Episode 105 - Flying on Wings Like a Boeing 747

This weekend I went to the Blackpool air show. I've always enjoyed watching aeroplanes. Not just when they do awesome tricks and upside down and do barrel rolls and loop the loops although that is super cool. But I really also enjoy just seeing them flying normally just sitting in the air as if by magic. I think it's amazing. Something so big somehow able to keep afloat on top of nothing. Now I am a massive geek and a trained engineer, so of course I know Bernoulli’s principle and understand why planes can fly. But that doesn't matter. That for me doesn't take away from incredible fact that they do fly, nor does it take away from the spectacle of seeing them do so. Even more so, as I watch the planes career across the sky it doesn't matter whether at not I understand why they stay in the air, they still will.

This is amazing to me. This incredible thing is happening which allow these mammoth tin cans to float seemingly weightlessly and yet the pilot who needs great amounts of knowledge and skill to control the plane needs no knowledge of the laws of physics which allow it fly to do so. If I watch a huge passenger jet traverse the wide open sky the chances are that very few if any of the passengers on the plane are aware of Bernoulli’s principle, the foundation upon which a planes ability to fly is built upon and yet for the sake of their ignorance it won't suddenly drop out of the sky. Planes fly. Whether you understand why they do or not, they still fly.

Sometimes I can get carried away with the why's and how's of life and sometimes they can be important and useful and helpful. And sometimes they don't matter. Not really. I'm not devaluing knowledge,I would never do that. But sometimes some knowledge is more important than other pieces of knowledge, and sometimes some knowledge is just extraneous. In the case of a passenger on a jumbo jet, knowing that planes CAN fly is much more important than knowing why. Sometimes you just need to trust that the engineer knows what he's doing, leave it to him and just enjoy the ride. I try to follow God through this life but sometimes I get distracted or unbalanced by not how or why everything will work. I should learn a lesson from the aeroplane, trust the one who engineered life itself and just enjoy the ride.