Once I was flying at night over the North Atlantic. It was in 1947, and I was coming back from my first visit to Europe. Our plane, one of those old DC4\u2032s with two engines on each wing, was within two or three minutes of the middle of the Atlantic.<\/p>\n
Suddenly two engines on one wing stopped. I had already flown a lot, and so I could feel the engines going wrong. I remember thinking, if I\u2019m going to go down into the ocean, I\u2019d better get my coat. When I did, I said to the hostess, \u201cThere\u2019s something wrong with the engines.\u201d She was a bit snappy and said, \u201cYou people always think there\u2019s something wrong with the engines.\u201d So I shrugged my shoulders, but I took my coat.
\nI had no sooner sat down, than the lights came on and a very agitated co-pilot came out. \u201cWe\u2019re in trouble,\u201d he said. \u201cHurry and put on your life jackets.\u201d
\nSo down we went, and we fell and fell, until in the middle of the night with no moon we could actually see the water breaking under us in the darkness. And as we were coming down, I prayed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\n
Interestingly enough, a radio message had gone out, an SOS that was picked up and broadcast immediately all over the United States in a flash news announcement: \u201cThere is a plane falling in the middle of the Atlantic.\u201d My wife heard about this and at once she gathered our three little girls together and they knelt down and began to pray. They were praying in St Louis, Missouri, and I was praying on the plane. And we were going down and down.
\nThen, while we could see the waves breaking beneath us and everybody was ready for the crash, suddenly the two motors started, and we went on into Gander.
\nWhen we got down I found the pilot and asked what happened. \u201cWell,\u201d he said, \u201cit\u2019s a strange thing, something we can\u2019t explain. Only rarely do two motors stop on one wing, but you can make an absolute rule that when they do, they don\u2019t start again. We don\u2019t understand it.\u201d<\/p>\n
So I turned to him and I said, \u201cI can explain it.\u201d
\nHe looked at me: \u201cHow?\u201d
\nAnd I said, \u201cMy Father in heaven started it because I was praying.\u201d
\nThat man had the strangest look on his face and he turned away.<\/p>\n
Schaeffer draws a big-picture application:<\/p>\n
What one must realize is that seeing the world as a Christian does not mean just saying, \u201cI am a Christian. I believe in the supernatural world,\u201d and then stopping. It is possible to be saved through faith in Christ and then spend much of our lives in the materialist\u2019s chair. We can say we believe in a supernatural world, and yet live as though there were no supernatural in the universe at all. It is not enough merely to say, \u201cI believe in a supernatural world.\u201d
\nChristianity is not just a mental assent that certain doctrines are true. This is only the beginning. This would be rather like a starving man sitting in front of great heaps of food and saying, \u201cI believe the food exists; I believe it is real,\u201d and yet never eating it.
\nIt is not enough merely to say, \u201cI am a Christian,\u201d and then in practice to live as if present contact with the supernatural were something far off and strange.
\nMany Christians I know seem to act as though they come in contact with the supernatural just twice\u2014once when they are justified and become a Christian and once when they die. The rest of the time they act as though they were sitting in the materialist\u2019s chair.<\/p>\n
\u2014Francis Schaeffer, \u201cThe Universe and Two Chairs<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Once I was flying at night over the North Atlantic. It was in 1947, and I was coming back from my first visit to Europe. Our plane, one of those old DC4\u2032s with two engines on each wing, was within two or three minutes of the middle of the Atlantic. Suddenly two engines on one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1216,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog-en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.italianministries.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.italianministries.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.italianministries.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.italianministries.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.italianministries.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=862"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.italianministries.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/862\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":863,"href":"https:\/\/www.italianministries.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/862\/revisions\/863"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.italianministries.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.italianministries.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.italianministries.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.italianministries.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}