Terry Thompson’s Blog

Remember your first night flight?  You had hardly mastered getting the plane off the ground and down again skillfully, and your instructor had you out doing the same thing in pitch darkness.  Lighted instruments, no horizon, a different depth perception–it was a scary thing.  Okay, it’s still kind of scary.  The pucker factor is inversely proportional to the amount of light on the ground and in the cockpit.  Darkness significantly limits the visual inputs we need to maneuver our machine.  We have to compensate using unnatural data and assumptions.  We must depend on interpretations rather than what is visually obvious to us in the daylight.

God and His Son are described numerous times in the Bible as light.  Darkness is supposed to be unnatural and difficult.  God wants us to live in the light.  The difference between flying in the dark and flying in the light demonstrates the difference in living in the Light and living in the dark.  Choose light!

God created us to live by faith in His Son, Jesus Christ.  This faith is not some elusive, esoteric concept.  It is something we practice every day, especially those of us who are fortunate enough to fly.  Like aeronautics, the deepest mysteries of God will never be understood in this life. However, we see the undeniable evidence of His existence at every turn.  The Bible says that, since the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities have been clearly seen so the we are without excuse.  Just as we become better pilots through more practice of instrument flying by faith, we mature as Christians by practicing more faith in the Lord.  Is there something going on in your life right now that you are trusting too much to your own reasoning?  Rely on faith.  Get on the gauges!

Every time we are at the controls of our aircraft, we place our faith in our instruments.  Especially when we enter clouds, losing sight of the environment outside of our plane, we depend on some gadgets to keep us stable and traveling in the right direction. As we added hours to our log book, we became more and more confident in the credibility of a bunch of dials or monitors.  We learned in training that we cannot trust our own bodies to determine aircraft attitude or position. Most of us have confirmed that training by experiencing vertigo–that most misleading feeling known to mankind.  throughout aviation history, hundreds of aviators have perished because they believed their own instincts rather than exercising faith in their aircraft.  How much more important is our faith in God Who has never failed us.

I am often asked to explain how an airplane flies.  People are surprised when I say that I don’t really know.  Oh, I can explain the basics of aeronautical science–lift as a factor of airflow, speed, and angle of attack–but the fact that it works is still a mystery to me.  I am convinced that aeronautical engineers do not really “know” how an airplane flies.  They just know the principles and how to apply them. I don’t know how electricity produces power or how airwaves transport sounds and images. I just have faith that they work because of the evidence resulting from their existence.  My faith in God began with the same reasoning.  Subsequently, that faith developed into a close, personal relationship with Jesus Christ–something that doesn’t come with faith in an airplane.

Perhaps nowhere is faith practiced more than in aviation.  Non-aviators regularly pay money to be hurled through the sky in a machine they know nothing about, trusting in aeronautical principles they don’t understand.  They willingly submit their lives to a cockpit crew they don’t even see.   We aviators, at least knowing something about flying, have even more reason to question the condition of the plane, how it flies, and whether the crew really knows what it is doing.  But do we hesitate to become a passenger?  Do we hesitate to submit out lives to the aircraft and pilot?  No.  We act by faith!