Flying Blind (Sermon Illustration)

No matter who you are, I can promise you one thing about life, it won’t be a smooth ride. We all encounter storms. It’s not a question of if but when a storm comes our way. The real question, then, is how will you navigate through the storm?

General “Jimmy” Doolittle is most remembered for his daring bombing raid over Tokyo just four months after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, but Doolittle’s most significant contribution to aviation happened many years earlier.

In 1922, he became the first pilot to fly cross country in less than twenty-four hours. He’d planned to fly by the light of the moon, but bad storms kept him in total darkness for several very dangerous hours. Luckily he had a turn and bank indicator installed on his plane. “Although I had been flying almost five years ‘by the seat of my pants’ and considered that I had achieved some skill at it, this particular flight made me a firm believer in proper instrumentation for bad-weather flying.” Flying with instruments was new and rare at the time, but without the indicator he might have been forced to “bail out” or just “luck it through,” as other pilots were forced to do.

There had to be a better way. “Progress was being made in the design of aircraft flight and navigation instruments and radio communication. If these sciences could be merged, I thought flying in weather could be mastered,” he said. The right mix of instruments could give him the direction he needed in the dark. It took several years, but he figured out a combination of radio and gyroscopes could let him fly safely regardless of visibility. And he proved it in 1929 by flying a plane with a totally blacked-out cockpit.

Like Doolittle’s navigation instruments guided his plane, the Bible can be our navigation instrument for life.

When we face the inevitable storms of life, although we cannot always see a way through, if we follow God’s Word, he will guide us. Most of us, if we’re honest, would admit that we often fly through life blind. We must have faith that God sees what we cannot see, and he will guide through the storm.

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Source: Michael Hyatt, Your Best Year Ever, Kindle ed. (Baker, 2018), Location 2258.

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