--- id: flying-free-04-check-your-instruments title: Chapter 4 – Check Your Instruments category: Personal Testimony predicted_narrative_arc: fear to anchored courage sentiment: reflective emotions: - fear - courage - faith - gratitude keypoints: - Grandfather asks Dean if he is afraid before Vietnam deployment - Deuteronomy 31:6 memorized as core life verse - Verse applied in combat, cancer recovery, and business collapse - God provides analysis and presence during crisis - Dark-room exercise illustrates need for external reference points summary: Dean recounts visiting his grandfather on an Indiana farm before deploying to Vietnam, admitting his fear of losing control in combat, and receiving Deuteronomy 31:6 as a verse to memorize. The verse became his lifelong attitude indicator, applied during combat, cancer, and business failures. He compares it to using a reference light in a dark room to regain orientation when visual references vanish. tags: - childhood - family - faith - testing - conviction - vietnam-deployment - deuteronomy-31-6 - grandfather-wisdom - instrument-flying - combat-pilot - vietnam-combat - bible-verse sycophancy: 0 truth_score: 9 entropy: 3 updated: '2026-09-08T20:49:29Z' vault_stage: 07_CODEX headwaters: COMPA prefix: COMPA enrich_status: ok enrich_blockers: [] enrich_method: llm pipeline_filename: COMPA_2026-09-08_chapter-4-check-your-instruments.md proposed_topic: Stories lane: Stories description: When everything goes dark, you need a reliable reference. Dean shares how a single memorized verse from Deuteronomy became his instrument panel through combat, cancer, and business failure. corpus_topic: Stories --- # Chapter 4 ## Check Your Instruments – Find a Reliable Reference **Full book:** https://deanrush.net/downloads/flyingfreebook.md --- ### Context for the Reader This chapter introduces the idea of **instrument flying for the soul**. When life removes all visual references (the “horizon” disappears), you must have trusted instruments — in Dean’s case, Scripture — that tell you the truth when your feelings and circumstances lie. The story of young Dean visiting his grandfather before Vietnam and receiving Deuteronomy 31:6 is one of the most moving passages in the book. That single verse became his personal attitude indicator for the rest of his life. --- Many years ago, when I was on the way to an assignment in Vietnam as a combat pilot, I was doing some serious soul-searching for truth in my life. I had never been in combat and was doing a lot of self-examination. I wanted to determine who I was deep down. Life was a huge question mark for me. My grandfather was always one of my heroes when I was growing up and I valued his wisdom, especially when there was a large question about my life. My wife, Vickie, understood my searching and suggested we visit him on his farm in Indiana as we traveled across the country before my departure to go into combat. A visit with him would allow us to spend some time with him and maybe sort out answers to some of the questions plaguing me. It was a great visit. Grandpa and I talked openly about life itself. The central question for me was determining who I really was and how I would react in combat. The answer to that question became important for a number of reasons. It exposed me to how I was going to approach life and the stress of combat. Grandpa took me to the heart of the discussion when he asked me a very simple question. He said, “Dean, are you afraid?” What a penetrating question! I think that is an important question for anyone about to enter turmoil of any kind. Are you afraid? I knew I was going into combat and had been trained extensively to fly aircraft and operate the systems of the airplane. I was not certain, however, that I was trained to operate myself when I was not in control of the situation. I could never lie to my grandfather and my answer was simply, “Yes.” I admitted that I did not know what was coming in the future, even with all the training and all the support from my wife. I wasn’t necessarily afraid of death itself, but I was more concerned about not being in control of how I died and when. (I didn’t realize until years later that we are never in complete control of those factors.) I wanted more time with my wife (I didn’t know at the time that she was pregnant with our first child or I would have really been freaked). I was simply afraid of not finishing life correctly. I was concerned about not handling the adversity that might ensue from the upcoming experience in this faraway place called Vietnam. The answer was tough for me to utter, but true. I knew that I was afraid but I had never before admitted it publicly. I really didn’t know what was coming in the next year or whether I would again have the opportunity to sit and receive this wisdom from my grandfather. Grandpa looked at me after I answered his question. He then stood up and walked into his house. He came back out to the porch with his Bible and requested that I memorize a verse. I followed his instruction and that verse has helped me handle a number of challenging times in life. It also certainly helped me get through my time in the war zone. Since those months in combat and the years into maturity, the verse has helped me overcome many other adversities as well. It is a simple verse found in Deuteronomy 31:6. It says, “Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or terrified because of them, for the LORD your God goes with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you.” That little verse has had many applications for me and I suggest you also memorize it. It applied when I was being shot at in combat. It applied when I was very concerned about just making it home in one piece after some of my fellow pilots had lost their lives. It applied later in life when I was fighting cancer and concerned about recovery. It also applied in my life when my businesses were in a mess and it became apparent that I could not save them. That Bible verse has applied to so many circumstances in my life that it has been apparent that God was right there. The verse made me understand that God has been there, no matter what the circumstance, and has instilled in me the fact that I should remain strong and courageous because He (God Himself) is with me. God is with you in the face of an enemy or enemies (the “them” referred to in the verse). In fact, one of the greatest lessons learned from all of those combined incidents where I applied that verse was that God will help analyze what is occurring while it is happening. He is with you at all times. Before we take a step in any direction we should determine our location. God will help clarify that position. Analyzing our situation provides a new orientation as to our location, especially in the time of crisis. When I went through pilot training, the instructors placed us in a room that was totally dark with absolutely no source of light and told us to walk around the room. It was a very disturbing experience because there was almost nothing on which you could place a relationship. After experiencing that total darkness for a short period of time, the instructor introduced a tiny beam of light from the top corner of the room. The beam shown across the ceiling from one corner to another. Once the very tiny beam of light presented itself in the room the environment changed completely. I suddenly felt a relationship to the environment. I had something that I could use to analyze my position relative to the walls, the boundaries of the room, the space in which I was operating. The point of the exercise was to teach us how to use references so that we could analyze how to operate in the airplane when there was very little reference to the horizon. We had to use the instruments available to us in the cockpit. By using those instruments we could orient ourselves so that we would operate the airplane safely in clouds when the horizon was totally obscured. Those instruments provided the only reference available that gave an indication of what the real world looked like. God will provide that same orientation to you in the time of crisis in your life. With God there is input that can be used for an analysis of our position even in the bad times. --- **Next chapter:** What Are Your Limits? – Faith Provides Strength in Life **Full book:** https://deanrush.net/downloads/flyingfreebook.md