Aviation

There is a story told, and is said to be true, from the early days of aviation.  In those pioneer days planes flew from airfield to airfield to refuel and they could only carry a limited amount of aviation fuel.  One pilot was making a flight around the world and had landed at an airfield for more fuel.  He then set off and after two hours heard some strange noises inside the plane.  As he listened he realised, to his horror, that somehow a rat had got onto the plane at the last stop and was gnawing at the inside of the aircraft.  

He knew this was a very dangerous situation because if the rat gnawed through some vital cable or control on the plane then the likelihood of crashing was very high.  He was in serious trouble and was two hours away from his last stop and had nearly two hours to go to reach the next destination.  At first the pilot didn’t know what to do and felt deeply concerned and anxious. Then he remembered that a rat was a rodent and was not made for heights.  Rats live on the ground and even under the ground and not thousands of feet in the air.  The pilot started to take his plane on a climb upwards.  He reached a thousand feet, then ten thousand and eventually at twenty thousand feet the gnawing stopped.

How will you turn out in the tough times?

All photos used by permission of Unsplash

In the world of nature, we only really find out whether a tree is evergreen when the season turns to winter.  Throughout all the other seasons, to the untrained eye, it can be hard to tell the difference between those trees that will eventually shed their leaves and those that will keep them. Yet once the sun fails to climb quite as high in the sky and the temperature drops, the truth begins to emerge. When winter sets in, it soon becomes clear which trees have kept hold of their leaves and which have not.

And so it is, too, with us. Perhaps we do not really know what we are made of until we encounter a little winter in our lives. When things are at their toughest, when life feels at its most frail, that is when we really find out what kind of people we are. Can we remain evergreen and still able to keep singing in the deep dark of winter?