I like to fly in airplanes. If I add up all the miles I’ve flown, it’s well over 500,000 miles, so I have a laundry list of experiences while flying. Even with the delays, changing gates, overpriced food, and uncomfortable waiting chairs, I like to fly.
The take-off is one of the best things about flying; the roar of the engines is energizing. Amazing to understand that these engines are lifting this large metal container – full of people, luggage, and pretzels off the ground and soaring to a destination.
It’s fun to see cities, rivers, lakes, and geography from on high. Flying at night is especially beautiful and no wonder there are shortages of electricity in our country. A few years back, I flew into Chicago on the evening of 4th of July. As we were approaching the airport you could see multiple firework displays of regional towns and amateur pyromaniacs.
There is beauty in the air.
On one flight, the staff were serving food and drinks and the man next to me looked like he was having a stroke. I said something to his wife and the flight attendant. They called on the intercom, asking for a doctor on the flight, and we got him laid down in the aisle. The woman behind me was an emergency room nurse and a doctor came from the front. She said she was a dermatologist. Luckily, she deferred to the ER nurse and didn’t feel the need to examine his moles.
The nurse took charge. She was taking his vitals, talking to the wife about his medical history, and then they gave her headphones. She was speaking with a doctor on the ground and were just seconds away from the flight being diverted and the man came to and sat up. The short version is, he had a vasovagal response. For some reason, the vagus nerve overreacts and can cause changes to heart rate, blood pressure, and occasionally loss of consciousness.
He got back into his seat for the duration of the flight. The couple got to get off the plane ahead of everyone else, with medical staff that met him at the gate. He joked he just wanted to get off the flight before those in first class.
But what I like most about flying is, in a relatively short time, you’re in a new place. Often fun places when you’ve planned a vacation or time to see family. Snow to palm trees is the best. When I was a junior in high school, I was a foreign exchange student to Ghana. At the end of my experience, our flight left at midnight and I was home in Aberdeen SD at 9:00pm that night. Literally traveled half the planet in one day, because we gained time zones flying to the west. Incredible.
The one thing that is guaranteed when you fly is – INTERRUPTIONS. From the crew not showing up to de-icing the plane to gate changes to mechanical issues to weather to who knows the cause – there are interruptions.
The one thing that is guaranteed in our lives is – INTERRUPTIONS. From an illness to a flat tire on the car to an unexpected death of a loved one to a job change to the kids doing something unexpected – there are interruptions.
In the spring of 2027, my new book The Gift of Interruption: Discovering God in the Detours will be published. The hope is we learn to see God in the detours and interruptions in our lives. Even while sitting on the tarmac for two hours.
Image by Ross Parmly
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Do you remember departing the plane and entering the terminal at Port Au, Prince on our flight to Haiti and flying over the mountains to Cap Haitian with fuel dripping from our aircraft? My most memorable flights.