My hope tonight

I knew my father-in-law flew in Vietnam.

I knew he flew a refueling plane, the KC-135.

I knew he never talked about his three tours there.

Until the week he died. We sat around him, in that hospital room, watching his life ebb away on the monitors, and listened. He didn’t have his glasses on, but he didn’t need them to see. His hands—the hands of an artist, a craftsman, a pilot—painted for us what he saw: the dark tangled canopy of the rainforest below, the soaring night sky above, streaked with lightning, as he flew through the storm. It was his job to stay on the edges of the combat zone, staying in the air to provide fuel for planes in combat and on missions. So he stayed, flying steady as lightning exploded around him.

His voice held only wonder as he described what it was like. What it was like to be in the night sky during a war in a metal plane with brilliant bursts of electricity exploding around him. “It was like touching the face of God,” he said.

I’m sure he was afraid. But almost half a century later, he only remembered the wonder, the beauty, the presence of God.

I’m sitting by myself tonight in a hotel room. Tomorrow I will be back in the archives. Around me the news is exploding with terrible things. In this moment, as I felt afraid, I thought of my father-in-law. The wonder and peace in his voice that God was there in the storm.

I don’t know what this week will hold. I don’t know what next will hold. But I know, with the surety of my father-in-law’s wonder on that night so long ago, that God is here with us. Even in a storm of our own making.

I finished an endorsement tonight for a new book by . It is a beautiful book. It has given me so much to think about. I will tell you more about it as the publication date draws nearer. I mention it now because Nijay quotes the same poem my father-in-law did in the hospital room that night. As he searched for language to describe his experiences during Vietnam, he found it in the words of his favorite poem that hangs, still, above his desk.

Titled High Flight, by John Gillespie Magee, Jr., it is in the public domain.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

of sun-split clouds,—and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,

I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air ....

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue

I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace

Where never lark, or even eagle flew—

And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

This poem, my father-in-law’s words, reminded me tonight that even here, God is.

Even here in the midst of a lightning storm, a storm of our own making, the peace of Christ that passes all understanding is still here.

Even here, in the midst of our mess, the wonder of God in the beauty of the world created for us is still here

And, as Nijay reminded me in his book (that you will want to read), the beauty and goodness of God, that is still here, is worth fighting for.