Fear of Flying
I used to be seriously scared of flying in aeroplanes. I can remember as a child sitting bolt upright in aeroplane seats, holding the arm rests with an iron grip and sweaty palms, particularly as the plane was taking off, but also if the plane banked, or the engines changed pitch or if there was any turbulence. I can remember the amount of reassurance my father gave me during the flight every time we went on holiday.
The fear is that the plane will fall out of the sky and crash. Aeroplanes appear to defy the laws of physics, being held up there by nothing at all. The wings look as if they will snap off if they are shaken about, and they do appear to wobble a quite a lot. The engines – well we know how easy it is to stall a car – and if an aeroplane engine stills, you just drop like a stone out of the sky, of course. Barely a year goes past without the news of some airliner ending up as scattered wreckage with few or no survivors, and who knows: the plane I’m in now could be about to be one of them.
To say that I am completely cured of this wouldn’t be true, although I don’t sit in an aeroplane as if it were a white-knuckle theme park ride. I still get quite travel sick, and I am worse now than when I was younger. I think this is partly to do with the thickening of the fluids in the inner ear as I have got older. What remains stems from a lack of what is termed basic trust . This is the sense that the world is basically a safe place, and this is usually transmitted to you from your mother when you are very young. Deep insecurity is a classic autistic trait, and I have always scored very highly in this department. This is yet to be dealt with (at the time of writing this). I understand that the autism blocked the reception of basic trust to quite a large degree. It is possible that insecurity may have been transmitted onto me as a result of my mother having a miscarriage a year before I was born. My parents may have been afraid that they could lose me as well.
However, flying now ranks alongside other forms of transport in terms of how secure I feel. And so I should move on to what changed things.
General fears and insecurities are covered elsewhere, but specific to flying, there were general ungodly beliefs I had to deal with. Along with that was a specific soul-spirit hurt from when I was very young, and a fear demon to be dealt with.
Quite a lot of the changes in what I believed about aeroplanes from when I was younger has come from an understanding of how they work. For example, there is a lot a has to go wrong with the engines before you get any loss of altitude, and it is very rare that this ever happens. Also, if a forced landing is needed, there are so many airfields dotted around that the chances of not having somewhere safe to put down is actually quite small. Furthermore, even large aeroplanes are capable of gliding, even if the glide path is quite steep – they don’t just drop out of the sky. Working in engineering as I do, I have come to appreciate the level of integrity that is applied to the design of aircraft and the level of safety of every part of it. The Lord has shown me that it all part of his plan that we should have this means of rapid travel from one part of the world to another in the day and age that we live in, and that I should put my trust in the processes that bring us air travel, as he is behind them.
The soul-spirit hurt that I referred to happened when I was 3. It seems that the deeper the trauma and the younger you are when it happens, the more profound its effects are. We went to stay with my grandparents who lived in Malta at the time. On the way back, we had to get onto the aeroplane via a set of steps that dropped down from the back of the aircraft. Right above that there was an engine running, and this was very loud and high pitched. I was petrified. The inability to cope with noise is another classic autistic trait. From what I remember, I became completely disorientated, and had to be carried on and consoled over an extended period of time.
When we do soul-spirit hurts, we ask God to reveal the incident that is at the root of the current problem, and in this case this was it. We then pour out to God how we felt, asking God to bring the memories to our recollection if necessary. Having done that we ask God to show us where Jesus is in the memory. In all cases throughout our lives the Lord is always there; it’s just that we’re frequently not aware of it. He always has something to reveal to us, and it is going back into the memory and having him reveal himself in some way (of his choosing – we don’t just imagine it ourselves) that actually does the healing. We don’t actually modify in our memories what actually happened, but we add to it another dimension. In this case, the Lord revealed himself to me in the memory in that he put his hands over my ears and put his face in mine so that the world around was blocked out, and there was only him. This was actually pretty much what happened as I became disorientated, but at the time I was unaware of the Lord’s presence. It was the filling in of that gap which did the healing.
After that, we were able to cast out the demon of fear of flying. Wherever there is uncontrollable behaviour, there is pretty well always a demon behind it. Fears are a classic, because so often you just can’t stop yourself from being afraid, even if the fear is irrational.
Some people take exception to the term cast out. They think that a demon somehow can’t be in a Christian and controlling them from the inside, especially if the Holy Spirit is there. This is subject to a lot of heated debate. I won’t going into theology and examples from the Bible here. What I have observed is that it is very rare for someone to have their entire lives controlled by demons (possessed as some people would call it) – I’ve never actually encountered it. What I do see is people suddenly switching into a mode that is very uncharacteristic of them, and this is usually triggered by a set of circumstances or sequence of events. Then, just as quickly they snap out of it. It can be very momentary – just a few seconds sometimes. Yet, when you know what to look for, you can see the demon take control. The person effectively lets go and lets themselves be driven into a particular behaviour pattern.