Kitty Hawk
While on a family vacation to the Outer Banks, I had an epiphany at Kitty Hawk that foreshadowed the import the Wilmington years would have on my life (I served a church in Wilmington, NC, from 1989-1998). As a colleague told me point blank when later I asked for prayers of fortification for what I perceived to be a difficult season of ministry ahead, “You’d better put on your big boy pants.”
There are a set of monuments at Kitty Hawk marking Orville and Wilbur Wright’s first flights on December 17, 1903. At one end of the long, open stretch of field where those flights took place is a boulder. It marks the spot from which the Wright Flyer took off on its four successive flights. Down the field from the boulder, 120 feet away, is a piece of granite, four feet high or so, on which is engraved the number 1. It marks the point at which the first flight touched down after 12 seconds in the air. Fifty-five feet beyond the first stone is a stone displaying the number 2 and twenty-five feet beyond it another stone with the number 3, monuments to the second and third flights.
As I stood at the take-off point, my first thought was of how short the first flight was. Only 120 feet. Forty yards. I can throw a baseball farther than the Wright brothers’ first flight. Such an unremarkable beginning for what proved to be such a world-changing feat. The second and third flights weren’t much more impressive – just a few feet farther.
Flight four was of a different order. From where I stood next to the third marker, the stone marking the landing point of the fourth flight was a distance away. At the remote end of the field, over 600 feet from where I stood, was the stone marked 4. As I walked down to it, I wondered at the thought of the airplane lifting off, staying aloft 59 seconds, traversing 852 feet, and touching down three football fields away from where it took off. I was in awe of the fourth flight.
My epiphany? Like the Wright brothers’ first flights, I had made three identifiable leaps forward in my life of faith. From the boulder that marked my taking-off point – the day of my baptism – I counted three moments that marked measurable advances in my journey of faith.
Stone 1 marks the moment when as a sixteen-year-old I got on my knees at the side of my bed in my grandparents’ basement and prayed, “God, if you’re really there, I want to know it.” It wasn’t much – the only response I got was the sound of my grandfather flushing the toilet upstairs (I kid you not!) – but it was my soul’s first flight.
Stone 2, the monument to my second flight of faith, is in St. Louis. In October, 1987, after returning from my dad’s death and burial at age 50 from cancer, I got back on my knees in my office at Compton Heights Christian Church and asked God to lead me into a deeper relationship. I knew how to write and say prayers, but I didn’t know how to pray. There’s a difference. I talked a lot about God, but not to God. I wanted a first-person relationship. The spiritual discipline of daily prayer and journaling I keep to this day began in that moment – my second flight.
Marker 3 designated the period leading to my accepting the call to Wilmington. Those days of striving with heart, might, and soul to discern rightly what God would have me do stretched, equipped, and carried me beyond where I had ever been. Spiritual discernment is an exercise that lifts one airborne.
A woman in our congregation had recently told me about her six-year-old son’s exploits in his first year of Little League. In T-ball, the ball is placed on a peg, the batter swings the bat, hits the ball, and runs. Cathy told me her son Davis had the routine down pat. He’d hit the ball, it would roll gently back to the pitcher’s mound, and the pitcher would throw the ball to the first baseman well before he arrived. The umpire would signal Yer out! as Davis crossed the first base bag whereupon he would make a hard right turn and trot to the dugout until it was time to do the same thing a few innings later.
One day, however, Davis hit a ball that shot past the pitcher’s mound, past the second base bag, and out into the outfield. “Hooray!” Davis’ family and teammates cheered as he ran down the first base line, crossed the bag … made a hard right hand turn and trotted toward the dugout. His coach and teammates met him at the dugout steps, flailing their arms, yelling, “No! No! Go! Go! Run!” and pointing him back to the field.
Meanwhile, the ball came to a stop in the outfield with nary a fielder nearby. The center fielder was chasing a butterfly and had enjoined the neighboring outfielders to help him catch it. They were in hot pursuit of a monarch instead of the baseball Davis had hit.
Davis, however, once he got back to the vicinity of first base, didn’t have the slightest idea what to do next. So, he headed toward the outfield where the butterfly chase was underway. That elicited more frantic screaming, direction-giving, and pointing, which eventually led him safely to second base where he received a thunderous applause. As he stood on the bag, he raised his arms high in the air and declared, “I’ve never been this far before!”
As I stood at marker 3 on the field where the Wright brothers first took to the air, I thought of the markers in my life of faith that had led me from the waters of the baptistery in northeast Ohio to west of the mighty Mississippi to the remote Outer Banks of North Carolina. I’d never been that far before. I looked down the field at the stone in the distance marked 4 and past the distant dunes to the boundless horizon of the Atlantic.
Was I prepared for a fourth flight? I did not know it at the time, but my ministry in Wilmington would be that fourth flight. Neither did I know that liftoff was imminent for what would be a sometimes turbulent flight.
Those big boy pants would come in handy.
