--- id: flying-free-03-tell-god-your-flight-plan title: Chapter 3 – Tell God Your Flight Plan category: Personal Reflection predicted_narrative_arc: Crisis to empowered recovery through deliberate planning with God sentiment: Reflective emotions: - calm - hopeful - resilient - faithful keypoints: - Slow down and analyze instead of worrying during emergencies - File a deliberate life flight plan that includes God - Recovery from crisis offers opportunity for new directions and growth - Past hardships were training sessions for future tests - Regain control after crisis to reach a chosen destination summary: Dean shares lessons on handling life crises by slowing down, maintaining control, and inviting God into the planning process rather than panicking or complaining. Using aviation metaphors from his flying instructor and personal experiences, he emphasizes that recovery can lead to new heights and that past storms serve as training. Biblical reference to 1 Peter 4:12 reinforces that trials are expected but survivable with faith and preparation. tags: - childhood - faith - work - testing - gratitude - reverence - warmth - conviction - flight-plan - crisis-recovery - faith-in-action - life-preparation - storm-navigation - faith-planning - aviation-metaphors - life-lessons sycophancy: 2 truth_score: 8 entropy: 4 updated: '2026-09-08T20:49:35Z' vault_stage: 07_CODEX headwaters: COMPA prefix: COMPA enrich_status: ok enrich_blockers: [] enrich_method: llm pipeline_filename: COMPA_2026-09-08_chapter-3-tell-god-your-flight-plan.md proposed_topic: Wisdom lane: Wisdom description: Recovery from crisis can become the most beautiful chapter of your life. Dean teaches the power of filing a deliberate flight plan with God instead of flying blind. corpus_topic: Wisdom --- # Chapter 3 ## Tell God Your Flight Plan for Life! Make Him Smile! **Full book:** https://deanrush.net/downloads/flyingfreebook.md --- ### Context for the Reader This chapter shifts the focus from simply surviving crisis to **intentionally inviting God into the planning process**. Dean contrasts the human tendency to panic or complain with the wisdom of slowing down, maintaining control, and seeking God’s direction. The memorable line “Tell God your flight plan… make Him smile” captures the heart of the chapter: God is not surprised by our plans, but He delights when we invite Him into them. The chapter also introduces the powerful image of the eagle facing the storm head-on and being lifted above it. --- Surprisingly, I have discovered that recovery from turmoil can end up being the most beautiful experience in life. Not surprisingly, that revelation normally is discovered after the fact. Recovery can provide the unique opportunity to climb to new heights and live out dreams in the freedom of the moment. You can go in a completely new direction and explore new possibilities during the mending process from a crisis. People often look at me askance when I make that statement, but it is true. When you are flying, you file a flight plan that, if followed, will take you to your destination. A correctly prepared flight plan takes you to your destination. A haphazardly prepared plan may stop your life in its tracks. Which plan do you want to choose? There is a choice for your life, but there is planning involved. You must be ready to accept the requirement for some investment of time if you are going to take a new path and develop a successful plan. The desired path is obviously one that will take you forward in a new direction when you are in crisis. Let’s examine that forward path in the following pages and attempt to determine how to mark a path for your life. When I was learning to fly, I was blessed to fly with a very wise instructor pilot who convinced me that when there is an emergency, the last thing you want to do is complain about the problem. He always said if there is an emergency, slow down, look around, and “Don’t worry until you see the windshield crack.” If that sounds like a casual solution to an emergency in an airplane, think about the situation you are in when you are hit by tragedy. My instructor said when you find yourself in a tough predicament, slow down, maintain control of the aircraft, and analyze what is taking place instead of spending your time worrying. Don’t hurry to an answer that may be wrong when you can take time and get the proper information to make a wise decision. It is more important to be right than to be quick. - When you slow down you can keep your life and airplane on a steady state. You are maintaining control. - When you take time to look around you can often find unseen solutions. - There is no reason to worry about the situation. - All the time you spend worrying can be better used solving the problem. - Analyze the situation! The instructor pilot who gave me those words helped me survive many emergencies in the air over the years as I flew various types of airplanes. As stated earlier, we are all going to encounter problems in life. The method we use to handle those challenges may determine how we live the rest of our lives. We can build a plan that can get us to safety and a solid conclusion, or we can panic, senselessly worry, and do nothing. These are two distinct paths that are exactly contrary solutions that will carry us in opposite directions. Both options are final but have distinctly different results. In the Bible, Peter says, “Dear friends, do not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering, as though something strange were happening to you” (1 Peter 4:12 NIV). My interpretation of this little verse is, “Don’t be surprised at changes in life because we are going to be rewarded at the end of the trial with a new perspective.” I love this verse because it reinforces the fact that God is always in charge and in control, even when we fail to follow His directions. The verse does not say that there will not be problems in life. God will help you survive whatever you may encounter as long as you stick with Him. Often problems are grounded in difficulties that we do not understand. Those unknown circumstances become very real and very personal. Challenges and tragedy strike everyone, but with proper faith and preparation we can navigate through any storm. How do you control the crises in your life? When a crisis strikes you need to regain control before you can make progress. As in any emergency, there are choices, and how you handle those choices will probably determine your future. In an airplane that is in trouble your choices range from doing nothing and riding the bird into the ground or choosing a method of recovery and continuing to fly in a controlled manner. Obviously, the desired selection would be to regain control and get to a predetermined destination, but it is the pilot’s choice. The same holds true as you experience a problem in your life. As I have grown older, it has been interesting to look back and see how some of the events in my life that I deemed very tough and insurmountable were, quite often, just training sessions for what was coming in the future. I became tougher and smarter from those storms. I know now that those tough times when I was required to bite down hard and take guff that came with failure or illness were just preparations for the main event to come. Those events were preparing me to handle real tests later in life. I remember the challenges I had in the small airline that two other men and I had started when I got out of the Air Force. We started the business with no cash for payroll or extra capital for operation. Financing came from a friend and pilot who I flew with in Vietnam. We started the airline with borrowed money and capital from a coal company we formed. Two other ex-Air Force officers were also involved and our only common aptitude was having no airline experience. Our intent was to fly a route around major Texas cities each night and carry freight from town to town. It was a tough business with little margin for error. Soon the operation grew to more than 100 employees and I was elected president. As president, I knew the employees would look to me to reward them for their work and they needed to be paid. When I looked around for an answer to the lack of cash, it became obvious that there had to be additional sales to bring in the necessary income to pay the bills and the employees. We formed a team that constantly called our customers and potential customers to find business for our airplanes. The persistence finally paid off with a contract at Thanksgiving from one of the largest users of microchips who had to have an immediate shipment to avoid shutting down their factory during that four-day holiday weekend. Because we had been hounding them for business, they called us and asked if we could send two airplanes to California to meet a shipment of microchips sent from Asia and get them to Austin, Texas. The large airlines had cut back their schedules due to the holiday and could not respond. Our answer was a hearty “yes” when they called us, and we were rewarded by being paid double the normal price for the job (unexpected, but the flight saved the company—both ours and theirs). Nothing is insurmountable if you realize that resources are available. We had been able to maintain control of the situation without panicking and the persistence was rewarded. Our plan was to succeed by flying reiterative routes around Texas on a daily basis. God provided an opportunity to succeed by becoming an on-call airline, which paid more per trip, required fewer personnel, and better utilized our resources. God had a different plan than ours but His plan worked much better than ours. I could devote an entire book to discuss all that we encountered as we were getting that airline off the ground. It was a time of chaos and challenge. We had no money, very little knowledge about airlines, very little knowledge of how to run an airline, and almost no experience at anything other than flying airplanes. My tenure at the helm of the little company was short but it was one of the most enlightening of my life. I learned more in three years of running that start-up airline than all the textbooks, graduate schools, and seminars I have encountered in a long life of corporate work. Because our most constant resource was originality (some might describe it as survival), we quickly learned to make the most of all available resources. If you called our company for information and I answered the phone (there were only three employees when we began), I would greet you, transfer you to the freight department, put you on hold, and answer the phone in a different pitch, and try to talk you into sending your freight on our airplanes. Once, when we had just purchased our first DC-9 airplanes and an aeromotive directive (AD) from the FAA arrived about DC-9s, the AD stated that there might be a crack in the spar that held the wings together. It was a big deal and also expensive. When we received the directive, some concluded that this was the end of the airline because we called every shop who worked on DC-9s around the country and were told the next available slot to have our bird looked at was in three to four weeks and the cost would be about $250,000 for the inspection. Talk about a downer. We didn’t have $250,000 and we sure couldn’t wait three to four weeks to get our airplane back in the air. One of our guys who worked in the parts room came into my office and knew the gravity of the situation (everyone in our company was aware of the problem). He said we could do the inspection ourselves over the weekend. At first I ignored his idea but then began to realize we had no choice. It was a wild idea, but after discussing it with our maintenance personnel they became excited about trying the long shot. We began to assemble the employees and tell them about the problem, the circumstance, and the need for all of us to work through the weekend. One guy was building a house so he supplied the beams he was going to use in his new home to shore up the wings and allow us to lift the fuselage and separate the wings from the airplane. Another group of employees prepared meals for the maintenance guys who were performing the inspection, and yet others took out the interior and later replaced it when the spar was determined to be safe with no cracks. The airplane passed the inspection, the employees became a team, and the airline developed an esprit de corps that helped every employee become a salesman for our company. What could have been the downfall of the airline became the incentive for us to grow and develop into a really viable corporation. Because of the idea of that young employee, we successfully corrected the problem, and gained an appreciation of one another that helped us grow and flourish in a very competitive industry. I left the organization a few years later to start another company, but I could never forget the satisfaction of seeing the team that developed from that weekend under pressure. Controlling the chaos of the moment actually proved to establish a foundation for a great team. The original plans for building an airline certainly did not include the panic of that weekend maintenance ordeal, but God used the time to show us how to build a team in the company. We do not have the advantage of seeing into the future, so it is important to understand that your present dire circumstance may actually be an opportunity to build yourself a new beginning. The circumstance may eventually allow you to make lemonade out of lemons. The final execution looks nothing like the original plan but somehow God works it out. The plans we make for ourselves often change. The plan God has for us never changes. The secret is to find out how to use the circumstance of a problem to our advantage. When facing a storm the eagle does not fly away but stays on his perch and spreads his wings as the severe weather approaches. With his wings spread full and facing head on into the torrent he is taken aloft and soars above the storm. Just as the young eagle must have faith that he can fly, the mature eagle knows that facing the storm (the crisis) head on, he will soar above it. He uses the power of the storm to rise above it. God provides an opportunity to use His plan for our lives and, as with the eagle, we rise above the storm. --- **Next chapter:** Check Your Instruments – Find a Reliable Reference **Full book:** https://deanrush.net/downloads/flyingfreebook.md