Against All Odds

Against All Odds

Jesus replied with a story: “A Jewish man was traveling from Jerusalem down to Jericho. . . . Then a despised Samaritan came along.” Luke 10:30, 33

I remember it to this day. I had been wronged and was complaining about the unfairness of what had occurred. My dad agreed with me, but his response to me was by way of a story.

“When I was in the service,” he said, “they didn’t want to teach us how to fly planes, so we taught ourselves to fly.”

We being blacks. African Americans. The Samaritans, perhaps, of that time. I didn’t ask any questions about what he meant by “we taught ourselves to fly.”

Tuskegee, Alabama, is near Montgomery. The town was named for a nearby Native American tribe called the Taskigis. It is still best known for Tuskegee University, whose first president was Booker T. Washington.

During World War II, the United States Army Air Corps needed a training location for a start-up program to train black pilots until 1946, when blacks were fully integrated into military training. In 1940, Tuskegee was selected as the training site. Roughly one thousand pilots—the Tuskegee Airmen—were trained there and first saw combat in 1943, finishing their service without any of their planes shot down in bombing runs in Europe. In 2007, the Tuskegee Airmen were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for their service.

My dad was a part of this elite group of pilots, but I never knew it until his memorial service in 2004, where one of the eulogists shared the story about my dad and all the other black pilots trained to fly at that training facility. I wondered why he had never told me that story. There may have been a number of reasons, not least of which was my failure to follow up and ask about what he had meant by his comment.

It would have gotten lost in the lesson, anyway, which was that we should not let external issues hinder us and our objectives, goals, and performance, especially when those issues are based on race or any other factor.

Things will go wrong. We will be wronged. With Christ in our lives, He will help us get beyond it.

He will come up with a new and customized plan just for you.

Uncommon Key > Are there any barriers between you and others that need to come down? Read the entire story of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:29-37. Who is the most like you in the story? Make any changes to be more like the Samaritan.