My wife’s grandson, Brandon Wilson, is in commercial flight training. On his first night flight training session, just as he lifted off the runway, a deer ran out of the darkness and the landing gear hit it going 70 miles per hour. The plane was immediately powered back to successfully land back on the runway. Damage was done to the landing gear of the plane, but it could be repaired so the plane could continue to fly. Years ago Brandon made the decision that he wanted to become a commercial airline pilot. His life was focused on that goal. When the reality of it began to be unfolded, he encountered this incident. He could have gotten “spooked” by the deer incident and decided to pursue some other career. But, he has a made up mind. That’s what he is going to be. He did not get side-tracked by the incident and any other adversity. He learns from it all to be a better pilot for it. It is all taken as part of the training.
So many times incidents happen in church that causes “offence”, and people will turn their back on the things of God. I know of an incident where there was a disagreement and a fist fight in a church meeting, causing a person to decide to never set foot in a church again. That’s like if after Brandon hit that deer, he said, “I’ll never get in an airplane again.” What that would show is that Brandon wasn’t really committed to flying. We can be religious, but not really committed to Jesus Christ as Lord. We can be born again but living after a natural point of view instead of living by the mind of the Holy Spirit. This results in being easily offended by incidents and opposition. Some people “quit serving God” because of the death of a loved one. If we have a made up mind to walk with God with a heart filled with the Holy Spirit, even when we don’t understand things, we still have our source of life and peace in the Lord. We will still walk with him. We might not understand things but we know that he does, and as we trust in him and live our life in his presence, we will come to the understanding we need to come to. We must understand that God is good, the devil is bad, life and people can be bad, and every person is responsible to obey the promptings and leadership of the Spirit each day in life. As we each do that, we live in victory even in the face of bad incidences, decisions, actions, and attitudes, and in the face of the devil’s devices. To successfully learn to “fly” in this life, we each must learn to submit all to the Lord seeking to learn from and trust him. He is God. We are not. We must make our mind up to walk with him no matter what.
