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Hello, friend.

This is Max Lakato.

Thanks for tuning in.

It's an honor to be with you.

As we study God's word together,

may our time uplift and encourage you.

If you could use some hope, I pray you find it here today.

Well, prior to the flight, I'm a midlife version of Tom Cruise and Top Gunn,

wearing an Air Force helmet, flight suit, and a smile the size of a watermelon sliced. But after the flight, I confess,

top gun is undone. Pale as Marley's ghost, I list to the side and my smile is flattened as straight

as a tarmac on which we just landed. You can chalk the change in expression up to 60 minutes of acrobatics

in a T6 at 10,000 feet. I occupied the cockpit seat directly behind Lieutenant Colonel Tom McLean,

right over here. One month shy of retirement, he invited me to join him

on an orientation flight. The invitation came complete with a pre-flight physical in which I was

measured for the ejection seat. A safety briefing in which I practiced pulling the handle for the ejection seat,

and a few moments hanging in the harness of a training parachute, which is how I would have returned to the earth had I pulled the handle on the

ejection seat. It sure was a lot of discussion about ejection seats. Turns out we didn't use

the ejection seat, which is no small accomplishment since we dived and rose and dived again. Sometimes we had the

vertical velocity of 10,000 feet a minute. I wonder if you can picture a roller coaster without the

rails. We flew in tandem with another T6. At one point, the two wingtips were separated by just seven feet.

I don't like to get that close to someone in a shopping mall.

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