Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth. 2 Tim 2:15
Charles Plumb was a U.S navy jet pilot in Vietnam. After 75 combat missions, his plane was destroyed by a surface-to-air missile. Plumb ejected and parachuted into enemy hands. He was captured and spent six years in a communist Vietnamese prison. He survived the ordeal and now
lectures on lessons learned from that experience.
One day, when Plumb and his wife were sitting in a restaurant, a man at another table approached them and said, “You’re Plumb! You flew jet fighters in Vietnam for the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk. You were shot down!”
“How in this world did you know that?” asked Plumb.
“I packed your parachute,” the man replied.
Plumb gasped in surprise and gratitude. The man pumped his hand and said, “I guess it worked”
Plumb assured him, “It sure did. If your chute hadn’t worked, I wouldn’t be here today.”
Plumb couldn’t sleep that night, thinking about the man. Plumb says, “I keep wondering what he might have looked like in a Navy uniform: A white hat, a bib in the back, and bell bottom trousers. I wonder how many times I might have seen him and not even said, ‘Good Morning, how are you? Or anything because, you see, I was a fighter pilot and he was just a sailor.
Plumb thought of the many hours the sailor had spent on a wooden table in the bowels of the ship, carefully weaving the shrouds and folding the skills of each chute, holding in his hands each time the fate of someone he didn’t know.
Now, Plumb asks his audience, “Who is packing your parachute?”
Everyone has someone who provides what they need to make it through out the day. Plumb also points out that he needed many kinds of parachutes when his plane was shot down over enemy territory. He needed his physical parachute, his emotional parachute, his mental parachute, and his spiritual parachute.
He called on all these supports before reaching safety.
Sometimes in the daily challenges that life gives us, we miss what is really important. We may fail to say hello, please, thank you, congratulate someone on something wonderful that has happened to them, give a compliment, or just do something nice for no reason.
As you go through this week, this month, this year, recognize people who pack your parachute.