Perseverance

As a regular church goer, I've always been told that the bible, being the "living" Word of Christ, is something that you can find application for in your everyday life.  This past Sunday I pondered that for a minute when the were studying the chapter of Romans a bit:

Romans 5:3-5
"Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us."


That's only one sentence long, but it has many aspects it applies to our lives, even if you bring it down to homebuilding an airplane.  I know I certainly feel at times that having this kit to complete causes some level of suffering, and the only way to complete the kit is through endurance.  I believe that by completing a large task such as this, it is definitely a character building experience, and the character you gain does give you hope...not just hope but almost expectation, in other aspects of your life.  You have the hope for things you face in the future, but having persevered, you also may have the expectation of success, or ability to survive through some other hardship in life.  It teaches you what you are capable of, even though at one time you may have thought the task was insurmountable. The passage ends on the up-note of God's love filling us through the Holy Spirit.  This may seem harder to apply to an aircraft kit project, but I believe that all of these good things that we have in life, and in fact every thing we are, are only due to God's love and grace.  There is really almost no place I feel more connected than when I am in the cockpit on a flight.  From the skies above, you can see the amazing creation around you, and you realize that although plate tectonics and evolution may play some role in the physical transformations happening on earth, there is no way that such grand design was created by simple physical processes.  All of this was created, for us, as a gift from God, and I would love to be able to see more people share in the experience of seeing it all.  On a side note, I cannot fathom how someone could visit the many National Parks, and not end up with an environmentalist side to themselves.  Once you see what nature, which is God's gift to us, is like in it's more undisturbed form, you will have the tendency to want to protect it.

...It's interesting where one simple sentence in a bible passage can take us...