Who is packing your parachute?

Sunday December 11th I was babysitting and Isaiah and we were watching Joel Osteen. I rarely watch him, but on this day, I needed to be inspired. and wow, this sermon was AMAZING and definetly made me think things through! He was telling the story of an US Pilot, named Charles Plumb, here is the story:

(www.JoelOlsteen.com)

He was a US Navy jet pilot in Vietnam. After 75 combat missions, his plane as destroyed by a surface-to-air missile. Plumb ejected and parachuted into enemy hands. He was captured and spent 6 years in a communist Vietnamese prison. He survived the ordeal and now lectures on lessons learned from that experience.
One day, when Plumb and his wife were sitting in a restaurant, a man at another table came up and said, “You’re Plumb! You flew jet fighters in Vietnam from the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk. You were shot down!”
“How in the world did you know that?” asked Plumb.

“ I packed your parachute,” the man replied. Plumb gasped in surprise and gratitude. The man pumped his hand and said, “I guess it worked!” Plumb assured him, “It sure did. If your chute hadn’t worked, I wouldn’t be here today.”

Plumb couldn’t sleep that night, thinking about that man. Plumb says, “I kept wondering what he might have looked like in a Navy uniform: a white hat, a bib in the back, and bell-bottom trousers. I wonder how many times I might have seen him and not even said Good morning, how are you?’ or anything because, you see, I was a fighter pilot and he was just a sailor.”

Plumb thought of the man hours the sailor had spent on a long wooden table in the bowels of the ship, carefully weaving the shrouds and folding the silks of each chute, holding in his hands each time the fate of someone he didn’t know.

Now, Plumb goes around the world giving conferences, and he always asks his audience:

“Who’s packing your parachute?”

The People that is packing our parachutes are the ones that we don’t notice most of the times, the people that do the “small things” for us: the people that is cleaning the streets, cleaning the office, the policeman, the waiter at the restaurant, the cashier at the grocery store. All those people that we sometimes barely notice and that many times we don’t even know their names, are always there for us, even when we don’t even notice them.

You could do many things for these people behind you, but sometimes the best way to do something for them is to say “thank you” from the heart, letting them know, that they are really important for you, that they are doing a great job for you and that you really appreciate it.

A simple way to do this is to do it one at a time, this way we can start by finding one person that does somethong for us, and start thanking one person every day, trying to be aware of all the persons behind you, one person per day, one at a time. you can write them a letter, an email, a text message, you can thank them in person.

I am pretty sure you won’t run out of persons that are now helping you, you may even notice that you are aware of more and more people every day that are there to make your life easier.

I also want to Thank You for reading my posts.

-sunshine