Have you ever wondered if there was something wrong with you? You wanted to go right but somehow you ended up left? You wanted to do good but somehow . . . well, it didn’t quite work out the way you planned? You might have even wondered if you were possessed.
That’s good if you have felt that way. Now I know you think I’m nuts, but bear with me. First of all, you need to know there is nothing wrong with you. God didn’t make any mistakes. You are perfectly made but there is a slight problem. The problem is we aren’t made to be good. Even Jesus said, “Why callest thou me good? There is none good but God.”
Was he being facetious or was he trying to tell us something about how we are made? I am going to use a true story to illustrate my point. This happened to me and it is recounted in this edited excerpt from The Lost Coin. To set the stage, Sam Season is a student pilot who just received his solo certificate and is going up for the first time by himself to practice some maneuvers. It’s a perfect day. The plane is in perfect condition. But something goes horribly wrong. Let’s pick it up in Chapter 1 which is on our website. Sam is at altitude and practicing:
Sam started out with some easy maneuvers keeping his eye on the airport. He liked to leave breadcrumbs of landmarks to make it easier to navigate back. He practiced the usual maneuvers, banking to the right, banking to the left. This was very routine, and after a while, he was a little bored. Need to spice this up, he thought.
He decided to practice a power take-off stall. This was more interesting and required some real skill. It was done to simulate a stall on take-off and how to recover. One of the first things Sam learned was that an aeronautical stall had nothing to do with stalling the engine. A stall means the airplane has no lift. There is a minimum airspeed required to keep a plane aloft. Anything less, the plane falls. There is no gradual loss of lift. It was all or none. When a plane stalled, it fell from the sky like a rock.
He pulled the nose up, thrust the throttle all the way back in and reset the trim to take-off position. He inched the nose up, slowly, watching the speed drop off and keeping his eye on the little white ball on the lower left hand side of the dash. That indicated that enough right rudder was being employed to compensate for the torque of the engine and keep it level. As the plane speed slowed, more and more rudder was applied to keep the ball in the center. He waited apprehensively for the plane to stall which would be a quick dip of the nose if he did it correctly from which he would nose the plane down to recover enough airspeed to resume control.
Slowly . . . slowly, he nosed the plane upward. Slowly the airspeed dropped. The ball stayed centered. As he approached 40 knots, he knew he was getting close to stall speed. The right rudder was pushed to the floorboard. And then the stall. The nose dropped. He pushed the stick forward and quickly recovered, level and flying straight. He was proud of himself. It was textbook.
Suddenly without warning and with full power still employed, the plane dropped. It fell like a rock. No lift. The strings cut. No control. Straight down with full throttle. The plane went into an immediate counterclockwise spin. The earth rose up to meet him, a kaleidoscope of greens, oranges, and browns in a dizzying blur.
Sam immediately reacted. His instructor had shown this to him how to recover but he had never done it himself. He struggled to remember.
How did he do it again? He panicked. The altimeter was spinning, only 2,000 feet left to recover. Full right rudder to stop the spin? . . . yes . . . that’s it.
Sam pushed the right rudder to the floorboard. No effect. The plane continued to spin out of control as the rotating earth loomed larger and larger. He pulled on the elevators. Hard. As hard as he could. No effect. They would not budge. He turned the ailerons clockwise hard. The plane continued its downward spin. He was out of ideas. Totally helpless.
The situation was dire with only seconds remaining and he knew it. The tach was redlined. The airspeed was pegged. In the few seconds left, Sam’s life started passing before him.
The plane seemed to spiral downward at supersonic speed. The earth roared up to meet it. He never thought about praying nor had he time. He resigned himself to his fate as he twisted and pulled on the controls. What else could he do?
Not to be a spoiler, but Sam does survive (besides, you know I’m alive). He is hesitant to continue his flying but his instructor convinces him to go up with him one more time just to show him what he did wrong. We pick it back up in Chapter 7. George Sherman is giving Sam instructions:
“Ok. Easy does it. This time we are going to do a power take-off stall, just like you did before, only we are not going to try and recover. We are going to let it stall and go into a nose dive.”
“Okayyyy, you’re the boss.” Sam set the trim to takeoff and nosed the plane up and up. The plane slowed more and more as Sam increased the attitude. Images of his last flight flooded back to him. His stomach knotted up. He kept the little white ball in the middle with the right rudder. He could feel in his bones what was about to happen. Suddenly the nose dropped. As instructed, Sam did not try to recover. He let it fall. It nosed straight down and started to spin. Deja vu.
George touched Sam’s tense shoulder. “It’s ok, Sam,” he said pointing his finger at the throttle, “pull the throttle all the way back.”
Sam wasted no time yanking it to idle.
“Now, don’t touch anything,” Sherm instructed. “Give it a little right rudder and keep your hands on the wheel to guide it.”
The plane stopped spinning and began to level off on its own without any effort. Sam looked over at Sherm. He was shocked.
“Really!” Sam almost shouted as he reset the trim and gave it some gas. “You mean that was all there was to it? This thing flies itself?”
Sherm just smiled. “Almost, Sam. Look, what happened that day was not your fault. You didn’t have the proper training. That’s my fault. The fact that you recovered is nothing short of a miracle but you did it. Let me explain what you did. First of all, this plane is designed to fly. It’s a natural flyer. The only way it can’t fly is if we make it not fly.”
“Make it not fly?” Sam asked puzzled.
“Exactly. It was born to fly. That’s what it does naturally. All it needs is some guidance. When you kept the throttle in and were pulling on the controls, you were in effect holding it in a stall, preventing it from flying. If you had taken your hands off all the controls, it probably would have done what comes naturally, flying.
“Amazing,” Sam said. “All along I thought I was flying the plane and lo and behold, I wasn’t flying it at all. It was flying itself. You’re saying all I have to do is make small adjustments and point it in the right direction.”
“That’s about it. The plane is going to follow the laws of aerodynamics if the operator aligns himself with them. If he fights them, it doesn’t work. The only thing I can figure about what saved you, other than divine intervention, was that when you turned the ailerons in the direction of the spin, at least you stopped fighting it. That was apparently enough alignment to come out of the spin into that spiral you described and defeat death.”
Agree with your adversary quickly in the way came to Sam’s mind as Sherm talked. He kept mulling over what he had just learned. It was such a simple concept. Simple? That was a term he and Mo had been discussing a lot of recently. Sometimes it was too simple to see.
So now this light bulb goes off in Sam’s head. He suddenly realizes that what happened in the air is analogous to the failures in his life. He excitedly explains it to his girlfriend, Mo. We pick it up at the end of Chapter 7:
“What I learned today is there are not just immutable laws of physics in the universe, there are immutable spiritual laws. You can fight them if you want, but they always win. Take the plane as a metaphor. Say I am the plane. The cockpit is my spirit. It’s perfectly made, designed to do what it does, just as man is. Nothing wrong with it. How it operates is determined by the pilot. The pilot knows what he is doing and guides the plane according to his will. When aligned with all the laws of aerodynamics there is no problem. But if it’s not aligned with those laws, it falls from the sky. If our cockpit contains God and we are in alignment with His will, everything works perfectly. If not, disaster. Anytime the plane decides it can fly itself, or we decide to climb into the cockpit ourselves, God lets us so we can prove to ourselves it can’t be done. If we take over for the pilot acting in the delusion of independence against the laws of nature, the result is always the same. We crash and burn. The plane is just the vessel, the container in need of a pilot. Man is just the vessel, the container in need of an operator. In my case, in my ignorance, I took a perfectly good vessel and forced it into a stall until it all but killed me. We do the same thing in our spiritual lives. When we take control and start jerking and pulling at the controls because we can’t wait on God, we force ourselves into a spiritual stall. Wait, the Bible says, on the Lord.”
What Sam learned was that we are all perfectly made vessels, but that is all we are. It is a delusion propagated by Satan, who believes it himself, that we operate ourselves as independent persons. We are referred to as jars or vessels in the Bible. Our spirit is the container. The one we contain is in control, either God or the not-god, and we take on the nature of whomever that is, either good or evil. There is no co-pilot. If you think you can do a better job, that you can pilot or co-pilot, He will let you work at it until you finally wear yourself out.
So if you want to fly, stop fiddling with the knobs and let the Pilot do his job and fly His perfectly made vessel. Now that certainly makes my yoke easy and my burden light knowing that the only one who is good is God and I no longer have to try or pretend to be something I am not. I just manifest the Christ in me and His goodness.
If you like what you have read, you can request an advance copy of The Lost Coin in *.pdf format. Just use the contact form to request it. Read all of Chapter 1 by clicking this link.
Very good.