Articles
Choosing the Right Path
“You can enter God’s Kingdom only through the narrow gate. The highway to hell is broad, and its gate is wide for the many who choose that way. But the gateway to life is very narrow and the road is difficult, and only a few ever find it. (Matthew 7:13-14, New Living Translation)
News outlets and social media have been aflame with news regarding plane crashes. Some have been shot down; some have flat out disappeared; some have inexplicably fallen out of the sky. These stories exude with human emotion including sadness, melancholy, confusion, and anger. As a result, many have also developed a fear of flight, even more pronounced than before in some of the worst cases. Our hearts go out to the families of those lost. May their grief and tears bring relief and may the God of all comforts comfort them in all of their afflictions.
There is a spiritual application to be drawn from two of these recent tragedies. That golden nugget may be found in contrasting the accounts of two different plane crashes distanced by thousands of miles.
Last Friday night, the Gutzler family was returning to Illinois from a trip to Florida in a Piper PA-34-200T flown by the head of the family, Marty. During the flight, he sent in a distress call asking for an emergency landing in Kentucky. He never made it. The twin-engine crashed and another tragedy unfolded. Lives were lost and a family was dramatically changed forever. But, in an unexplainable twist, Marty’s seven-year-old daughter, Sailor, survived the crash. Not only that, but in freezing temperatures, she found her way to a house barefoot and in shorts. She did so without any light at all and in an unfamiliar, and topographically challenging, landscape. Authorities have claimed divine intervention as the only conceivable explanation for the path the girl found as she was able to navigate to the nearest possible house without any clue as to where she was going. She chose the right path and may God be thanked for it.
Contrast this with Air Asia Flight 8501. Despite regulations regarding when flights could take the course from Surabaya to Singapore, the plane took the route anyways. The pilots and company broke the rules. They chose the wrong path at the wrong time and a disregard for those rules led to the loss of dozens of lives. (Granted, the consequences of flying on a prohibited day don’t seem to be drastic, and probably aren’t under normal circumstances, but the decision still contributed to the loss of many lives.)
Choosing the right path can be a matter of life and death. When applied to the spiritual plane, choosing our route is always a life or death decision. Many choose incorrectly. Many lives are lost. But if you would choose correctly, you would save your soul and quite possibly numerous others through your influence and zeal for the cross of Christ. Choose wisely…
