By Father Timothy Gollob
Special to The Texas Catholic
Last week I was coming back from delivering some travelers to the Southwest Airlines terminal at Love Field.
It was a beautiful morning with a nice cool front coming in from the north. Birds were singing the praises of God for the first signs of autumn. Leaves were dancing in the brisk wind.
As I looked up, an airliner was taking off from the airport runway. I noticed something very different in the configuration of the wings. Instead of being completely flat as they extended from the fuselage, the tips of the wings were bent up.
Since the car I was driving had been in a couple of fender benders, I was tempted for a moment to think that the plane had bumped into a wall somewhere, but my logical mind went back to my school days to find an engineering solution.
I am sure that all of you have sailed paper airplanes at some time in your life. It was a skill that I had developed to be able to fold a sheet of 8 1/2 x 11 piece of paper into several models of aircraft. Some would go for long distances, while others would loop and do tricks. I tested various ways of folding the wings to get different results.
That, I concluded, was what the engineers had done for the plane I had spied. It probably could lift more quickly, fly farther on less fuel and maneuver around storms with the bent tip wings.
That is exactly the story of our lives as well. We have routines each day which take us to our normal destinations, but every now and then there are detours in the road or collisions at the intersections. It might be normal to fret about these unforeseen bends in our path, but it is much more productive if we see them as opportunities to learn some new tricks or to find some new meanings for that particular journey.
Our Creator God is in charge of all our ways and is the healer of all our bumps and bruises.
Father Timothy Gollob is the pastor of Holy Cross Catholic Church in Oak Cliff.
