Hi Friend,

One of the fascinating things about piloting a private plane is the marvel of natural law.  No matter how many times my hands grasped the yoke of the small Cherokee 140, as I lined up at the end of the runway and pushed the throttle full forward, it was a marvel to feel the transition from the ground beneath the wheels to liftoff, supported only by air beneath the wings.

The same laws of thrust, drag and lift worked every time. The laws of nature are eternal—existing before Adam walked the earth—and had he discovered them before Orville and Wilbur, the Apostle Paul may have brought his message to America.

All the same, being stuffed in the passenger compartment of a commercial jet for several hours with 200 other humans isn’t my choice of a desirable afternoon.  So it was that I spent an afternoon flying from Dallas to Cincinnati with a connecting flight in Atlanta, which didn’t improve the process.  As the plane taxied from the terminal at Hartsfield International, I introduced myself to my seatmate and she responded with pleasantries.  Neither of us was looking for a conversation, she being absorbed in a statistical graph and me in a book.

She noticed the book cover, “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl and that started the conversation.  She was a college professor in Milwaukee, married to a terrific man and they had two daughters, their most valued possessions. But there was a problem.  She was an atheist, or at least a strong agnostic, and her husband a committed Christian.  The girls, just entering puberty, were inquiring about God.

“How are you dealing with that?” I asked, my curiosity peaked. She became very serious, like a person who, having always believed the sky is green, is looking heavenward for the first time.  “We’re allowing them to make their own decisions,” she said, “but they are moving toward my husband’s faith.”  Her voice reflected emptiness.

Children change the worldview of parents.  Now she was faced with the vanity of her own intellectual arrogance versus destroying the faith of her daughters.

The conversation moved forward.  Sometimes people are inclined to reveal their deepest secrets to a total stranger when they won’t tell them to their most intimate friends.  She was a scientist trying to rationalize a matter of faith and she had concluded faith was only for the less intelligent.  She wanted to be convinced, to see objective proof that God is real.

The obvious answer was screaming at me.  “We are passengers in a metal tube traveling through the sky at 550 miles per hour.  Did this jet have a designer?  How could we trust our lives to an engineer in Seattle we have never met yet doubt the existence of the designer of an infinitely more complex universe?”  Structure demands a designer!  Even the airport runway took thought to create.

No sane human would look at the family’s doghouse and claim it happened by accident, yet a scientist questions whether the earth has a designer.

The history of sustained powered flight is shorter than that of spaceship earth which has more passengers while traveling at a speed faster than any man designed aircraft could reach.

Looking up at the sky King David was inspired to sing, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.” (Psalm 19:1) And David was still standing on earth.

Reason was aided by environment.  Even a skeptic can be convinced of natural law—and maybe Nature’s God while flying six miles above the earth.  The seed was planted in the most unlikely location—and in the most unusual soil.  I will always wonder when it will germinate.

Jesus told His disciples that the kingdom of God is like a man who scatters seed on the ground. “Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain—first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head.’’ (Mark 4:26-28)

Believers are like farmers—empowered to sow life-changing seeds to a stranger at 35,000 feet above the earth.  The farmer plants a seed and returns to his house, but the seed grows all by itself.

Until next time,

Jim O’Brien