Alice Gray tells this true story of
Larry Walter, a truck driver whose lifelong dream had been to fly.
Unfortunately, poor eyesight disqualified him from being a pilot. But he
never gave up his dream. He often sat in his lawn chair out in his back
yard longing to fly.
One day, Larry got an idea. He went
down to the local army-navy surplus store and bought a tank of helium and
forty-five-weather balloons measuring more than four feet across when
fully inflated. Back in his yard, Larry attached the balloons to his lawn
chair, anchored the chair to the bumper of his jeep, and inflated all the
balloons with helium. Then he packed some sandwiches and drinks and loaded
a BB gun, figuring that he could pop off a few of the balloons when he got
ready to come down to earth.
When everything was ready, Larry sat
in his chair and cut the anchoring cord. But when he did, he didn't float
up lazily as he expected. Instead he shot up as if he had been fired from
a cannon! Nor did he go up just a couple hundred feet. He climbed and
climbed until he finally leveled off at eleven thousand feet. At that
height, he couldn't risk deflating any of his balloons for fear of
unbalancing the load and dumping himself out of his flying lawn chair. So
he stayed up there for fourteen hours, totally at a loss as to how to get
down. Eventually he drifted into the approach corridor for Los Angeles
International Airport. A pilot radioed the tower about passing a guy in a
lawn chair at eleven thousand feet with a BB gun in his lap. At this
point, the Navy dispatched a helicopter to rescue him. Although it wasn't
easy, they hovered over him, dropped a rescue line, and hauled him back to
earth. As you might have guessed, as soon as Larry got down, he was
arrested. As he was led away in handcuffs, a reporter called out,
"Mr. Walters, why'd you do it?" Larry stopped, eyed the man,
then replied nonchalantly, "A man just can't sit around, can
he?"
Although Larry Walter was wrong in
attempting to do what he did, the key point in the story is his
willingness to take a risk for what he deemed an exciting undertaking
which would fulfill a small part of his desire to fly. As Christians, we
should be willing to take risks for the glory of God. To some people we
may look foolish in doing so. A young man or woman feels the Spirit of God
calling him to the mission field, and in all likelihood to a life of
hardship, suffering and perhaps martyrdom for the sake of Jesus Christ.
Many with the world's viewpoint of success would call such a person crazy.
But God wants us to be willing to risk everything, even our lives, for His
eternal plan and purpose and for His ultimate glory. Are you and I ready
to fly?
"Let no man deceive himself. If
any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool,
that he may be wise, for the wisdom of this world is foolishness with
God" (1 Corinthians 3:18,19).
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