Two Analogies from the Airport

Written for the girls receiving God's Girls Newsletter, March 2011.

By Lady Theophilus

An air-traffic controller is a person who works in an airport’s control tower and tells the pilots when to take off, which altitude to fly at, what the weather is doing, etc., etc. to prevent air-crashes and to guide pilots safely to their destinations. A pilot also has instruments in the plane telling him different information, but he must always trust and obey the instructions from the control tower. I like to think of God as a Christian’s air-traffic controller. We are like pilots, going through life, making decisions everyday. Whenever we read the Bible or hear the Holy Spirit speaking to our hearts, we have to choose: will we obey what the directions are? If we don’t, there will be consequences in our relationship with God and others. (Just as crashes are the consequence of not obeying instructions from an airport control tower.) Our destination is heaven, and we can safely arrive by listening to and obeying God.

Several times in my life I have been to the Denver International Airport to greet arriving friends/family. In that particular airport, arriving passengers come up two escalators to the terminal, where they can go to baggage claim, meet people (picking them up), etc. Every few minutes a “boatload” of people ascend the escalators. Recently, my brother and I went to pick up some friends. As I stood by the escalators waiting to see them come up, I thought about some spiritual similarities to the situation. Just as Jeff and I were there, watching and waiting, knowing that our friends would soon be coming, we as Christians know that Jesus will come back to earth for us someday. But as we stood there watching, it was easy to get distracted from the “task” of looking for our friends. An airport is a very busy place with lots of interesting people to watch: husbands and wives, parents and children all greeting each other, soldiers, people from various countries… “Oh! But we’re supposed to be watching for our friends!” It is easy to forget what we are here on earth for. It’s easy to forget about eternity, about Jesus, and His soon return! Lord, help us not to be distracted from what really matters, as we live in an attention-getting world.