November 24, 2020
We begin with a thought from “Pearls Before Swine:”
👉 On November 24, 1971, the day before Thanksgiving that year, a man bought a one-way plane ticket from Portland, Oregon to Seattle, Washington, and boarded a Boeing 727 for Northwest Orient Flight 305. He ordered a bourbon and 7 Up, and after the plane took off he gave a note to a flight attendant that said, “I have a bomb in my briefcase. I will use it if necessary. I want you to sit next to me. You are being hijacked.” To show he was serious, he opened his briefcase to display wires and red sticks. He identified himself as Dan Cooper.
D.B. Cooper soon gave the flight attendant another note. This one had instructions that after the plane had landed in Seattle he should be given $200,000 in $20 bills and four parachutes, and that the plane should be refueled and allowed to take off again. When the plane landed in Seattle, Cooper let all 36 passengers as well as two flight attendants off, but made two pilots, a flight engineer, and a flight attendant stay on board and told them to stay in the cockpit.
The plane left Seattle at 7:40 p.m. with plans to stop for fuel in Reno, Nevada, before landing in Mexico City. It never reached its destination. Cooper had told the flight crew to fly below 10,000 feet in altitude at a speed of slower than 200 knots. Shortly after 8 p.m., the crew became aware that the rear stairs had been deployed. Somewhere above the wilderness of southwest Washington State, the man who called himself Dan Cooper parachuted from the plane. He was never seen again.
Never apprehended and never identified, his case is the only unsolved case of air piracy in FBI history. Many in the FBI believe that Cooper did not survive the jump.
Nine years later, in February 1980, along the Columbia River, near Vancouver, Washington, $5,800 of the ransom money was found. Brian Ingram, who was 8 years old at the time, came across a buried bundle of twenty-dollar bills in 1980 while camping with his family on the banks of the Columbia River in Washington state. “We were going to make a campfire,” Ingram said. “My dad was getting ready to put the wood down, and I was smoothing the sand. That’s when I found what felt like old newspaper.”
His parents contacted the local police and read off the serial numbers from the bills, which matched those given to D.B. Cooper. The F.B.I. then took custody of the money until 1986, when a court divided it among Ingram, the F.B.I., and Northwest Airlines and its insurance company. Of the $5,800 he found, Ingram was allowed to keep almost $3,000.
In 2008, Ingram sold 15 tattered $20 bills at auction for more than 120 times their face value – $37,000.
The FBI officially closed the investigation in 2016.
👉 Yesterday I posed some difficult questions for your consideration. One reader sent me some blog-worthy answers.
(Q1) A vacuum cleaner is good if it really sucks. (Q2) About the third hand on a watch being called the second hand: second is really first loser. (Q6) About singing “Take me out to the ball game” when we are already there: we are not really in the game – the players are. (Q10) When but at Christmas would you be sitting in front of a dead tree, eating candy out of your socks? – if you are on a season of “Survivor.”
Any other answers?
👉 Sometimes working in an office becomes boring and workers look for ways to break the monotony. Consider these (the first is a collection of post-it notes on the break room refrigerator – the others need no explanation):
👉 And some more “Signs of the Times:”
👉 Today’s close is from New Morning Mercies, by Paul David Tripp.
What is the most needed, yet the most dangerous, prayer you could ever pray? It is the one prayer that takes you beyond the small-picture hopes and dreams that kidnap so much of your prayer. It is all right to pray about your job, marriage, family, finances, house, children, retirement, vacation, investments, church, health, government, and the weather, but it is not enough.
This kind of prayer follows the “right now-me” model of prayer. It is about life right here, right now and about what I have come to think that I need right here, right now.
Yes, God cares about your present life. He gives you grace for this moment. Right now He is with, for, and in you. But He calls you to view yourself and your life from a perspective that goes far beyond this moment and extends far beyond your ability to diagnose what you truly need.
The one prayer Christ calls us all to pray requires us to let go of our momentary agendas and take up His eternal one. It requires us to surrender our distorted sense of need to His perfect sense of what is best. It is the “forever-you” model of prayer.
It requires you to take the long view – to let go of your hold on your life and surrender to the kingship of another. It is captured by a few dangerous words. Why “dangerous”? Because they have the power to turn your life upside down, to make you a very different you than you have been.
Here is what we have been called to pray: “Your kingdom come, your will be done, right here, right now in my life as it is in heaven” (from Matthew 6:10). It is only in the context of the surrender of these words that Jesus welcomes you to pray about your right-here, right-now needs.
Here is grace. I don’t have to work to be a king and I don’t have to carry the burdens of a king because I have been gifted with a King. In His kingdom, I am blessed with every good thing I will ever need, and in my welcome to His kingdom, I am included in something that will never, ever end. So pray that prayer because that dangerous grace is really what you – and I – need. Don’t hesitate. Do it now. Why live for what will pass away? Why give your searching heart to what can never satisfy? Why tell yourself that you know what you need, when the One who created you knows better and has promised to deliver?
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