t trust our own spiritual senses without God through His Word and Holy Spirit as our reference.  Isn’t it interesting how God, through our experiences, illustrates His relationship with us.  More on this in the next post.

If you are coming up on a life waypoint, or if you have just begun a new leg of your journey, learn from the past, celebrate it, and thank God for it.  Then, ask Him to show you how you can best prepare for and succeed in your promotion to the next phase.

“…Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.”  (Philippians 3: 13b-14)

Like waypoints along a flight plan, it is important to look forward from life’s waypoints.  New factors will need to be assessed and adjusted for.  Perhaps new techniques and disciplines will have to be applied to make the new direction successful.  Some change will be inevitable, so don’t hesitate to make corrections or take another approach.  Every waypoint takes us one step closer to our destination.   It is a promotion to the next phase of life. We should take advantage of every opportunity to make the new direction better than the one we just completed.  It is a time of renewal–another chance.

At all of life’s waypoints, it is important to look back on where we have been with celebration. The blessings that accompanies the immediate past should be cause for thanksgiving.  Even if the experience was rough and frustrating, God had a reason for it.  He tells us in the scriptures that, if we belong to Him, ALL things that happen are ultimately for our good.  A leg of our journey that was unpleasant may have been to qualify or prepare us for the next leg.  We should learn from it, celebrate it, and thank God for it anyway.  The Bible tells us to be joyful when we face hardships because it develops us and makes us stronger.  Once the past has been acknowledged, learned from, and celebrated, let it go.   Don’t dwell on it.  You have a new en route leg to concentrate on.

When you think about it, our lives are a series of waypoints.  There are many points along the life journey where we change direction.  We plan for some of those points such as graduations, marriage, children, career changes, relocations, etc.  Some of them are out of our control, directed by a higher earthly or heavenly authority.  Some changes are made to avoid adverse situations, while others may be caused by adversity.  New direction may be for convenience or to take advantege of unexpected opportunities.  God uses diversions, planned and unplanned, as a time to speak into our lives in new and exciting ways.  If we give Him complete soveriengty over our lives as we should, we have to be flexible.