The Counter-intuitive Right Answer

I have a friend at work who is a student pilot, and we recently were talking about some of the challenges of flying an airplane. Anyone who has played Sega's Afterburner or Konami's Top Gun arcade games as a kid gets the general premise that when you pull back on the stick (or push down on the controller pad), you're actually causing the flaps to move in a way which points the nose upwards. So one of the counter-intuitive thing that an arcade-game-playing kid learns is that pressing down makes you go up.

For student pilots, it becomes pretty natural that, generally, when you want to ascend, you'll pull up on the controls. The one major exception to this is when your plane begins to stall. I'm probably going to screw up the true engineering or mechanical explanation here, but generally speaking, when a plane's engine begins to stall, what's imperative is to gain airspeed, and that is done by pushing the nose of the plane downwards. Gravity becomes the plane's friend, and as the plane descends and picks up airspeed, the engine will move out of its stall and hopefully restarts, much to the joy and relief of the pilots and passengers.

Talking to my pilot friend, he confesses that this is easier said than done. When you're in a plane and the plane begins to descend suddenly due to a stall, the instinct is to pull back on the controls in an attempt to ascend. That's the worst thing that a pilot can do, as this will further kill airspeed and the plane will drop like a rock out of the sky. As my friend told me, more seasoned pilots aren't immune from this, as a regional plane in 2009 crashed in Buffalo in part due to a similar pilot error, killing all 49 passengers and crew. Training helps, but sometimes instinct overwhelms the counter-intuitive right answer.

I was thinking about this recently as I consider my extremely busy life right now. There's much up in the air with my life between work and church, and the human instinct is to seize more control. But ironically, that's probably to worst thing for me to do. The desire to control, often termed euphemistically as "grabbing the reins" is often thinly disguised manipulation or obsessive compulsion. At some point, being proactive and responsible becomes an obsession to do whatever it takes to control and manipulate a situation to bring about a result that we think that we want. Judgment becomes clouded, and before soon, we are single-minded focus to achieve our goal, without any regard for the unintended consequences.

From a faith perspective, the challenge is to understand when my responsibility ends, and when to let God reveal His sovereign will. When does one, as the cliché goes, "let go and let God?" I submit that there's discernment that goes into this, and I acknowledge that every person needs to work this out for themselves, but as for me, I know where my natural instinct and inclination leans, and for me, the counter-intuitive thing - namely, to let God - is what I need to do more of.