Category: Aviation

THE SECRET KEY TO SUCCESS

THE SECRET KEY TO SUCCESS

“I, wisdom, dwell together with prudence;

I possess knowledge and discretion. [1]

“How have you ridden motorcycles for forty years and never been hurt when seven of my friends have been badly injured or killed on them?” The more I thought about my young friend’s question, the more safety precautions I listed. But then I realized it boils down to one thing, and that one thing is the secret to everything. It’s the secret to motorcycle safety and economic security. It’s the secret to physical health and psychological wellbeing. It’s the secret to a successful life, and it is baked into the universe as surely as gravity.

The secret is margin.

The old word for it is prudence, and its spiritual roots go back to the Garden of Eden when our first parents decided they could do life without God in their hubris. “Cursed is the ground for your sake,” said God. “In pain, you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Thorns and thistles it will grow for you. By the sweat of your face, you shall eat bread till you return to the ground.” The need for margin was born that day—the cosmic Murphy’s Law—and whoever observes it reaps the benefits.

An airline pilot and flight instructor who was retiring after fifty accident-free years (we never hear about those guys, do we?) boiled it all down to one simple principle: Always fly with the idea that if anything can go wrong, it will and work hard to prepare for it. For example, most general aviation accidents result from fuel exhaustion. The veteran’s advice? Never assume the gages are correct. Always know exactly how much you put in before you launch and exactly how many gallons per hour that ship burns. Then land and refuel when you think you have one hour of flying time remaining. Simple right? Impose a one-hour fuel margin and NEVER break it. That’s prudence. That’s margin.

It is the same with money. We live in a world of economic hazards. Anything can go wrong and usually will at the worst possible moment. A tornado can blow your house down or flood it. A pandemic can destroy your job. Yet few operate with any self-imposed financial margins. We fly along on credit with little to no reserve, assuming that all will be well. Until the bottom drops out, the sky closes in, and our economic engines start to sputter. Safe landings are hard to come by in those situations.

But the biblical principle (see Proverbs 6:6-11) is simple: Work hard, spend less than you earn, set aside funds for future contingencies, and do it consistently, year after year. Then the poverty tsunami cannot catch you, nor the scarcity bandit overpower you.  

Margin. Prudence. Marriages need it, churches need it, and people need it. With it, we have enough to make it through the inevitable tough times brought on by the fall. Without it, we fall apart.

[1] The New International Version. (2011). (Pr 8:12). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

STRAIGHT LINES WITH CROOKED STICKS An Evangelical Response to the State of the Union Speech

STRAIGHT LINES WITH CROOKED STICKS An Evangelical Response to the State of the Union Speech

Parents of young children need eight hands, I thought as the mom and dad juggled tiny baby, luggage, diaper bag, car-seat, boarding passes, and ID while shepherding their toddler through Phoenix Sky Harbor security. I wish they’d hurry up. Then the agent slowed things down even more by starting a conversation with the little guy.

“Is this your daddy? Uh huh. No, you don’t have to take off your shoes. Is this your mommy? Uh huh, you can hold your bear. Is that your baby sister?”

C’mon dude! Any idiot can see he’s their son! Stop harassing these people and let us in so we can all go home! If TSA agents could read minds I’d be in jail.

Then I remembered a recent news report: Human-trafficking is everywhere all the time and it is not all about sex. The Hispanic, and Romanian house-keepers in my hotels, the Moroccan Uber driver in Austin, the Russian donut shop clerk in Williamsburg, the Asian and Latino cooks who work seven-days-a-week in local restaurants. All might be in a form of slavery, working themselves to death to pay off enormous immigration debt to ruthless traffickers. Some surely are.[1]

Then there are the so-called “sex-workers”: Children, even infants, stolen, smuggled, sold into the sex trade to grow up—if they live that long—with no identity, no power, no voice, no skills and no hope. People who want to do immoral things often plan to do them on vacation. Susie Harville, who fights trafficking in Biloxi, Mississippi casino culture, told World Radio: “We had a person come down to the Mississippi Gulf Coast on a convention and um, while he was here he actually ordered a 12 year-old and a 16 year-old. One was a boy and one was a girl. What we found out was this Montana man was a deacon in his church, was married and had two children at home.”[2]

Twenty years after NAFTA—which George H. W. Bush negotiated and was ratified under Bill Clinton—killed our local textile economy, our still-struggling region is considering Casino gambling to create jobs. Really.[3]

My gut clinches in anger and grief at such stories. Doesn’t yours? But that’s not all. Scripture commands more than sympathy. “Welcome the stranger,” said Jesus. “Provide for the poor and the sojourner,” wrote Moses. Protect the immigrant, the fatherless, and the widow,” preached Jeremiah.[4]

All these ideas and one more simmered in my mind as I read the State of the Union Speech. (I no longer watch. The circus takes too long). God draws straight lines with crooked sticks. Trump the former casino owner advocates for a border solution that will choke entry points for traffickers. Who isn’t for that? Trump, who said “They have to go …” during the campaign argues for fair treatment of the dreamers while fixing our decades old immigration problems. Trump the thrice-married adulterer who has feasted on the fruits of the sexual revolution advocates for that revolution’s greatest victims—the unborn—because we are made “in the image of a holy God.”

Presidents “learn as they go” on the job, said the Arizona sheriff who called Trump’s campaign concrete wall idea a medieval solution to a 21st Century problem. “I support his current position.”[5]

Whether his policies indicate a shift in his personal morality—and I pray they do—is irrelevant. Franklin Roosevelt broke the law by providing covert support for Great Britain from 1936 to 1939 and died in the presence of his paramour in Georgia.[6] Serial adulterer John F. Kennedy[7] solved the Cuban missile crisis, preventing World War III. Rabid anti-communist “Tricky Dick” Nixon ended the Vietnam war and normalized relations with Red China, stifling communism and laying the foundation for global trade which brought billions of Chinese out of poverty and made Dollar General possible.

God draws straight lines with crooked sticks.

That’s why evangelicals like me voted for Donald Trump. We can walk and chew gum at the same time. We pray for his soul while we pull for his policies. If he succeeds in choking the flow of human trafficking and building a barrier wall against abortion, we will rejoice. Hillary Clinton would have done the opposite. It’s that simple.

I’ll try to remember that the next time TSA grills a toddler and Trump tries to privatize air traffic control, which I think is insane. Will you?

[1] https://worldandeverything.org/2019/01/listening-in-raleigh-sadler/

[2] https://worldandeverything.org/2019/02/protecting-children-on-the-gulf-coast-part-1/

[3] https://www.wsls.com/news/virginia/southside/a-casino-in-danville-it-could-happen

[4] Matthew 25:32-40; Leviticus 19:33-34; Jeremiah 7:5-7.

[5] https://worldandeverything.org/2019/01/washington-wednesday-border-security-2/

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_Mercer_Rutherfurd

[7] https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/reliable-source/post/jfk-intern-mimi-alford-shares-story-of-her-affair-with-kennedy-in-new-book-relevant-historian-robert-dallek-says-yes/2012/02/06/gIQAFgF1uQ_blog.html?utm_term=.d3b02518f54c

WAKE UP YOUR DREAMS:With Good Summer Reads

WAKE UP YOUR DREAMS:With Good Summer Reads

You have dreams that need waking, aspirations of which you are unaware, mental landscapes that will escape your notice unless someone outside your acquaintance introduces you to them. That someone is waiting to take you to new places this summer, giving you hours of enlightening entertainment, for about the price of a large pizza.

Of whom are we speaking? Authors of course, those strange people who spend months, even years, in research and writing isolation so that you and I can travel new worlds in our imaginations.

Recreational reading does several beneficial things. Our brains need rest from the daily grind. Light reading helps us escape.  Most of us never travel to other cultures and cannot travel to other times. Good storytellers also take us places impossible to visit, expanding our horizons and understanding of human nature along the way.

And if you think you don’t have time to read, consider: the average American spends 608 hours per year on social media, and 1642 hours on TV. According to author Charles Chu, who did the math, we can read 200 books in 417 hours![1]

Books are better than movies too. The pace and length of a good novel or memoir replace the storytelling rush job that is a movie with time and space to imagine the world on the page, see the multiple motives and connections a movie doesn’t have time to develop, and strengthen our understanding in the process.

Good books, even if they aren’t overtly Christian, also strengthen our faith and stimulate our dreams. They help us see ourselves as we are and feed aspirations of what we might become.

A book is an investment of your time, so it is important to find a genre’ that you enjoy. If you aren’t sure where to start it helps to read reviews from trusted sources like World Magazine or Focus on the Family. Here are a few on my shelves broken down by genre’. In honor of the 74th anniversary of D-Day we’ll begin with WWII.

WWII, nonfiction – D-Day: The Climactic Battle of WWII, by Stephen Ambrose; Citizen Soldiers, also by Ambrose; Jimmy Stewart: Bomber Pilot, by Starr Smith; Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand; The Generals: Patton, Marshall and MacArthur and the Winning of WWII, by Winston Groom (author of Forest Gump); The Lost Airman: A True Story of Escape from Nazi Occupied France, by Seth Meyerwitz and Peter F. Stevens; A Man Called Intrepid: True Story of the Hero Whose Spy Network and Secret Diplomacy Changed the Course of History, by William Stevenson; Silent Running: My Years on a WWII Attack Submarine, by James F. Calvert.

Historical Fiction – The Winds of War, War and Remembrance, and A Hole in Texas, by Herman Wouk; The Hornblower series, by C.S. Forester. The Aubrey / Maturin series, by Patrick O’Brian (caution, strong language).

Biography / Memoir – Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World, by Eric Metaxas; Sailor and Fidler: Reflections of a 100-Year-Old Author, by Herman Wouk; God and Churchill, by Wallace Henley and Jonathon Sandys; West with the Night, by Beryl Markham; The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, and Charles Lindbergh and the Epic Age of Flight, by Winston Groom.

Mysteries and Thrillers – The Last Days series by Joel C. Rosenberg; The Testament, by John Grisham; Sydney Chambers, series by James Runcie; The Brother Cadfael Mysteries, series by Ellis Peters; Blink, by Ted Dekker.

Nothing here that suits your fancy? Find something that does, dig in and wake up your dreams.

[1] https://qz.com/895101/in-the-time-you-spend-on-social-media-each-year-you-could-read-200-books/

GOD BLESS YOU DOGFACE

Two hundred and eighty-four combat missions in helicopter gunships over Vietnam, flying in support of the SEALS and River Patrol Boat squadrons along the Mekong Delta, followed by a stint with Air America, the CIA air force in Laos along the Ho Chi Minh trail, qualify a man to comment on the meaning of Memorial Day.

My late friend, Paul Steube, who flew those missions, was rightly proud of his service. Of flying with the Helicopter Attack Light 3rd Squadron (HAL 3) Seawolves, he wrote, “It was sort of like dancing around the sky, hurling thunderbolts at anyone foolish enough to reveal themselves by shooting tracers at us.  And they couldn’t touch us.  We were too good, too lucky, too cute, and we were so young. Lord, we knew we were something.”

It wasn’t until much later in life that Paul came to appreciate the role of the common, “dogface,” foot-soldier. That’s when he wrote the following tribute.

“I want to tell you something that took me 54 years to learn.  And I am so glad that I learned it in time to tell my brother (who was an infantryman).

I was a mustang in the Navy. That’s someone who gets a commission after serving as an enlisted man. After I’d been in the Navy for a couple of years, I was fortunate enough to get into the NAVCAD, or Naval Aviation Cadet, program.

Going to Pensacola! Going to get those wings of gold, the Holy Grail! It was a demanding program, especially difficult for me, but I made it. I made my five requisite carrier landings and got my Naval Aviator Wings and a commission as an Ensign.

Years later, in the observations memorializing the Fiftieth Anniversary of the D-Day landings, I learned about what some other people had done, and still do. And it finally dawned on me that I didn’t amount to a pimple on the behind of the noblest man on the field of battle: The Straight Leg Infantryman.

Usually not much more than a boy.

Usually given not much more than a hunting rifle.

Usually told not much more than, “Go that way and kill anything that tries to stop you.”

And thank God he does.

And that is why, if ever again I were in uniform, walking down a street or through an airport concourse, and I met a private wearing a small blue enamel rectangle with a rifle mounted on it, I wouldn’t stop to explain.  He would simply have to wonder the rest of his life, why did that Navy Commander salute me?

God bless you, Dogface.”

Study the killing fields of Pol Pot that ran with the blood of innocent millions after America withdrew from South East Asia and the truth of Scripture will stand: As long as sinful man remains on this fallen planet there will be ruthless aggressors who seek by violence to impose their will on peaceful populations. Thank God for the soldiers past and present who have died to defend them.