A stewardess is saved, just in time!

"How's everything?" I asked, as she was passing out the Chiclets. The plane stewardess did not answer. Instead of receiving an answer, I noticed a tear in her eye. Sensing that something was wrong, I told my traveling companion to pray while I would talk with her at our next landing at Wichita.

Half the passengers got out to stretch their legs for the brief stop-over. I found the stewardess at her station in the rear of the plane. There, after some introductory remarks between us, she told me her story.

Her fiancee was to have been returned to the States from England. At her request the airline officials had changed her from the West Coast to Chicago, where he was to have been stationed, so that she could be with him between flights. Instead of the anticipated reunion in Chicago, however, she got word that he had been killed while returning from his fiftieth and last bombing mission. Her plans were "shot," her disappointment bitter, and life no longer seemed worth living.

Secretly I prayed for the right words. "It is hard for one to put one's self into your place," I said. "I wonder what I would do were I to receive word right now that my wife had met with sudden death." "What a blow it would be!" I reflected. "How lonely the days that would stretch ahead!" "Yet," I ventured, "I have a very dear Friend who I believe would help me face the sorrow and the empty days. I have known this friend for many years, and He has never let me down. It is the Lord Jesus Christ. Do you know Him?"

"I can't say I do," she replied." Her attitude bespoke her readiness to hear more about the Lord, and with open Bible I pointed out to her how to accept this Friend as her personal Savior. And there in the back of the plane we bowed our heads and the stewardess uttered the penitential prayer, "Lord be merciful to me a sinner." God heard that prayer and definitely witnessed to her heart that she had become a child of God through faith in the One who died for her.

When the plane resumed its flight, it carried a lighter cargo, for the burden of sin and sorrow had been lifted from the heart of its stewardess. And when we finally left her plane at Tulsa, with tears in her eyes she looked up into the blue sky and said, "If I were to die right now, I know I would go straight to heaven."

A few hours later that stewardess did "go straight to heaven," for when we picked up the newspaper next morning we read that our plane had crashed and that the stewardess was instantly killed. -- Torrey Johnson

From: 2700-PLUS SERMON ILLUSTRATIONS By Duane V. Maxey

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