I remember my first skiing lesson. Like just about everyone else on the bunny slope that day, I fell a few times. The only part of me that got a little beat up from that fall was the part God designed for that purpose. But today the entertainment world is mourning the sudden and shocking death of Natasha Richardson-from a head injury sustained in a fall on the beginner's slope.
As I heard that news, I looked out the window to see a beautiful morning mist covering a nearby lake. Within minutes the mist that had defined the landscape was gone.
The morning news and the morning mist called to remembrance a sobering life commentary from the Bible. God says, "Now listen, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.' Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes" (James 4:13-14 ).
When I heard a commercial airliner was down in the Hudson River, I feared the worst. I flipped on cable news, expecting the worst. It was the kind of story that almost always includes a tragic death toll. I was stunned to learn that every passenger got out alive and largely unscathed. The difference? The man at the controls.
US Air Flight 1549 didn’t last long. About three minutes. Who could have guessed that minutes after takeoff, the passengers would be in the middle of the Hudson River on a downed jetliner? I’ve been on airplanes in distress. I’ve been through emergency landings. So this one hits pretty close.
If you live down river from a manmade lake or reservoir, the words you don’t want to hear are “the dam broke.” That happened in central Missouri when the Taum Sauk Reservoir Dam broke and suddenly the people who lived down river were inundated with a billion gallons of water.
Engineers were shocked to find that a whole big piece of that reservoir was made out of dirt and rocks…little stones. The problem was that the dam that was supposed to hold back the flood was made of material that couldn’t withstand the pressure of the flood. Of course the test of what anything is made of is what happens when massive pressure hits.
When I heard a commercial airliner was down in the Hudson River, I feared the worst. I flipped on cable news, expecting the worst. It was the kind of story that almost always includes a tragic death toll. I was stunned to learn that every passenger got out alive and largely unscathed. The difference? The man at the controls.
US Air Flight 1549 didn’t last long. About three minutes. Who could have guessed that minutes after takeoff, the passengers would be in the middle of the Hudson River on a downed jetliner? I’ve been on airplanes in distress. I’ve been through emergency landings. So this one hits pretty close.
