Part of teaching people how to fly is teaching them how to land.  In fact, the landing may be the hardest part of taking a new student pilot and turning him into a private pilot.  The challenges of landing an airplane are many.  Precise airspeed control, a well-flown traffic pattern, glide slope, control coordination and communicating on the radio.  I know when I first learned to fly, I felt like I was doing 20 things at once during the first few landings.

For some students there is another challenge—fear.  It’s the fear of hitting the ground.  As you descend toward mother earth on final, that runway keeps getting larger and larger.  More and more of the windscreen is taken up by earth and pavement, less and less by sky and clouds.  At some point something primal awakens in the back of the students mind.  You can almost hear their brain screaming, “That’s the ground!  This is gonna hurt!”

Glancing at the hand on the control yoke, you can see the knuckles getting white—you can almost feel the tension you see in their hand.  Inadvertently (or maybe intentionally), the bicep and trapezius muscles begin to contract, pulling back upon the yoke and raising the nose.

Now, at the right moment this is what we want—raise the nose to gently return to earth.  Done too high, however, it is a problem.  As that nose comes up speed bleeds off.  Continuing to raise the nose eventually brings the wing to its critical angle of attack.  At this point the stall warning horn informs you that pretty soon the wings are gonna stop producing lift.  Shortly thereafter you fall.

Of course, as an instructor it’s my job to intervene.  First, I intervene verbally and then, if the student fails to comply, physically.  My intervention is simple—push the yoke forward and lower the nose.  This lowers the wing, raises the speed and prevents a dangerous situation.

The student, you see, must overcome their fear of the ground.  The fear leads them to fixate upon the spot of earth right in front of them.  That tends to exaggerate, at least in their mind, the situation.  What is a fairly normal landing can feel like playing chicken with mother earth.  So, I encourage them to look down at the far end of the runway, doing so tends to give one a better perspective—and allow for a smoother, safer landing.

It occurs to me that following Christ is quite similar.  He is our instructor, strapped in beside us, teaching us how to live.  Sometimes He asks us to do things that we want to do, but maybe are a bit afraid of.  Like the student we become fixated on the potential consequences.  We worry about what people might think, or whether we’ll mess up and any number of other potentialities.  That fixation exaggerates the consequences of obedience.  What is the blessed life of following Christ begins to seem like a cursed life of hardship.  Yet, all along Christ is there, encouraging us to stop fixating on the ground in front of us and look at the end of the runway—look at the destination.  Doing so, reminding ourselves of the end result of following Christ, tends to put our fears in perspective and enables us to follow.

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us,  2 looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.”  Hebrews 12:1, 2 (ESV)