Longing and Legacy

Aeronka Defender Aircraft

Among other comments under my High School yearbook picture was written, "interested in aviation." Interested was an understatement. I was longing to fly.

I waited patiently for the monthly magazine "Flying" to appear in our school library. I would read every page, drooling over the latest small aircraft advertisements. I would ride my bicycle with a friend nearly six miles to the local airport and pay for rides in small Cessna aircraft. 

After High School, I began taking flying lessons at the same airport. I reached the amount of hours needed to begin to my solo flights. During that time a group of friends interested in getting our pilot's licenses, formed a club and bought an old 1945 Aeronka Defender (like the one pictured above) to fix up and get ready to fly. It would save us a lot of money to have our own aircraft to complete our training for a license. I was longing to fly.

Life interrupted my longings. I was drafted during the Vietnam War and ended up doing a two-year alternate service assignment in Honduras. I listed "flying" as an interest of mine, so I got assigned to a job that involved a lot of flying, despite the fact that I had no credentials for it. I enjoyed flying from place to place in Honduras in small planes. I got to know the pilots, and when I had a seat beside them, they often let me take the controls. What fun, feeling the aircraft respond to my touch! Although getting my own license was postponed, my longing to fly was still within me.

Those 2-plus years I spent in Honduras impacted me greatly. I wrote a memoir of this time titled Coming of Age in Honduras: A Young Adult's Struggle with Faith, Poverty and Sexuality.  When I returned home, I decided to go to college, now five years older than those who would be my peers. Unfortunately, this postponed my longing to fly. As the cost rose and the job market shrank, my dream to be an aviator died. I sold my share in the aviation club, and didn't look back. Eventually I became a Spanish teacher and taught for over thirty years. 

In a recent Sunday school class, I was leading a discussion of the longings of Leah and Rachel from the Old Testament. Neither got exactly what they longed for, but their legacies live on to this day. As I was sharing my longing to be an aviator and how I had to give it up, someone from the class piped up: "Your longing was unfulfilled, but your legacy of influencing hundreds of students over the years lives on." I choked up at the comment. 

Before I left Honduras, my best Honduran friend said to me: "Never forget what you learned

My best friend in Honduras

while you were here. Tell your story to everyone you meet." His comment became my new longing; to tell the story of Honduras. My years of teaching Spanish and leading students on cross-cultural adventures to Guatemala was the means by which I told their story. Later, I began writing about these experiences and got them published in religious magazines.

My father, upon reading these stories in national magazines commented: "Your experience in Honduras really changed your life, didn't it?" to which I replied, "Yes, dad, Honduras had changed my life forever." That is the last line in my Honduras memoir mentioned above.

My legacy didn't come from what I had planned or wanted. It came through events that I didn't control. Like Leah and Rachel, our longings may not be fully satisfied, but God can transform them into unexpected legacies.