Life is a Beach

As a child who grew up next to the ocean I have always loved and adored the complexity of the seashore. The never ending action and interaction between the birds, the crashing waves, the shifting sands, the blowing of the wind and finally the variations in light between night, with the changing of the constellations from season to season, to daytime, with the changing tapestry of the sky due to the interplay of the clouds and the sun. The seashore is a continuous display of the broadest view of “life” in its most basic form: birth, living and death, but displayed in a lovely visual and aural poetry.

As every New Year comes I am reminded of my past beach days of running along the water’s edge, avoiding the cold early January waves as they desperately tried to reach out to me and as I teased them with my advances and retreats. Most people made New Year resolutions when I was teenager. However, they were usually in vain as keeping a New Year’s resolution usually seemed to last until early Spring for even the most convicted of believer’s in the ritual, my experiences of seeing packed fitness clubs in January only to be grossly thinned by April giving personal validity to that belief.

The seashore also reminds me of the Bible. God created the universe and then set about to populate it with us. The Bible, in my very simple mind, is about regeneration, about being born, living and then dying, only to have the process repeat itself over and over. Jesus Himself, in His own words said in John 3:3, “No one can see the kingdom of God without being born again.”

The idea or thought of how you could be born again seemed odd when I was younger. But as I read the Bible in its entirety I saw the wisdom and wonder of its form in the theme of constant death and rebirth: God made the world, populated it, and then had to eradicate most of the people and creatures due to the growing sinfulness of its people. With the washing and cleaning action of the water the world was made clean again, reborn if you will, and man once again grew in numbers. But, once again the sinful nature of people grew to overwhelming numbers. So, God gave us His Son, Jesus in order to show us His perfection, see His miracles, hear His wisdom and show us how we all should walk the walk. Then we saw as the people killed Jesus; but in that death all of us are able to be reborn anew for everlasting life….birth, life, death, rebirth. The theme, again to me, is pervasive in the Bible and at the seashore; only once in heaven is the thread cut and then there is a wonderful, everlasting life with our Father.

I left the shore after college and went into the military. The military boot camps that we have seen in so many films, “An Officer and a Gentleman” for one, is a proving ground of sorts. It’s designed to test your mettle, separate the wheat from the chaff, and make strong the weakling; it’s a teaching discipline of mind, body and soul and during your stay there the instructors break you down just to rebuild you in the way they think you need to be to survive. I will fully admit I was a wimp upon entering the military and it really toughened me up. The instructors, the other cadets, the elements and the experience itself when taken in the whole, caused me to become stronger in every way, but in it, the process was one of being born, living and then dying only to be reborn.

But even after my boot camp experiences, the process of being born, into a new fighter unit and then getting my ego beat down by tough as nails ex-Vietnam veteran fighter pilots who dearly believed in the code of “dying like a man” and other machismo, added to my armor. But they had to break me down in order for me to become reborn. And though I tried, and failed, many times to beat these heroes at their own games, one day I would and then I moved on to teach others in the same form and manner, trying to make them better defenders of our skies and better men in general…birth, life, death, rebirth.

As a pilot my father said it is incumbent upon you to always be willing to learn and grow in your craft, whatever it may be. As a man who flew for 56 years and over 35,000 hours, he said he was still learning his craft and searching for that perfect flight until his last, in his last aircraft a B-727, and at the age of 75. That’s a lot of years of being born, living, dying and being born again in order to perfect your ability.

What reading the Bible, being in the military, living with such a Great Santini as my father, being a pilot, a father, a husband and a friend have taught me is that life is a training ground. It is not a place to amass fortunes, or to get the most stuff, or have the best or cleanest house or the most perfect kids, or spouse (though the aforementioned may happen out of God’s will and or circumstance). It is a training environment, God’s boot camp for us. Can you imagine Joseph’s anguish in his up and down life? (GEN 30:24) or Job’s?

At 50 years old I view each New Year as a rebirth in my enthusiasm for life and this boot camp in which I am immersed. Death is inevitable but so is living to the fullest between my birth and death and trying to fulfill God’s will; trying my best at being a better human; failing at times, succeeding at times, going three steps forward with two back, and then trying again, at whatever it is God’s will has me doing; being born, living, dying and repeating. It may seem tedious, but I firmly believe that this is the purpose of our lives. Growing, reorganizing, and then growing some more, that is my never ending quest and commitment to God every day, but I renew that vow every year in heartfelt prayer in early January.

Far off of the shore of which I spoke earlier is a life saving river. In my metaphorically and eclectically weird mind I view it as the river of life. The Gulf Stream starts in the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, turns northbound after leaving the Straits of Florida, and brings a variety of life with it as it passes the North American Eastern Seaboard and turns easterly to enrich Western Europe’s shores. As a kid I used to jump off boats or beaches into this river. The waters surround you and will carry you away if you let them, just like everyday life carries us away. If you struggle to swim you will sink and drown, and even if you are the greatest of swimmers you will eventually tire and drown. It is only when you stop struggling, put your legs out straight, your arms at your side and look to the heavens, to the face of God, and relax, will the water support you and allow you to rest. The salt in the water is what helps to lift you and allows you to float. Jesus is the salt in our everyday lives. Struggle in life and you will die and sink to the bottom, but if you relax and put your trust in Him and give up yourself to His will, the pain of your struggles will disappear and you will begin to float above the everyday weariness of your life.

If you have not done so, recommit yourself to God and to the everyday life he gave you and to being the best you can be, the best that He wants you to be. While here on Earth and when overwhelmed with life, stop swimming, relax, let God support you, gain strength, and then get swimming again, knowing that the Lord is always all around you, ready, willing, and more than able to support your weight.

Christmas Miracle

It was a pristine winter's day as the big jet cruised westward 7 miles above the frozen tundra of far Western Alaska. The Captain and First Officer were in good spirits as they headed for Tokyo and talking about a myriad of topics, as crews normally do when sealed in an aircraft for 8 hours at a time as they traverse the upper layers of the troposphere. The beautiful spectacle of a slowly setting sun as it morphed from yellow to orange and its bottom edge melded with the horizon, caused the crew to take a pause in the conversation and watch as the sun began to settle in its slumber.

At that moment, when the crew's thoughts were the farthest away, a radio call came over the #2 VHF radio and asked if anyone was listening (this radio is always tuned to the international distress frequency). The person on the other end wanted to report the crash of an aircraft. The Captain of our intrepid crew immediately responded that he was listening. The bush pilot, far below and unseen, said that he was flying over a red and white Super Cub, that it was completely destroyed, and burning, and asked the MD-11 Captain if he would relay the coordinates of the crash site to the Air Force in Anchorage, Alaska so they could send out a rescue helicopter. When asked if he saw any sign of survivors he said no, and with a resigned sigh the bush pilot said that the pilot of the crashed aircraft was his son.

After catching his breath, upon hearing this dreadful news, and after reporting the accident to Anchorage Center, the MD-11 Captain excused himself from the cockpit for a short break and headed into the galley area. There he shed some tears for this Dad and the loss of his son and prayed to God asking Him to save this man, somehow, from a lifetime of tears, emotional pain, and anguish that he knew was sure to come...the Captain knew all too well of this sense of loss...as he too, 9 years earlier, held his daughter in his arms after she was run over by a car and slowly passed away.

He knew!! He knew the incredibly overwhelming feeling of loss you suffer when your child dies and the immense pain and suffering it brings.

I was the Captain on the day of that flight and I will never forget hearing that father's calm voice as he announced the death of his son. There is no escape from the deeply personal, emotional pain and suffering that comes form the loss of one's child; the magnitude of the pain is impossible to control and time will not shield the emotional hurt.

My mother told me many times when I was a child that time heals all wounds, and for many years I believed she was correct...until my loss. The pain you get from the loss of a child is life long. The passage of time does begin to hide it, but, the hurt is always just below the emotional surface, welling up, like a geyser when a poignant reminder of the loss causes the pain to hit you full force, as if it had happened yesterday. Every person I know that has lost a child is but a heartbeat from tears when the topic of their loss is reminisced.

One area of contention I had with my daughter's loss was when people came to me and said they could understand how I felt. I was shocked by their naivety, though I was grateful for their compassion. Simply put it is impossible to understand the pain of another unless you too have walked in their shoes and that is why, I humbly think, Jesus was pretty blunt when he said before we can judge another we must remove the plank from our own eye. I do not condemn those who have said they felt my pain, but, I just must caution you that it is impossible to truly understand and feel and know the trauma of another...cancer, disease, etc...unless you too have endured it.

If I've learned anything from Autumn's death it's the magnanimity of what God did for us in choosing to have his son, the most perfect child the world has ever and will ever know, born unto us. God knew all too well the horrible fate that awaited his son, yet he still chose to have him born.

It is a double edged sword too, because there is also the pain of watching your child suffer on the way to his death. God knew He was sending His son to certain torture and horrible physical abuse, yet He still did so. On my pathetic human level had I known that Autumn- Paige was to suffer the way she did and die they way she died I can assure you I would never have wanted her to be born. As a parent I would have wanted to spare her the pain of dying and me the pain of watching her die. And then as bad as those emotions are, the ever present anguish of the loss after the death.

But God had the choice and full knowledge of what was going to happen to His son and He still chose to gift us sinners with the grace of His son...a gift we fully did not deserve, given our incredibly sinful nature. In order to save our wretched and imperfect souls, He gave us a pure and perfect lamb, Jesus, his own child, and sent Him down to us for slaughter.

Can you imagine the anguish our Father felt must have felt? He knew all to well what He was doing and the pain His child would experience, not too mention that He, God, would have to watch His own son suffer. Can you imagine watching your child be absolutely abused by others, severely beaten, spat upon, nailed to cross and hung to die? And yet God still chose, knowing full well the consequences to Him and to his son. He still chose the path that caused Him and His son anguish and brought us salvation. Stop and think as a parent if you could have done that to any of your children...the torture, pain, and suffering they would have to endure to help the lives of someone else. Can you imagine it and could you have done what God did? It is hard for me to even remotely imagine it, but I have to say, the loss of Autumn-Paige has brought me a notch closer to that empathy.

And so it is, now on every Christmas, as I get down on my knees and thank God for giving us His son, I also thank Him profusely for His sacrifice in choosing to accept the pain of watching as His child suffered, died and was buried....all for us sinners. It is a miracle and blessing to all of us humans, without equal, in all of time.

But, there is a happy ending, as we all know! On the third day after His passing, Jesus rose from the grave and he joined His Father in Heaven and now sits at His right hand.

And on a much more human and earthly level, on that fateful winter's day when the son crashed in his aircraft and his father watched from above, here too a miracle occurred: By the grace of God the Air Force rescue crew found the boy alive and after a few months of recuperation and rehabilitation he has fully recovered. Once again he has joined his father flying in the heavenly skies over Alaska.

MERRY CHRISTMAS