Another Day to Live

For about ten minutes, I seriously thought my time to die had come today.

It was when the lights went dim and the pilot announced "Flight attendants, please take your seats for landing.." But instead of descending, the plane swerved violently and started to make a sharp dive then a sharp climb. Everyone in the plane was started. I felt an intensity of the G-Force pushing down on me as the plane seemed to climb desperately. I spontaneously let out a low groan. It seemed everyone around me felt it too. I could feel the intensity of the wind. And sitting at the back rows of the plane, the feeling of being tossed around could only have been worse.

I had been on many flights before, and this was certainly not normal. Pilots don't suddenly decide to go all roller-coaster immediately after announcing a landing. Perhaps at the very last minute before touching down, the pilot had to abort the landing due to an unexpected wind. Whatever it was, it scared me. I switched off my MP3 player and started paying attention. The little boy next to me was terrified. And his mom was trying hard to reassure her. But I could feel her mothers nervous energy. To my left, the man sitting next to me had tightened his seat belt for the third time.

I didn't know what to do. There was nothing I could do anyway. I thought of all those disaster movies, where the poor characters all are stuck on a place that's about to crash, and the hero comes up to the crowd and says "If you believe in God, now's a good time to start praying..." There was no hero in my plane, but I started praying anyway. I suddenly understood why some people were so terrified of flying. There was absolutely nothing you can do if something bad was about to happen. Your life literally depends on 3 parties; the pilot whose flying the plane, the engineer who built and maintains the plane, and most importantly, God himself who decides which wind blows your way. You just had to trust that they each would do what they promised to do; one to fly, the other to fix and the last one, to save.

So I closed my eyes and started praying. Or at least I tried to. It all came out in an incoherent mix of fear, hope and faith. What you have no time to think, the things most important to you, usually come out most naturally...

"Oh God... help us. Help us get through this safely. If its possible, not yet God, not yet. I can't die yet. My family needs me. They need me. Please God. But if I really die God.. if I really die.. then let them be OK... Please let them be OK...."

That Garth Brooks song started playing in my head.... "If tomorrow never comes, will she know how much I loved her? Is the love I gave in the past, going to be enough to last, if tomorrow never comes?" I closed my eyes and started visualizing my own funeral... with my father, mother, brother, wife, friends all standing around sobbing. Would they ever know that my dying thoughts were on them? Will they be alright? Funny that my thoughts were more on those who would survive me rather than on my own death. I kind of knew that once I was dead, that was it. In the blackness of death, a day would be a thousand years. And a thousand years would be a day. But for those who lived on, it would be weeks, months, years and decades of sadness and lost.

Hours earlier, my wife hugged me closely and said to me "Come home safely OK dear.. I can't afford to lose you." I had always brushed talked like that aside. To me, I wasn't going anywhere, anytime soon, so there was no need for such talk. But right now, sitting in a plane being tossed by the winds so easily... her worries didn't seem so unfounded after all. After about 20 minutes of circling around, waiting for the weather to subside, the pilot announced that we will be making the 'final' approach to land. The most dangerous part of a flight is often the landing. I was still recovering from the earlier failed landing attempt.  I didn't like the 'final' part in his sentence. It was still raining heavily. I wondered if perhaps we should wait longer before trying again?

Needless to say, this isn't written from the great beyond, and I didn't die. The pilot landed us safely and we arrived in one piece. Although everyone did seem more eager than usual to get out of the plane. The little boy next to me was smiling again. And as for me... well, I kind of laugh at myself.. it felt as if I had gone overboard in my own thoughts (again). Perhaps I wasn't quite at the brink of death as I thought I was.

Sitting in the taxi heading to the hotel, I thought about it a bit more. It didn't really matter if I wasn't technically really going to die. Emotionally, it felt real. Emotionally, in that short ten minutes (that seemed to last an eternity), I had given the prospect of my immediate death very serious consideration. And as expected, the fear associated with it sprung out so great, I was hardly able to contain it. Had something else not sprung at the same time, I don't think I could have taken it so well. That something else was faith. While a big part of me is not ready to die, a big part of me also believes that all things are in the hands of God. If my time was indeed up, I had to trust that God knows what He's doing... and that He would take care of the ones I loved most... and that if I were meant to die today, in the grand scheme of things, it was never going to be without purpose or meaning.

So thank you God... for keeping me safe today. You answered my prayer, and you gave me one more day. I'm calling my family... to tell them I love them. Thank you for that.