Is there a spiritual component woven into the tapestry along this Eze life?

Probably the main thing that has fostered success with the plane thus far is having no expectation that an airplane would make me happy.

Flying things had been part of fun stuff since I can remember. They say time spent flying isn’t deducted from one’s life span. I hope the hours count that this kid spent careening in a rope-suspended apple crate hanging and banging around that spectacular pecan tree in our back yard.
A silver bullet shaped Commando Cody helmet allowed an extra 5 knots on the soup can lid airspeed indicator. The helmet bag was a long skinny box that said ‘Reynolds Aluminum-75 feet’ and the helmet had to be reshaped before and after every donning.
A Commando Cody Rocket Backpack provided more mobile flights around the neighborhood – a couple of 2×4 lumber rockets with 5 point harness, my father’s old belts nailed on. Matching setup for my dog Lady. Yes we turned heads.

How Big A Deal Is This
There are moments, points in our life where we could have asked ourselves “How big of a deal is this?” Looking back we would recognize significant benchmarks.
For a four year old the world can be a pretty confusing place. I can almost remember the childhood moment when a big decision had to be made. It was on whether to be happy or not.

From my earliest remembrances there were folks that liked what I did and others that didn’t like what I did, even when it was the same thing. So on that one big day, it was up to me to decide how things were going, and most importantly how I felt about it.
I made a simple decision. “I’m happy”. It stuck. Not that everything was easy after that, just settled. Was that a big deal?

Also at about the age of four I remember feeling the warm spiritual cloak that Someone put around me. I still know and feel that comforting support. One day it got put into words for me. I was watching TV. It had a round grey fuzzy picture. Art Linkletter asked a little boy, “Johnny, if you could talk to God, what would you say?” The way I remember it, the boy thought and looked up and said, “Hi God, this is Johnny- Count Me In!”

Little Johnny’s nutshell response hit my nail right on the head. While there are plenty of spiritual rabbits to chase, “count me in” is today my simple response to the Maker Of The Molecules.
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“A guy is about as happy as he decides to be” has several supposed authors including Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain. But the sentiment and substance was part of my temperament and evolution even before I heard it.

The airplane is a major component opening up a wild aeronautical ride chasing air molecules along sleek cowl lines and ragged rock ridge lines. But it wasn’t expected to be the actual vehicle of happiness.

Building Blocks
After Marine flight school, we’d been in Hawaii a couple of months. A pastor named Paul came by to visit. We had visited his church. He asked if I was a Christian. I said I did believe in Jesus, but did not believe in myself. I told him there had been a little water under the bridge since I last felt very spiritual.
Through high school and college sports I had become prolific in the fine art of ribald communicative device. Of course colorful cursing was the common ready room lingo of us pilots, always at the ready with the manly quip. I didn’t even have to think to spout a real humdinger. In fact, phrases could slip out uncontrollably and this had become somewhat of a problem in polite company.

In quiet moments I would often hear my mother’s knowing voice with her uncomforting admonition that vulgarity was a verbal crutch for a weak man. A spirited high school English teacher for 44 years, with her natural wit and rubbing shoulders with Shakespeare and friends, she had no problem getting her point across. Her firm intellectual slice and dice set many a teen age boy on his heels and on the right track. I had observed her evaluations of off color parlance to be accurate, and this uncomfortable reality framed my response to the pastor’s spiritual question. I told him I totally believed in Jesus, but I just didn’t feel like a Christian.
He described a man in a canoe pushing off from the shore to go fishing. A little later he looked back and was so far from shore that he couldn’t get back. In fact, it looked so far back to shore that it seemed he had never even been there. In a spiritual sense, as hard as he might struggle, he couldn’t get himself back. Maybe like me. Maybe I wanted to get back but just couldn’t overcome the vast gulf. The pastor said I was right, I couldn’t do it. But, he said, God can. He can reach through the separated distance and bring me back home. We prayed. I felt and recognized the warm cloak again; and began to know more about that comforting Someone from my childhood.

Six weeks later, in eight helos at daybreak we thundered across deep spiked green mountains and out over the blue Pacific waters, transporting Marine troops to Molokai. We were caught in the sun’s exploding grandeur. The early preflight and multi-ship takeoff had been hectic. Catching my breath, I looked out over the vast blue ocean and into the reflected blazing sunrise.

I was just realizing that this was probably the most spectacular work of nature and art I had ever seen. It caught me and pulled me up and up and in. In my spirit, a whole new world opened up. Overwhelmed, tears filled my eyes. This moment had started when I was about four years old, had gotten a new grip on me at about fourteen, and now again. I hadn’t known it but It had taken hold of me good this time.
In the wild expanse of the moment, I realized I was in the midst of a personal miracle. After years of struggling to control distasteful dialect, in six weeks, I hadn’t even thought of my all too common vulnacular since the pastor’s visit. Not a single word had even entered my brain. For years I couldn’t conquer it. But He could. And did. In vanquishing my harsh habit, He showed a simple, powerful truth in a way I understood; that with Him I could be free.

So, was it a big deal that Paul, the pastor, stopped by? He was one of the most spectacular people I have known. He was a highly recognized author. Among other things, he was my best friend until his death at age 44. That’s when I began to understand that God’s best for us might not be here on earth.

Another milestone.
John was a seminary student that I had hired. He stopped painting the cabinet and turned to me and said, “I am disappointed in you Mr. James, you are out of God’s Will. You went to seminary and you aren’t pastoring a church and you have obviously missed your calling. You are wasting your life.”

By that time in my life, I understood that he was not questioning me, but himself and his own spiritual future. In the heat of battle, so to speak, without time to think, I responded that I was right in the center of God’s Will. I had done what I knew to do concerning seminary and established a successful business and my wife still talked to me, and all my kids had passed me mentally and financially and spiritually and I have total confidence that I am right now right in the center of God’s Will. A quick mental re-check of this statement held. I didn’t mention it but an image of the fuselage in the garage did flash across my awareness. Even years later, the immediacy and simplicity of that from-the-hip response is comforting, especially since it is true.

By this time John had stopped painting the cabinet again. He said “But you can’t really know God’s Will”.
I said “Yes You Can”.
I told him to get back to painting and I would tell him about my big day at Seminary, one of those days that starting out, you had no idea how big a deal it would be.

How to know and do God’s Will
Dr. Oscar Thompson strode into the classroom. He heard the two seminary master’s degree students arguing, one saying that the other had missed God’s Will for not taking a part time position in a church 40 miles away. Dr Thompson looked at them and said,
“Yes, I think this just might be the day to discuss this… How would you like to learn how to know and do God’s Will. It’s easy.”

He had everyone’s attention. We all kinda secretly suspected that you cant really know what God’s Will is.

First he required that everyone agree to his ground rules, that only one person talk at a time. He wanted to hear what each of us had to say. And second, no one would leave the room before he announced the class over, stomping out of class in righteous indignation. He had obviously done this before.

So to the board with a flourish he wrote:
Step 1. Be transformed. 
For the next ten minutes he explained that accepting Jesus Christ as your Savior starts a lot of things in motion that happens to us. You don’t do any of it, and you really don’t recognize or appreciate what has happened in you.
Along the way he quoted Romans 12:2 …”And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect”.

“So, step one, be transformed. You are born again and Christ’s mind is in you.” Then he wrote:

Step 2. Do what you want to do.

He turned around to the class and smiled. The protestations didn’t take long. The first student stood and said,

“I can’t do what I want to do. I have to do what GOD wants me to do!”

Things unraveled as you would expect. Some would have stomped out if not for the pre-agreement. After a few moments Dr. Thompson called for order. He had everyone let go of each other’s throats and sit back down. For a few minutes he listened to each person’s thoughts.

He added that “Step 2. Do What You Want To Do” had a Part B, which is to consider your options wisely. Some things are just not legitimate options.

He worked through the parable of the talents in Matthew 25, and the shrewd steward in Luke 16. I thought the steward was being underhanded and hadn’t previously expected he was actually using his own commission to earn positions of favor, and was a little surprised to hear Jesus encouraging us to be smarter.

Dr. Thompson ended telling each of us we were absolutely best positioned to know and do God’s Will for ourself.
“Through Jesus you now have the spiritual mind of God and you can read and hear His words even through life’s tumult. He knew you from before the foundations of the world. He wonderfully formed you and prepared you and invested you with talents and interests and passions. Unearth them. Use them.”

“Be transformed, and do what you want to do.”

We knew of Dr. Thompson’s illness and that he was in the last semester of his life here on earth. He went to be with the Lord a few months later. I look forward to catching up with him.
John the cabinet painter? He was excited to think about being able to be in God’s Will and have fun and move forward in life with renewed awareness and appreciation of his God given talents and passions.

The hour with Dr. Thompson that day is relived often. This truth is the foundation of my confident position. He pulled awareness and truths together from my earliest remembrances and tied them to the present and flung and anchored them into the future. It was a spectacular moment in time that I didn’t want to end. Actually it hasn’t.

Was that a big deal? That afternoon in 1980 I went out to Sycamore Airport and dusted off N1761, a 1947 Cessna 120. I had bought the plane after not taking that last flying job. But when starting my master’s degree studies, the plane had been considered a secular frivolity and an inappropriate distraction and waste of time for a student involved in God’s serious work.
Turned out that it was providential for this particular student to move to Fort Worth and complete seminary and then… do what he wanted to do! Crazy.
But that very day the spunky taildragger got going again. Over time and understanding, interests and passions and talents were unearthed and what do you know, a burried dream got going. I didn’t expect it, but work on the VariEze actually went better when the contracting work was busiest. Where all the normal aviation channels had closed to me before, now flying was blossoming open again. I took a customer for an Eze ride and ended up in the Sim at the airlines. And today it gets even crazier than that.

Recently in a group of a dozen fighter types, one asked my ex F-15 cube mate if he was going back to corporate flying. To my surprise he said “No, I’m going to do what Bill did, build my own plane and fly when I want”. He now owns a 90% LongEZ.

It is my experience that the Lord wants to give a guy his heart’s desire. Even so, the elements of my spiritual core have not come easily. I would rather that some things were different. For example I think it would have been easier if the Ten Commandments were hard-wired in our main frame noggin from the beginning, rather than this discipline stuff. Oh well.

I chuckle each time I fill out an offering envelope. What’s so funny about that? Years ago we joined our current church about the same time I subscribed to the Canard Pusher newsletter. A while later I noticed that my Eze newsletter ID number and my church envelope number are identical. Ha.
Is that a big deal? A coincidence just between us molecules? But sure is fun. They are framed together on the hangar wall.

Does being born again spiritually make a guy perfect or smart? Probably not. Us humans can do some pretty unconscious things. In fact, because of this I know what I would think right before I die.

What goes through a person’s mind just before you die? I hear that you think of your kids. Or that your life flashes before your eyes. For me, my family passed nodding and smiling across my consciousness and I whispered see you soon. During the last couple of seconds, I wondered to myself out loud whether Jesus was going to harass me about getting into this predicament. That’s what I thought about. When faced with eternity, I was expectant to meet my maker as I was, relying on His grace.

Our middle son was popping the ball up every time at bat. I suggested that he was using all of his muscles in the swing at max power and that they were fighting each other, and that he should relax and watch the ball and let his brain and body do their thing. It worked for him. He has a Palomino League World Series Champions ring the size of a door knob. I told him, and I tell myself, hang in there and do your best.
I ‘hear’ that same advice pretty much every day, spiritually… Stand in there and do your best… Do what you want to do… Abide in Me and all things are possible…

As for the spiritual dimension to flying, you bet. For some reason the sunsets are most vibrant to me right now. Heading out to 17R the visuals open up out to the west. From the distant horizon and deep inside the wonder of the sunset beckons. Finally we are aloft and immersed in the deep blue. We are the center of the universe. At the same time, miniscule, we glide into position among the eons and galaxies of The Maker’s Handiwork. In blazing majesty the Maker of the Molecules flings His flamboyant art gracefully across the heavens, graciously and warmly, including us. Our cozy capsule escorts, and is escorted by the heavenly procession. I love a parade.

As I write this tonight my kids and their kids sit out in the living room. Their spiritual investments come into the conversations as afterthougths. They have certainly passed me…
How big a deal is this.

Merry Christmas! Hope you get everything you want…
Bill James, Fort Worth VariEze