Fly Away Home

The other night, thanks to cable TV, I rewatched the classic and underrated film "Fly Away Home." In case you forgot, this movie tells the true story of a girl who taught a motherless flock of geese how to fly south for the winter by leading them in a homemade airplane.

But that's not where the story begins.

Underscored by Mary Chapin Carpenter's impeccable "10,000 Miles," the story wordlessly begins with little Amy and her mother driving around New Zealand. They're exchanging laughs, watching the nightscapes pass by, and clearly enjoying a normal drive in the car together. And then the semi truck swerves, throwing their car off the road. The mother dies. Amy survives and goes to live with her estranged father in Canada, where she'll eventually become the surrogate mother of the flock of goslings.

Time after time, Amy and her father strive to come up with ways to teach the geese to fly south. Even if you haven't seen the movie before, you know they'll make it. Like most movies we love, this is a story of redemption. What strings us breathlessly along is not knowing if or when they'll hit trouble along the way.

We worry about Amy when the practice plane crashes with her in it in the field. We gasp when Igor the goose gets hit out of the sky. We fear that the law will catch up with them and the geese's wings will get clipped in the night. Our hearts race when the American military almost shoots Amy and the geese out of the sky. But we know they're going to make it. We know they're going to be okay in the end.

Isn't that our story, too? The Bible - the world's Great Story of redemption - has a "happy ending." The happiest, in fact. Yet throughout the Bible and our own lives, we continue to worry when the next ball will drop. Even though we know the ending.

I often catch myself full of fear or anxiety or breathless anticipation as life sits on the cusp of diverging down one road or the other. But like the movie, even though I don't know if Igor will die or if the plane will have enough fuel to get to the next stop, I know they're going to make it south and be more than alright.

I know the ending. Why do I continue to fear the middle so much?