I flew in a ten-passenger Cessna 401-402 from Kansas City to Topeka last week, and I realized something had changed in my feelings about small aircraft.
I used to dread them. My Uncle Harold’s crop duster in northern Minnesota, the World War II-vintage aircraft I occasionally flew on softball trips, the helicopter across San Francisco Bay to Oakland one dark, windy night-all of them left me with a sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach. There was an element of exhilaration, I must admit, much like what I felt as a child when my dad accelerated our ’56 Chevy just before mounded railroad tracks on the blacktopped roads of rural Indiana. But the element of fear dominated whenever I climbed into the belly of a small airplane.
Thus I developed a standard rule of my traveling thumb: any airline that had to ask my weight at the check-in counter was too small to get my business, much less my trust. I stuck to that rule for at least a decade.
But on my trip last week, I realized those powerful fears had disappeared. Apparently five or six flights on a Beaver into the Canadian back country to fish for lake trout and muskie had removed the last vestiges of small-aircraft phobia. It was gone along with the fear of Ferris wheels, first days at school, and the first day on a new job.
As I flew over eastern Kansas (even after having to tell my weight when checking in), I realized I don’t fear too many things anymore. It was symptomatic of the flattening of life’s peaks and valleys that age seems to bring. My lows are less deep-but my joys are less joyous. Can this be a good thing?
On the flat plains below I could look ahead and see Lawrence, the plane’s first stop, and beyond that, Topeka. The prairie stretched unbroken as far as I could see. Bad weather would have been easy to spot and avoid. Life is safer, more predictable, I mused, on the flat plains.
Yet when it comes to human psychology, I wonder how many of us could live consistently on the flat plains. Aren’t peaks and valleys a necessity? Something dies in us if we eliminate the risks. We need opportunities to achieve or to fail, to run a great race or fall flat from the starting blocks.
Like most people, a couple times in my life I have achieved far beyond what I thought possible. Paradoxically, in every case a corresponding low followed the temporary high. “Reactive depression,” the psychologists call it.
I also have been deeply depressed for no apparent reason, and the six-month battle with valium, MMPI’s, and counselors left me shaken. Yet I emerged even stronger: although life had come at me with the force of a hurricane, God somehow helped me weather the storm.
God uses valleys to teach me lessons of great value. I learn far more from them than from the more mundane annoyances of traffic tickets, unbalanced checkbooks, and missed deadlines. I stare in wonder at those who question, Does God really teach through suffering and fear?
A nagging thought as I approach the age ripe for mid-life crisis: if my immature, neurotic fears are one by one being eliminated-like my fear of small aircraft-what will be my teachers of the future? If God works best on the edges of my psyche rubbed raw by fear and uncertainty, in what situations can I expect him to shape me in the future? I don’t know for sure. To dogmatically predict would be arrogant, I suspect. But if I were forced to guess, I’d say it will happen most often in my relationships with people.
Personal relationships seem to grow more complicated as the years go by. Most grade schoolers view their classmates as a pool of potential companions. They simply pick the ones they want to befriend and do it. It’s like picking the ripest, juiciest apple from the orchard. It never occurs to children that there might be years when the apple tree won’t bear a very good crop, or they might lose the capacity or desire to pick.
The years teach differently. If surveys of American adults, particularly males, are any indication, friends become a rarer commodity as the years go by, more like gold than apples. Many of us are forced to treasure the few we have and become less optimistic, frighteningly skeptical about making new ones. It becomes a fearful process to bare bruised feelings and memories to strangers-the very process that establishes fellowship. It fascinates me that what is a commonplace experience for children becomes fertile ground for growing and stretching as adults.
After landing in Topeka, I discovered the flatness of the plains is something of an illusion. People live on plains and hills and in valleys. To meet them and fellowship with them, I must climb emotional inclines and descend into hidden hollows.
It is in people that my greatest experiences will come in future years. Fortunate, isn’t it, that people are God’s work.
Terry Muck is editor of LEADERSHIP.
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