obedience and airplanes

Lucky me, I get to teach the Young Women in our ward! My special group is the 'Beehive-class', the 12-13yr old girls. This week's lesson was on obedience (to the commandments) and as always they impressed me with their thoughtful comments and questions.
There was a doozy of a question of whether I would sacrifice my children if God required it of me....   obviously inspired by the story of Abraham and Isaac.

For a handout I used this idea here . I loved the quote by elder Robert D Hales using airplanes as an example:

"Just as aircraft pilots must obey certain rules to avoid disaster, there are laws, ordinances and covenants we must understand and keep as we go through earthly life if we are to reach our goal of eternal life. As important as it is for an airman to develop an automatic response to warning indicators on the instrument panel, it is even more important for us to learn emergency procedures to the warning lights that go off in our personal lives".

("Return with honour" Ensign Nov 2001)

I'm grateful for all the preparation that pilots do in the simulators preparing for worst-case scenarios. (Hopefully) you'll never see pilots in an emergency situation completely unprepared, frantically flicking through the manuals trying to find a way to avert disaster... a great lesson in how it is better to Prepare and Prevent than to Repair and Repent.

My little squadron of airplanes ready to take off......   so much fun to make.