Flying a plane for the first time

First Time Flying…

For my 30^th Birthday my wife surprised me by organising a flying lesson.

As with any new endeavour there is a certain amount of trepidation, that knowledge that you really don’t know what you are doing and the ramifications of that, when flying a plane, could be disastrous.

The pilot who took me up can’t have been any older than me but it figures that he did know what he was doing. He ran me through the basic controls before we left the ground but after take-off the controls were all mine!

So off we went flying towards the Mount and up the Papamoa coastline – given the fact that he took the above picture he obviously wasn’t too worried about my flying. As the time of the lesson drew to a close he again took over and landed the plane. Apparently landing and taking off are the hardest parts to master.

I think that too, is the way of life in general, especially when it comes to ministry. When we are starting off we live in that trepidation that we don’t know everything – and for the most part that feeling is always there to some degree – sometimes worse at times than others but thankfully we have people and God to help us, to explain the basic controls. And like flying he also lets us fly by ourselves. When we finally come to landing he has that sorted as well, his destination is already set for us.

People say that staying in the ministry for the long haul is a difficult prospect, in fact the statistics aren’t too flash, so how do we keep on flying.

To continue with our plane analogy , we need to be continually refuelling – it’s a little hard to refuel in midair when you are in a cessna but what if you had one of those jets that can fly behind a refuelling plane like you see in that movies, now that would work.

I think that maybe we need to take time to refuel sometimes, serious intentional time – fatigue only leads to pilot error and lets face it you won’t fly far on an empty tank.

This morning John Watson spoke to the interns and gave this bit of advice. If you wish your arrows to keep hitting the mark then you have to loosen the string on the bow at times otherwise it will eventually break because of the continued tension.

Something for us all to think about.

plane
Originally uploaded by doctornemoidian