The Problem With Aeroplanes

I love aeroplanes. Ever since I was a child, picking out my first Revell model kit with my Grandpa (a Messerschmitt BF109G), reading Biggles books, watching war movies and watching the helicopters fly overhead, I loved them. My goal as a teenager was to join the Irish Air Corps, but when I encountered Christ at 17, he set me on a different path. Nonetheless, I became an aircraft mechanic, loved my work, and still happily fill my children with knowledge of planes on a regular basis in the hopes that they too will love aviation. I will forever be grateful to our teammates who picked out for us an apartment directly under the flight path for departing aircraft from the airport 4km away!

However, recently I have come to find a difficult and unfortunate problem with these giant flying tin cans: Travel is too easy.

This may seem like a strange thing to say. After all, that is the whole point of aeroplanes. They make travel easier. In today’s world, there are few families who have not benefitted from the ease of travel that comes with multitudinous flights to every country in the world. Families separated for work purposes or cross-cultural marriages, can expect their loved ones to come home at a moment’s notice, whether for a Christmas holiday or a sudden funeral. Within 24 hours you can be almost anywhere in the world.

However, this shrunken world leaves a shorter tether to the homeland for those living cross-culturally. And this is only enhanced by smart-communication. “Home” is only a button away virtually, or a day away physically.

As we hit the 5-month mark in our new country, we are facing the struggle that comes with the crash of the honeymoon period, and the setting in of the first major dip of culture shock.

So far the friendships we have in Ireland have still been freshly maintained relationships. Being gone 3 months isn’t really a big deal while maintaining good friendships, but as time ticks on, those friendships become more loosely defined, and far less tangible. They are unable to provide what is needed in the current situation (on either side). And yet at the same time, 3 months in a new land is not ample time to find and develop new, deep friendships, over a language and culture barrier.

The taste of hearty Irish food, a deep lungful of fresh air, the sight of the luscious green fields, all linger close in the memory for 3 months. But at 5, they are faded now. Living life here has become somewhat easier, in knowing how to navigate things, but progress has slowed. We can now communicate a lot of specific things, but cannot communicate all that we want to.

Overall, until now, that which we left behind, and that which we have entered into, have co-existed to a degree. But as the former fades and gives place to the latter, that pain of separation enters our hearts in fresh ways.

This is where I feel that modern air travel doesn’t help matters. Back in the days of William Carey or Hudson Taylor, one had to spend 2, 3, 4 months on a ship just to reach your destination of service. By the time you reached your new home you had already been through that time of separation. A prescribed time of mourning, waiting, praying, and preparation, with little to distract the heart. At the end of the prescribed time, the missionary would disembark, ready to fully commit to the land upon which their feet landed. Surely their processing must have been helped by this period. (Throw in the fact that many experienced perilous sea voyages, lending a sobriety to the mindset being formed. Should you make it to your chosen destination at all, life and death were surely more real, and certain dangers small in light of previous experience!)

Compare this to what happens nowadays. One day you’re enjoying all the relationships, sights, smells, conversation etc. of your home country. The next day you’re transplanted into your new environment. The texts come flooding in, asking if you’ve arrived safely. Those things that were active and thriving the day before, still exist with the same strength as they had yesterday. No matter how well prepared you are mentally, the speed of travel and ease of communication that exists, makes it difficult to completely commit to your new land in as you step out of that aircraft into the immigration hall.

Metaphorically speaking, I think a 3-month ship journey probably allowed people to hoist up the anchor of their hearts and lower it again when they came to the new port. Fast travel and internet access doesn’t even allow one to lift it up completely before landing on the other side of the world.

Diver’s with the bends, people with crushing loads on their chests both have to be slowly adjusted to the new pressure in slow, incremental ways. A friend who was in the Royal Navy was not allowed to drive for a certain period after exiting the submarine. After 6 months of short-distance sight, his eyes had to readjust to long-distance. For those moving to drastically new environments, this is one thing that pressurised aluminium cannot do.

Maybe I’m overstating my completely conjecture-laden point. Or maybe not, please let me know what you think! (And of course this is only dealing with one tiny part of modern-day comparisons to ways of old. It is not a rose-tinted glasses view of mission of days gone by. And I’m sure culture shock hit them hard in other ways, for example, we have so much exposure to the world, we can expect new cultural problems before we even leave our homes.)

Regardless, the reality of being slightly tethered to the Emerald Isle, while settling roots here is very real. Thankfully, almost the entirety of the Scriptures are written to either pilgrims or exiles. Our God is a travelling God. He knows how to bring people along with him.

We’ve had some discussions this week about passages like Luke 9:57-62, and Mark 10:28-31. As we enter the strange zone of letting go of what’s behind, and with trepidation reaching out to invest in what’s before us to a greater extent. It’s a hard thing to wilfully enter that funnelling point that must occur. Friendships become fewer. Language/communication becomes most difficult. As we lose more and more of our old lives, the funnel narrows. And as we squeeze through the other side, slowly that funnel widens again. Again we find ourselves growing in communication in our new language, growing in deep friendships in this country.

The reality is that the Christian life is not a graph that is up and to the right. Not even a wiggly line with ups and downs that is still generally up and to the right. The Christian life is not even U-shaped. It is J shaped. It involves a downward trend at the beginning, but what exists on the other side of that downward step is far greater than what preceded it. It is the promise of Mark 10, that not only in the age to come, but in this life also, we will receive a hundredfold of what we’ve left behind.

Pray for us, and for all missionaries you know. Descending the first part of the graph is hard, squeezing through the narrow part of the funnel is a painful process, and hits at different times and different ways, but most commonly the 3-9 month stage, and again at 2 years, are said to be the most difficult culture shock seasons. Pray that we might learn to untether ourselves to be completely given to this land, as Christ descended for us.

And just because Dee didn’t quite grab my funnel analogy, as a funnel is normally one-sided, I present you with what was in my mind… This is in fact a Venturi tube, demonstrating Bernoulli’s principle. It is essential in aircraft engineering. Just to remind you that aeroplanes aren’t entirely bad either…