Richard Bach, Author/Barnstormer

Nothing by Chance

“If we are alert, with minds and eyes opens, we will see meaning in the commonplace; we will see very real purposes in situations which we might otherwise shrug off and call ‘chance’.” ~ from a lecture by Roland Bach

When I was in high school I discovered the writing of Richard Bach. He took me into a world of wonder in the realm above the earth, where the air was silver, sharp and cold, where the bold left the comfort of their couches and took to the sky, trusting their lives to the double wings and single engine of a biplane. There is a passage in the book, Nothing by Chance, that captivated the essence of my lifelong belief that there is something more beyond the horizon of my life...a passage that brings me a longing sigh today exactly as it did thirty years ago.

“There was a certain wistfulness in the room, as though we had something that these people wanted, that they might have had a distant wish to say good-bye to everything in Palmyra and fly away into the sunset with The Great American Flying Circus...And I thought; if they want to do something like this, why do they wait? Why don’t they just do it, and be happy?”

Last Summer I got a taste of that sharp cold air, I felt the rush of the silver air against my face, my hands, I left behind the comfort of solid ground and my soul was touched by flight. Rising into the air I longed to raise my hands in triumph. We made steep turns, the right wings pointed heavenward, as we circled a corn maze; we dipped low, skimmed the river like a hell-bent mallard; we flew so the wheels breezed inches above corn stalks, the engine roaring, as we sped towards the trees edging the field, pulling up ina steep climb, the nose skyward, before certain doom, my head titled back as I laughed at the sky.

But the biplane ride was more than a dream come true, it was a tangible reminder of Richard Bach's idea that nothing happens by chance. On the second page of the book that gave me that first love of biplanes and the world of barnstorming thirty years ago, is this passage, “Silent and trusting, Stuart Sandy MacPherson, age nineteen, peered over the edge of the cockpit in front of my own, looking down through his amber jumping goggles to the bottom of an ocean of crystal air...once in a while now, looking down through the wind, he smiled to himself, ever so faintly.”

My pilot last Summer? Stuart “Cap’n Mac” MacPherson, who began his flying career over 35 years ago as a pilot/parachute jumper in Richard Bach’s Great American Flying Circus. Coincidence? Something tells me it’s not.

So, if I am to believe that this one event did not happen by chance, then I also have to believe that the other events in my life do not happen by chance. I cannot pick and choose when to trust that God knows what He is doing with my life. And so, when I start to worry over unanswered questions, and doubt that everything has happened, and is happening for a reason, I just need to remember that it took thirty years for a certain 16 year old girl’s dream of the freedom of a biplane flight to come true, and to do as a dear friend recently reminded me and, “Just believe. That’s it.”

With Blessings and Boldness,

Melinda

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. Hebrews 11:1

“When you realize how perfect everything is, you will tilt back your head and laugh at the sky."—Attributed to the Buddha