GLOOM AND DOOM? NO!!!!

The klaxon rang loudly across the flight line at the U.S. Air Force Base, located some miles south of the North Pole.  At this air defense operation, well north of the radar net that is the Defense Early Warning system protecting North America,  our job was to protect the North American Continent while our citizens were sleeping soundly, or going about their daily routines, unaware that we were even there, or of our mission.

On this dark and frigid day, the alert came through our radio speakers loudly… Red Alert.. Red Alert.. Scramble Red.   

As an air traffic controller realizing that dense ice fog clung to the ground, visibility and ceiling were below legal landing “minimums,  my heart began to race.  The young fighter pilots did not have a choice, they had to go, the country was depending on them.

As the alert hanger doors opened and the 2 F102’s interceptor aircraft, Razor Red One and Two,  began to taxi, the lead pilot, voice stressed, yelled into the microphone that he couldn’t see anything, outside of the cockpit canopy.   He was led out to the runway by a Follow Me truck  and the two jets  made their turn, hopefully to line up with the long runway, then lit off the afterburners, pushed throttles completely forward,  and streaked down the runway  through the ice fog and darkness, climbing to meet the intruders.

At this northern most air base, the nighttime and total darkness lasts for many months and these pilots, depending on their ability to precisely follow their instruments and on the skills of the controllers, those calm voices guiding them, took off and climbed out.

Thinking back to that day recently,  it reminded me of another early experience.  Two years before the far north incident, stationed at an air base in Mississippi, situated just a few blocks from the U.S. Gulf Coast, we received reports of an approaching  hurricane.

The base aircraft were all ordered to leave immediately and to fly to a safer location hundreds of miles north of the coast. As I watched them take them depart I was amazed at their rate of climb. The winds had already picked up to about  60 mph and as the aircraft took off into the wind they climbed almost vertically, not nose up but just being lifted vertically by the force of the headwind, as if they were on an invisible elevator.

Also noticeable  was that as their landing gear left the runway,their last contact with earth, and the gear retracted into the fuselage, they climbed even higher, faster.   

As I left the base that day and went home to await the storm in a very small mobile home in a trailer park that an "airman last class" could afford, very close to the coast, I learned more about demonstrating courage and overcoming gloom and darkness.  Most of the airmen on base were protected in the concrete  barracks but I lived off-base with my wife and we had nowhere else to go. 

Through the hurricane, which devastated a lot of the coastal area, my

wife and I clung to each other, praying, as the mobile home shook and rattled on its flimsy foundation.  We made it safely through and felt God’s presence throughout the storm.

All of these experiences have been so helpful to me in relating them to how God provides protection and uplift in times of gloom and doom. They help us better understand God and our protection, in proving that we can trust more and be less frightened by conditions outside of our control. 

Here’s a summary of what I have learned.

·     That God, the Creator, our Father, as described in the Bible by Christ Jesus, is a very present help in trouble.  That God is Spirit, not material, not a human form sitting somewhere in space, but the essence of Spirit, unseen perhaps, but FELT by everyone who turns away from material sense of existence to seek the spiritual reality.    (God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.  (John 4:24)   

·       That we can listen to the quiet voice of the controller for takeoff, climb and a safe landing.  Turning to God, that still small voice that calmly guides us through the fog of materiality, giving a clear signal when the outside noises of matter are silenced, is a safe navigation aid. (And thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand, and when ye turn to the left. (Isaiah 30 :21))

·       That we can face headwinds of trouble; lack of finance, love and understanding; illness, fear, sin and death because the once frightening headwinds put lift in our wings and help us climb higher spiritually. Those winds are an earthly phenomena, but God is Spirit, Love, untouched by matter and the whirlwind of mortal reasoning.  (¶ Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. (Proverbs 3:5))

·        

    That when our landing  gear comes off the runway, when we turn loose of that last contact with earthly thinking, stop clinging desperately to a material sense of life,  and reach out to fly higher spiritually, we are lifted up even faster, higher.   As we release our tight hold on a material sense of life and existence, we begin to soar into an atmosphere of thought where fog dissipates and the sunshine of clear thinking reveals our true sense of life.

We can rejoice in our inevitable growth spiritward, to understand our own true identity as “the image and likeness” of God, knowing that we are not separate from God, but that  …in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring.  (Acts 17:28)    as the Apostle Paul observed. 

We don’t have to go somewhere else, at some other time or to some other place to be God’s image and likeness, we are there NOW.  Safe, Guided, Serene.

I love a poem written by John Greenleaf Whittier contained as a hymn in the Christian Science Hymnal.   It often helps me clear my thought in times when I seem to be flying “on instruments”, almost written for a pilot or air traffic controller, or anyone who feels that they are flying blind in the face of earth’s storms.  

Just for a moment, please sit with me here in the cockpit with those courageous young fighter pilots as we race down life’s runway, and sing with them:

Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom,

Lead Thou me on;

The night is dark, and I am far from home,

Lead Thou me on.

Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see

The distant scene; one step enough for me.

So long Thy power hath blest me, sure it still

Will lead me on

O’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent, till

The night is gone,

And with the morn those angel faces smile,

Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile.

Safe flight and happy landings.  God is whispering in your ear...  "Life is eternal, TRUST ME!!!"

(I loved a blog written by Kate Robertson that showed her love for this special poem as well.  Here is a link:  http://stoneriverstudio.blogspot.com.br/2013/08/proceed-as-way-opens.html     )

SlingShot Control

Now what is this? What could this possibly be, all wrapped up so nicely, but such a strange shape for a Christmas gift. It happened a couple of years ago. It was Christmas morning and I had received a gift from my son-in-law, Bob. Wonderful guy Bob but we can’t say that because some years ago he indicated he was tired of everyone saying “Bob is such a nice guy.” So we just call him Bob now. But what was this crazy thing? As the wrapping came off I could now see… a SLINGSHOT!!

What a unique gift. I loved it. I hadn’t had a slingshot since I was a really young guy. What memories flooded in, the scrounging around for an old inner tube, finding a small piece of leather, maybe the tongue of an old shoe, to hold the small stone or whatever ammunition we could find. Funny, but you don’t see many inner tubes any more since tubeless tires came in. How can the world even operate without old inner tubes, what can you make a really good slingshot of nowadays? We used to whittle down a small fork from a tree branch, cut the rubber strips from the tube to make the sling and fasten it all together. We were “armed”.  

With a slingshot you could feel invulnerable, protected, safe and secure. Nobody is going to with fool with a guy that has a homemade slingshot.

Just recently, with all of the news of gun violence, reports of the killing of over 10,000 individuals by guns in the year 2012, day after day, incident after incident, and after a tragedy in Connecticut where 20 children and six adults were killed, ironically , inconceivably, thousands of people flocked to gun stores to buy even more weapons.
I began to think back to those seemingly better days. How a slingshot provided all of the armament and mental courage a young boy needed. What has happened to our world? There is constant talk in the media and even on the street of more gun control, better gun control, and also talk of No gun control, some think that everyone should be armed, that teachers should all have weapons… and of course, the old standard… “guns don’t kill people, people do.” My humble observation is that people without guns don’t kill nearly as many as do people with guns. 

I have a solution and I am officially proposing it today. The solution is Slingshot Control… or, as it really should be called…FEAR CONTROL.   Guns should be outlawed and we should all have slingshots.

My solution, Slingshot Control, is soundly based on lessons from the Bible.  I have learned over the years that we can take advantage of what people have learned through the centuries as recorded in that wonderful book. 

The lesson of significance here is the record in I Samuel of David and his encounter with a giant of a man representing the Philistine army. The Philistines who were forming for battle against the army of Israel and the army of Israel was terrified. Out of the Philistine army stepped the giant, Goliath of Gath, nine feet tall and an experience warrior. He challenged the Israeli army to a "one-on-one" battle to determine victory. He said,” Choose you a man for you, and let him come down to me. If he be able to fight with me, and to kill me, then will we be your servants: but if I prevail against him, and kill him, then shall ye be our servants, and serve us.”**

 

With the army of Israel frozen in fear and nobody stepping up to the plate, young David the Shepherd boy, armed only with a slingshot and some stones but with plenty of courage and a sense of God’s protecting presence, accepted the challenge. Goliath, the fearsome giant, equivalent to a “human assault rifle” by today’s standards, scoffed when he saw that he was being confronted by a young boy armed with only a slingshot and whose only battle experience included struggles with bears and lions. But undeterred, David, trusting in God’s power and the rightness of his cause said , “Thou comest to me with a sword, and with a spear, and with a shield: but I come to thee in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom thou hast defied. And all this assembly shall know that the Lord saveth not with sword and spear: for the battle is the Lord’s, and he will give you into our hands.”** 

Now that’s all well and good but is it relevant to today’s problems? We realize that most Americans that have a weapon or a license to carry a weapon are law-abiding responsible citizens, good people that believe that carrying a self-defense weapon is perfectly sane, a good idea, maybe even necessary. But don’t we each need to look deep within our hearts to reevaluate whether the sacrifice of our innocent citizens is worth the risk of having the whole country heavily armed.

Is it indeed time to consider whether our lives are so threatened that we have become a citizenry that lives in fear of guns and evil. What many consider to be the greatest nation in the world sets a bad precedent when we are not even close to the top of the “good country” list in terms of deaths caused by guns in peacetime. 

In perspective, considering David’s victory over the forces of evil, it appears that maybe the size of our armaments should be inversely proportional to our faith in God, the God of love, peace, forgiveness, the God whom the Master Christian reflected so perfectly in his life. The bigger our faith and understanding of God as Life, the more constant our love and the smaller our "slingshots" need to be. 

Despite some seriously troubling quotes from gun advocates, like “ The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun”, history has shown that love and trust in God are more powerful weapons than guns.

To quote the apostle Paul as recorded in II Corinthians, “For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh: For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds; Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ;

And religious pioneer Mary Baker Eddy : “Judas had the world’s weapons. Jesus had not one of them, and chose not the world’s means of defence. He opened not his mouth.” The great demonstrator of Truth and Love was silent before envy and hate. Peter would have smitten the enemies of his Master, but Jesus forbade him, thus rebuking resentment or animal courage. He said: “Put up thy sword.”

“Choose Ye this day whom ye will serve.” ****


**   I Samuel                                                                                 

*** Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures 
****Joshua 24