Papered Airplanes

Writing on paper seems so much safer than jumping out of a moving plane, but there are similarities. In either case, the most difficult step is the first one. Everything else simply seems to happen in its own time and in its own way. Then, I suppose most things work that way.

Science calls it inertia. I seldom ever call it anything, but I recognize it. It is the principle that something still wants to stay that way and something moving wants to keep moving. For this reason the first step into open air is more difficult than the fall, the first pen stroke worse than the rambling to follow. The first steps require more than mere motion. They require something to be overcome.

In just about every way a step can be important, the first one is. One step in the right direction or the wrong leads quickly down a path, and that path always leads somewhere. It is that mounted pressure of knowing so that worsens the lack of motion we must overcome. It is a tricky proposition, yet one as common as dirt. The longer we think about it, the more common it becomes.

War, Men and Memories

Men of war, aged by time, are something to behold. Some become bitter, some broken. Some remain resentful. Then there are others. These men, perhaps no truer treasures than their ill-fated brethren, continue to shine.

One man returned two emaciated soldiers, toothless victims of another tongue, more than sixty years ago to their homes. He remembers the smiles that raced across otherwise devastated faces. He remembers learning of home, an entire world away from his own.

Another man airlifted food into the starving belly of a civilian land cut off from the world breaking into pieces atop it each day. He remembers the return trip, steering his plane with welling eyes as he looked earthward to find a field of tulips cut to spell two words—thank you. Strangers taught him mercy and grace through his own actions.

These men have been called heroes, along with a thousand other fitting titles. They deserve to be treasured still, wondered upon by new eyes and ears. Despite what should so seem their fate, though, these men are bound inevitably by their own mortality. So too are their stories—stories that simply must be told again and again throughout history—if a generation chooses. Whether that choice is not to listen or simply to wait, the result becomes more similar each day.

Business Trip

God left heaven. The gravity of such a thought somehow loses itself within a season filled with lesser things. God left heaven. Willingly, intentionally, presumably without hesitation, He left.

Why so many of the thoughts and actions of the eternal author should seem peculiar, the mortal mind may never know. Yet they do. All of creation with mind and heart enough to conceive it spends its collective lifetime hoping toward heaven. The pinnacle of all goodness, heaven is no place to be left.

Forget the dingy manger, the filthy animals, the picture of an unclean place within a society that knows it. What would it matter if it were a palace, a portrait of splendid opulence? He came from heaven. Were He not already God, would He have known the difference?

God left heaven. Even for the supreme maker whose thoughts transpire so laughably far beyond our own, that decision must be questioned. Why would He do it? Perhaps, among the more obvious answers, He did it to answer His own call.

God knew what He would ask of man. Leave it behind. Leave it all behind. Everything—every sight and sound and simple sensation ever known—leave it. It will not be easy, but leave it. It will not always make sense. Leave it. The reward to come makes distant memory of all the confusion, of all the care. Leave that behind, too.