The little adjustments

Every time I hear of another plane crash, my mind goes back to a bit of wisdom I heard years ago from an inspector with the Federal Aviation Administration. The essence of being a first-rate pilot, he told me, is constantly to think about the errors you’ve just made—and then to compensate for them.

Sometimes, of course, as appears likely in the sad case of the Russian airliner blown out of the sky over Egypt this month, there’s no time for such reflection, or cause for self-blame. But you can be sure that in every airplane disaster, the experts will search for signs of pilot error until evidence proves otherwise.

Every pilot makes mistakes. Those who have developed the habit of noting and then correcting the little mistakes they’ve just made live to perfect their skills. Those who regularly ignore their errors will sooner or later pay for their carelessness.

The world today needs a whole lot more people who live their lives like good airplane pilots. We need people who, without becoming gloomy and overly introspective, boldly look straight in the face of what they’ve just done and say: “That was wrong. That didn’t work. It needs correcting.”

The world today needs a whole lot more people who live their lives like good airplane pilots.

Today’s population fails that test for at least three reasons.

First, in large measure, we don’t really even believe in error anymore. When you do away with ultimate values and concepts of right and wrong, how can you have a strong sense of having erred? Do away with absolutes, and there’s nothing left to compensate for.

That’s one reason things are so blurry in Washington these days. Standards for behavior have become so dulled and ambiguous that no one knows for sure any longer whether laws have been broken. High officials in government, as well as giant corporations, regularly pay humongous fines but “deny all wrongdoing.” We’ve moved into a never-never land of moral illusions.

But second, even when we come around to admitting wrongdoing, we are quick to remind everyone that “he did it first.” In a land, though, where nobody ever gets measured, there are no short people. We’re outraged at the behavior of one public servant only until someone in our own party gets caught doing the same thing. Then we become embarrassingly adept at explaining why what at first was a hanging offense now gets nothing more than a slap on the wrist. The Apostle Paul described us well: “When they measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves with themselves, they are not wise.”

A third reason for our failure to deal realistically with our errors is that we’ve become so clever at inventing instant solutions. We’ve found ways to snap our fingers and wish away our wrongs. Some of the most successful businesses going today are built on human failure. FedEx, for example, is wealthy because so many of us are habitual procrastinators. Bank of America charges inordinate fees when we make careless mistakes in calculating the balance in our checkbooks.

The problem, though, with such casual approaches to our errors is that we tend to think we can apply such easy solutions to every wrong. You can’t, however, be a successful pilot just by (1) pretending no mistakes have been made, or (2) rationalizing that other pilots have probably made the same mistake, or (3) hitting the “undo” button after you’ve plowed into some obstacle.

But society is not made up merely of those who have faced their wrongs and those who haven’t. Among those who own up to their mistakes, there’s still a big divide. Some try to compensate with renewed self-discipline and increased effort. But that’s just compounding the problem. The ultimate winners are those who discover they can’t do it on their own, but turn instead to God to say: “I’ve spent my whole life goofing up. It’s part of who I am. I want now to face that wrongdoing head-on—and I need You to do what I cannot.”

Sometimes it’s a brand-new believer in Jesus who says that. Sometimes it’s someone who—like a pilot—knows you have to keep saying that during the whole flight.

Email jbelz@wng.org