Tammie Jo Shults: A Fresh Breeze
Into the fetid air of the great dismal that is today's selfie-celebrity cultural swamp comes the fresh breeze of a Tammie Jo Shults.
On April 18 this veteran pilot landed a Southwest Airlines passenger jet that had lost one of its two engines, been gashed by shrapnel that killed a passenger and might have compromised the strength of the aircraft.
Captain Shults sweeps into our consciousness midst the world where an actress laments that she never had an abortion, a stripper chases the president of the United States in the courts, and a college professor celebrates Barbara Bush's death in an obscenity-laden rant.
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Os Guinness, in his book, The Dust of Death, mentioned a letter written to someone named Diognetes in AD 150, discovered in modern times by archaeologists. Apparently the anonymous correspondent was living through an outbreak of the Black Death. Though not a Christian, he notes how the followers of Jesus Christ are not fleeing the infected cities and neighborhoods, but remaining to tend the sick, believers or not.
"As the soul is in the body, so are Christians in the world," says the letter-writer to Diognetes. Twenty centuries later, Christopher Dawson, a Catholic cultural philosopher-historian, calls Christianity "the soul of the West."
Tammie Jo Shults is an example.
Almost immediately after the events of April 18, a family member surfaces the fact that Shults is a deeply committed Christian, a neighbor describes her as a "strong Christian lady," and someone remembers that Shults once said that sitting in the pilot's seat in the cockpit provided "the opportunity to witness for Christ on every flight."
The airplane Tammie Jo Shults helmed on April 18 had taken off from New York's LaGuardia Airport. And just over there, off the wings of Southwest Flight 1380 as it turns toward Dallas is the Hudson River, where, a few years before, another pilot, "Sully" Sullenberger, flying a big jet whose engines had been crippled by a flock of birds, brought it gently down upon the icy surface of the waters, saving all aboard.
There was much ballyhoo not long after about Captain Sully's reply to a reporter's question that he was not praying during the emergency, but calling on all his skills to land the airplane on the river.
It was an "A-Ha!" moment for skeptics everywhere. See there, honest commenters as well as trolls said all over the internet: the God who probably does not exist was irrelevant to all of this.
The two events and the two pilots—one a witnessing Christian, the other a good man who seemed to have no religiosity—raises an important question: Can non-believers be just as heroic, poised, and helpful as people not only believing in God, but claiming a relationship with the Lord?
Of course they can. There were valiant people who saved Jews during Hitler's Holocaust that were not of Israel, but whom ethnic Jews called "Righteous Gentiles." So today there are noble atheists and agnostics and other non-Christians whose deeds are heroic and praiseworthy.
Whenever anyone serves others—especially when they themselves are endangered—it is the image of God within the human compelling the deeds. Sacrificial acts run counter to the "survival of the fittest," and arise from an extraordinary motivation that comes from beyond the human being. Every person has a measure of what the Reformers called "common grace." (See also Romans 1) The noble works of a non-believer are therefore as God-given as those of a person of great faith.
After her amazing landing Tammie Jo walked up and down the aisle checking on the well-being of each of her passengers. Following his phenomenal landing, Sully refused to leave his swamped aircraft until he had helped all his passengers into lifeboats.
Tammie Jo Shults is a living example of the "remnant" described in both the Old and New Testaments. These are people of open, unwavering faith in God and His word expressed in the Bible, deeply committed to Christ, driven by a Holy Spirit-empowered passion that all people would know His love, and eager to serve in His name and by His power.
Like Captain Shults, wherever they "sit" is a place of witness and ministry. She reminds us who seek to be part of that remnant within contemporary society that we are to bless the swamp we inhabit with fresh air, not hot blasts that only add to the fetid atmosphere around us.
The heroic non-believer inspires us on the immanent level with hope in what humans can do when they give their best to a situation. The heroic believer lifts us to the transcendent scale, where hope is not situational, but eternal in the heavens, a hope that holds whether the airplane stays aloft or afloat, or not.
