Photo by Flickr user wings777 licensed under Creative Commons
By Yay Padua-Olmedo
He (or they) must be pretty smart―whoever makes things seem easy-breezy and orderly at airports.
Fly with me to Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), California, the United States’ second busiest airport and the fourth worldwide.
Its 2013 Wikipedia statistics: 66.7million passengers; 1.1 metric tons of cargo; and more than 353,000 aircrafts flying in and out. An average of 182,740 pax and 967 planes a day!
How on earth can anyone or any group of people manage all these? Must be due to a pretty well-oiled system, a competent team, or state-of-the-art technology―or a combination of all these.
To simple-minded me, that’s one mind-boggling logistics nightmare; its complexity I can’t even imagine.
But even more intriguing is that sleek sky-boat jetting people in and out of airports. Do you know that the biggest plane in the world weighs 285 metric tons―640 metric tons including cargo and passengers?
How can something as heavy, thrust itself heavenward-ward, then cross 11,747 km (7,299 miles), say from Manila to the US―at precisely the time and spot you’ve been promised you’d land. Unthinkable too, to my unscientific pedestrian mind, is this: that plane defied gravity!
I relished all these recently as we flew in to the Los Angeles airport, from where my husband and I would take another flight to San Diego for a much-anticipated visit of our son Carlo’s family, my sisters and a handful of nieces and their extended families.
While the plane taxied down the runway, we viewed on its TV monitor the aircraft’s underbelly―its front wheel precisely rolling on the thin runway line. Talk of precision technology and precision-trained pilots!
Travellers make it safe to their destinations today because of those with the wisdom to invent, innovate, plan and execute up to the tinniest details, and closely coordinate with others even across the globe.
System and people failures (even terrorists), along with typhoons, can wreak havoc on even the best plans. That’s why security checks have never been more rigorous.
But isn’t it awesome that God has equipped man with wisdom, and limitless capabilities to create and put into motion seemingly undoable things, like making travel safe and comfortable―even in the sky?
Didn’t God say, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule…” (Genesis 1:26)?
God surely meant that likeness to be in the form of wisdom, understanding, insight, inventiveness, creativity, the ability to dream, have a vision, plan, execute, etc.
Genesis 2:7―Then the LORD God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life… man became a living being.
Yes, you and I are but dust; and we’re reminded of that often when we see a loved one’s remains in the cremation chamber. But it is not our form―nor this flesh we try to pamper everyday―which makes us like Him. His Spirit living in us makes us like Him. No wonder we can manage life and its complexities like no other creature can.
Your next booking better be for space travel.
