Trust in the Lord

My husband was a helicopter pilot who put in over 1,000 hours in the aircraft as well as flew during two tours of Vietnam.

Yet he came close to never becoming a pilot because he couldn’t learn to trust instruments.  He had had a hard life and had learned to trust himself in most things.

A lot of flying is trusting your instincts, "flying by the seat of your pants," and he excelled at that.  Instruments meant "flying blind" which was just the opposite.  He was put in a flight simulator which blacked out all outer sensations.  Then he had to learn to trust not what he felt or thought, but what the lighted panel told him.  Time after time, he messed up because he felt he was flying straight and level, yet the instruments showed he was in a tight descending turn!  He fought and fought against the necessity to trust something other than his own instincts. 

Finally, when he had become resigned to the fact that he would probably fail the course and end up in Vietnam as a foot soldier, he stopped caring what happened and loosened up enough to overcome his problem.  He started trusting the instruments more than his own gut feeling and he passed the course and became a pilot. 

In the war, and many times in his life, he had to pray, trust the impressions of the Holy Ghost; it saved him and many others many times.  

At the Family History Center in Salt Lake City where I am a missionary, we train and learn so that we can excel in the mechanics of Family History. But at times, we have to “let go,” pray, and allow the spirit to guide us. A staff member recently told me that a gentleman came in needing help with Finnish genealogy. She worked with him for over an hour and a half and couldn’t find anything about his Finnish great-grandmother. Finally, the thought, “google it,” came to her. At first, she was startled and was ready to deny the prompting, but it came again, louder; “google it.”

So, she went to google and put in his great-grandmother’s name, and suddenly the great-grandmother’s name and information popped up. The screen was filled with pages and pages of genealogy that the man’s deceased aunt had done on the family, with all the sourcing. All of it in google!

When we work at something that we think we are good at, and struggle to make it work, don’t be so proud to think we have to do it all by ourselves. “Let go,” pray and trust the Lord to help us.

Proverbs 3:5-6 says: “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart, and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.”