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WORLDWIDE CHURCH OF GOD
WORLD HEADQUARTERS
PASADENA, CALIFORNIA 91123
HERBERT W. ARMSTRONG
President and Pastor
En route Europe to Bombay
February 21, 1975
Dear Co-Worker with Christ:
As I start to write we are flying at 37,000 feet at 550 mph
plus tailwind over the spectacular snow-covered Swiss Alps. What
a beautiful, exciting view! Just outside my triple-pane window
the temperature is 82°F. below zero! If my Gulfstream-II aircraft
were not pressurized, there would be so little oxygen we could not
breathe.
However, it is warm and comfortable at my "office" seat flying
through the air. If anything happened to our pressurization,
the captain in the cockpit would press a button; instantly an oxygen
mask would drop in front of me, just as for all passengers.
I have become so accustomed to flying that I take it contemptuously
for granted like many people who do travel by air a great deal.
One can become so accustomed to it that everything becomes routine
and he begins to take it all for granted.
Things are happening faster and faster. It seems I have lived
through several ages in one lifetime. When I was a boy eleven years
old, no human had ever flown in an airplane. Orville and Wilbur
Wright were working on a funny little contraption in which one of
them was to fly a few feet in a matter of days after my eleventh
birthday -- but few people on earth knew about it when I turned
eleven. If any one of them had told me that someday I would be
flying over the Swiss Alps at 37,000 feet (about 7 miles) at a
speed of more than 600 mph, I would have known he was joking. My
transportation then was my father's horse and buggy and my bicycle.
The automobile then was steered by a sort of stick (I had never
yet seen a steering wheel), and there were mostly horse-drawn buggies
with horse shafts removed and motors put in. We called them
"horseless carriages." It was an exciting event to see one. My
father called the family to the front window of our home one day,
saying: "A horseless carriage is goinq by." He was right -- it was
a mule-drawn buggy! No one had ever heard of radio or television.
So we have speeded up, faster and faster. Now supersonic
aircraft can whip through the air at 1500 mph. Astronauts fly to the
moon and back at fantastic speeds.
The Model-T Ford ("flivver") came along in due time. An
Iowa farmer uncle of mine had one, but there were no paved roads yet --
just dirt and mud roads. This uncle was religious, and one night
he was saying his prayers in bed. Just as he drifted off to sleep,
my aunt heard him saying, "Oh Lord, give us better roads and MORE
SPEED." He could then drive his "flivver" twentv miles an hour --
if the roads were good. Apparently his prayer was answered. Some