Mitty Moments

"WE'RE going through!" The Commander's voice was like thin ice breaking. He wore his full-dress uniform, with the heavily braided white cap pulled down rakishly over one cold gray eye. "We can't make it, sir. It's spoiling for a hurricane, if you ask me." "I'm not asking you, Lieutenant Berg," said the Commander. "Throw on the power lights! Rev her up to 8500! We're going through!" The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa. The Commander stared at the ice forming on the pilot window. He walked over and twisted a row of complicated dials. "Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!" he shouted. "Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!" repeated Lieutenant Berg. "Full strength in No. 3 turret!" shouted the Commander. "Full strength in No. 3 turret!" The crew, bending to their various tasks in the huge, hurtling eight-engined Navy hydroplane, looked at each other and grinned. "The Old Man'll get us through," they said to one another.

"Not so fast! You're driving too fast!" said Mrs. Mitty. "What are you driving so fast for?" "Hmm?" said Walter Mitty. He looked at his wife, in the seat beside him, with shocked astonishment. She seemed grossly unfamiliar, like a strange woman who had yelled at him in a crowd. "You were up to fifty-five," she said. "You know I don't like to go more than forty. You were up to fifty-five." Walter Mitty drove on toward Waterbury in silence, the roaring of the SN202 through the worst storm in twenty years of Navy flying fading in the remote, intimate airways of his mind. "You're tensed up again," said Mrs. Mitty. "It's one of your days. I wish you'd let Dr. Renshaw look you over."

The Fictional story of “The secret Life of Walter Mitty” by James Thurber has always been one of my favorites because of the situations I have found myself in due to daydreaming.

My Bible reading schedule this morning took me to a portion of the Book of Exodus where God is instructing Moses on the building of the tabernacle and all the details surrounding it. At one point God tells Moses to be sure to do this exactly as he was told when they met on the mountain. Any time someone tells me to do something exactly as I was taught at a particular class, I begin to wonder if I was really paying close enough attention. One of my favorite sermon illustrations comes from a day in fifth grade when Mrs. Tibbitts made the statement, “I want you to never forget the thing I just told you”
The reason for my stress that day (and still to this day ) was that I was daydreaming up to that statement and I have no idea what she told us to ALWAYS remember. I wanted to raise my hand right then and ask her to repeat it, but didn’t, so now nearly fifty years later I still wonder what great truth I missed that day.

God has placed us in learning mode under many different teachers everyday. Be careful of the Walter Mitty Moments.