Full Transcript for Adventure will have Adversity - An interview with Tammie Jo Shults - Encore

well so its exciting to think about what um… what God’s preparing and doing in… in lives and I take… I look at your podcasts and I think about how many lives that touches and that word “fearless,”not… not being personally fearless but fearless in faith, like you said, we can be reckless in our love for the Lord which… which opens up the doors for love for other people. Cissie:            00:06:21 Many people might recall and remember the story of April 17th, 2018 and…but I want people to know the story before, your life before that so before you share what happened on that day in 2018, tell us what it was like for you growing up and how you became a pilot. Tammie:        00:06:39 Uh… growing up uh… in a family of four kids and a mom and dad that were very grounded, uh… we farmed and ranched in New Mexico.  Now uh… initially my dad drove a grader uh… saving up to invest in a little bit bigger place and more livestock and then he would farm uh… fla… uh… by flashlight at night and… and mom was hands on in everything on the farm and uh… as well as us kids and so that was… that was really the springboard of growing up problem solving as a kid.  I think that’s one of the things that I... I know in today’s world, it’s real easy to problem solve for our kids but I can’t remember not having chores growing up and that’s part of our, I think, our natural grooming in problem solving is having chores and we had plenty of those.  I saw the Air Force jets doing their dog fighting practice over our big hay barn and… and that’s really what drew me to aviation and the same summer that I met and finally understood who Jesus was was the summer that I read the book Jungle Pilot about Nate Saint, Jim Elliot’s, a pilot down in Ecuador and I just… I felt like, “Okay, I have seen it overhead but now… now that I read it, I feel like I can see it through a pilot’s eyes” and I could also see the path of how do you get from, you know, here uh… cleaning out stalls and stock trailers of organic fertilizer to a cockpit and so the Lord just kinda opened those… those doors.  Nobody else in my family had done that and so there wasn’t anybody that was really helping me navigate that other than just collecting books and… and reading. Cissie:            00:08:34 And I’ve heard you talk about your family sacrificed a lot for your chil… er… for you and your siblings…  Tammie:        00:08:39 Truly, all the… all the way through my college uh… my family um… came through some very difficult times, lost uh… their farm and ranch and… but they were in… intentional on keeping me in college and… and I worked a couple of jobs while I was in college so I did Arby’s uh… in the evenings and sold roast beef sandwiches and Hardy’s in the morning and sold uh… biscuits but I still needed help financially to make it through college and one time whenever I went home, uh… my little brother who’s about twelve years younger than me said, “I love it when you’re home, Tammie Jo,” and I thought, “Oh, you know,” and then he finished the sentence.  He goes, “When you’re home, we eat meat,” and I saw my mom and dad look at each other real briefly and I realized, I mean, they literally didn’t eat meat to help me get through college and uh… so I had a great example of what sacrificial love looked like and so whenever my eyes finally landed on Scripture that… that… that made sense to me about who God was and when He calls Himself “our Heavenly Father,” I can easily understand what that love affair is because I had an earthly father that poured into me and… and… and a mother that sacrificial love, when we show it to our children, I think it makes it easier for them to understand how God loves them. Cissie:            00:10:07 So when your interest started to grow to be a pilot, you were told “No,” and you have faced challenges of being a woman, especially early on when women weren’t flying that much so tell us about uh… those challenges and how you overcame them and per… still pursued a dream. Tammie:        00:10:26 My… my first challenge uh… was at uh… Career Day where you’re supposed to be encouraged and I went.  I signed up for the Aviation class… Cissie:            00:10:35 So was this Career Day in high school? Tammie:        00:10:36 In high school and I... I went to it ‘cause no one around there was a pilot and nobody even knew pilot… a pilot so I signed up for Career Day and when I got there, the Colonel in charge just kinda looked at me and said, “Are you lost?” uh… wanting to help me find my class.  He was not being mean at that point uh… but I... I said, “No, Sir, I signed up for Aviation” and he shook his head and he said, “Well, this is Career Day, not Hobby Day.  You need to go find something girls can do.”And it wasn’t my school.  We’d gotten there a little bit late and I just took the closest seat that was empty and kept my head down and listened and it wasn’t… I wasn’t brave or defiant, I just knew the buses were locked and it just sounded incredible and it also made me realize, since I had a father that treated me as an equal with my brothers and the hired hands, that uh… you know, on… on a farm and ranch, work needs a workforce so if you can do it, do it and uh… I’d always done everything that the… the other hired hands and my brothers had done so when I walked away and they said that women didn’t do that, I just thought, “That’s really a shame because it sounds like a lot of fun” uh… and I went and studied something different and then uh… came across another pilot that a woman getting her wings in the Air Force so I... I tried again.  I... I will have to say, you know, when God kinda locks your radar on something, it doesn’t… it doesn’t mean that its gonna be easy.  I think so many times people maybe think that if the door’s closed or its really a struggle, then it just must not be God’s will and I think you don’t have to read very far in Scripture to see that God’s will is not always easy, you know.  He’s not gonna always just

part the waters, um… you have to get to the water sometime, which is tough, and so even though I... I did face a number of um… I would say probably twenty-six years’ worth of or thirty years’ worth of uh… resistance, there was always that uh… moment in the day where I... if… if it was a frustrating day, uh… I would have to just put it before the Lord and… and just say, “Is it… is this really where I’m supposed to be?” andum… you know, “What is my merit here?  What is my motive?” and, you know, I... I... it ranged, honestly, from people, quote unquote, “not being nice.”  Well, people aren’t nice to a lot of people in a lot of different occupations.  Two guys literally trying to brush me off on mountains upside down at night in formation, you know, just to prove that women shouldn’t be there so there was some kind of harsh and ugly stuff that went on as well, uh… especially when they started opening up uh… new doors for women in the military and so any time there’s change, people get um… it… it… it brings to the surface their… their feelings about things and I always had… had that… that chance to put it before the Lord, something that if you’re not… if you’re not walking with the Lord, I don’t know how you do it, quite frankly.  I... I know my… my need for His strength and… and I would just look at what is their motive for acting that way and what’s the merit to their actions and compare that to mine and then let the Lord sift through it and, as my mom told me in junior high when people were mean, “Tattle on ‘em.  Tell the Lord every detail…” Cissie: 00:14:17 Tattle with the Lord, l like that. Tammie:        00:14:19 Yeah, “and then pray for them” ‘cause its really hard to resent and hate people that you have brought before the Lord.  Certainly, you know, be honest with Him about… about it but then also ask Him to heal a heart ‘cause when people are vindictive or um… vengeful, there’s a reason and its rarely the target right in front of them.  Its something behind them and so that would be I would say what pulled me through the uh… the times when just silly things like whenever we went to A7 weapons and it was the first-time women had ever been on the A7 weapons detachment.  They were not happy to see us at all but uh… really just because they acted out and left us, uh… never took us to supper, we had more time to practice and we did very well in weapons and when we passed up the guys in our scores ‘cause the scores are put every day, every flight, up on this huge wall so its for everybody to see and they… they took away our bullets for strafing so that we couldn’t score any more and then they put us off flying just with one instructor by ourselves doing something different so that we wouldn’t be compared with the guy… It was just little stuff that seemed uh… petty at the time but hurtful and uh… but God helps us to see the long range.   Cissie:            00:15:52 So for those who don’t know um… your military career… Tammie:        00:15:55 Yeah… Cissie:            00:15:55…and might not be aware of kind of, let’s say military terminology, tell us exactly what you did in the military. Tammie:        00:16:04 I came up through the Naval um… Naval Aviation so I went through AOCS, Aviation Officer Candidate School.  Uh… and then commissioned from there into flight school, flew the T-34 and then we get a choice of helos, props or jets.  I chose jets, got jets.  Then we flew another two aircraft, T-2’s and A-4’s and then I went back, instructed as a SERGRAD in T-2’s and then went on to fly uh… in a… an aggressor squadron A-7’s in VAQ-34.  At that time, women were not flying combat uh… but the Navy, being pretty ahead of the times in… in their opportunities, they had two squadrons where women could fly combat aircraft and we studied Russian, Chinese, and French weaponry, aircraft, missiles, things like that and then we simulated those against our own fleet.  We top gunned other squadrons, um… ke… whole carrier groups working up, getting ready to go on cruise, or just individual ships that wanted to test their sailors to see if they could… could survive an attack and so we’d do different things like uh… silkworm missile profiles were one of our favorites when we were in the A-7 and uh… we’d pop up from behind an island… come in at two hundred feet, four hundred knots behind an island and then pop up and dive down as deep as possible on a ship to see if they could uh… radar lock uh… and defend themselves and things like that.  After a couple of years in the A-7and going through A-7 weapons, Pam and I were selected to go through the F-18 um… what they call RAG, Replacement Air Group, which was their training command.  They had never had females go through the F-18 training and so I... I... I often say, you know, the… the um… the welcome was, I mean, there was a shock wave of… and it was very transparent their… their feelings about us being there, some good, some not so good. So, anyway, I... I did that for a couple of years and then uh… stepped out of the Navy and into flying over forest fires uh… for a summer and twenty-six years ago I started Boeings for seven… 737s for Southwest. Cissie: 00:18:26 And for uh… those who are listening who might not know and understand, you were just explaining to me also in the uh… Navy that if you’ve seen the movie, Top Gun… Tammie:        00:18:36 Right. Cissie:            00:18:36 … and how they’re practicing, you were basically kind of the bad guy that would practice against… Tammie:        00:18:37 Right. Cissie:            00:18:41 … them, correct? Tammie:        00:18:42 Right. In the movie, they have their instructors being the bad guys and I think they practice that way but when they’re ready uh… for graduation or do a little bit bigger project, then they order quote unquote “order bogies” like we order hamburgers.  You know, they would call our squadron and tell… tell us uh… maybe either a Russian, Chinese uh… whatever the threat would be of

simulation and how many and at what altitude, at what “whiskey area” over the ocean and then sometimes it was a surprise.  They’d just say, “Send at least four” and see if their students could jump us or survive us or whatever it was gonna be. Cissie:            00:19:25 So now for those that who are listening, you understand why Miss Tammie Jo is fearless in an everyday uh… aspect to just have that career. And I forgot to mention early on, your husband, Dean, who I love dearly because I enjoy fishing with Dean up here in Alaska, he’s my fishing buddy and we have competitions.  We’re out there on there on the river but he was also in the military. Tammie:        00:19:47 Oh, definitely, he is uh… he’s an integral part of my story and uh… blessed that he is.  He… he was… I met him at church and it was… it was funny because he came in.  I was up in the choir loft singing and… and he came in and looked around and found a place to sit and I... in Beeville, Texas, I mean, there were two places to meet girls, either the bar or the church so there were a lot of guys that came to church really just because it was a… a place that they could meet someone else besides a military person but uh… when he came in, I thought, “Now he is a young man that looks like he’s comfortable in God’s house.”  I remember just having that thought.  We met.  Nobody told him I was in the military and the next day when he came to the squadron, he was checking in as a new T-2 student… Cissie:            00:20:38 Awe… Tammie:        00:20:39 And he realized, “That’s the girl that I met yesterday and she’s… she’s one of my instructors” so I... I didn’t really instruct him.  Uh… we all get assigned students and he wasn’t assigned to me until uh… he couldn’t find anybody to go on a cross-country to New Mexico and so he called me and… and we wound up going on that cross-country together, having a lot of time to chit chat and talk and… and we both realized, “Okay, this is more than a church attendance, uh… you know, that that is a real walk with the Lord that I see in their life” and um… he was a student, I was an instructor and I... I really wanted to be careful about having any kind of scandal.  Uh… for the girls, it followed me ‘cause there was about one girl per year that would go through the flight training and jets in particular and also as a Christian and I remember going in to my Skipper, uh… Commander Grant, and saying, “Sir, I need to talk to you.” And he goes, “Okay,” and I shut the door and he goes, “Whoa, what are we talking about?” and I said, “Oh, there’s a guy…” and he goes, “Oh, no!” and… but I told him the situation, you know, that “I... I’m not dating him but there’s a guy that we go to the same church, same Bible study, and if he asks me out, I just… I just wanna make sure that I don’t cause a scandal in any way” and Commander Grant, who’s got a wry sense of humor, he said, “Now, Tammie Jo, a scandal, it requires for someone involved to be important.” And I kinda

waited… Cissie:            00:22:15 Was he saying you weren’t important? Tammie:        00:22:16 Right!  Right! And he goes, “Now if I dated a student, I’m married. I’m the Skipper. I’m important. You are just not important enough to cause a scandal.  I would say you and Dean may not wanna kiss in the squadron spaces but if he asks you out, you have my blessing.” Cissie:            00:22:32 Well, I guess he gave you permission… Tammie:        00:22:34 Yeah, yeah, so that we… we dated under the radar visiting uh… church friends of his in Texas um… as we dated and we were married within nine months. Cissie:            00:22:47 I love watching the two of you because you’ve both had successful careers, both military but both now Southwest Airline pilots.  You’ve raised a family but you love one anoth… I can see when you’re telling your story and you’re in the spotlight for the moment, he looks at you with adoration and he adores you.  He’s your partner and you’re his and it is very beautiful example for those who watch from the outside, and I’m not saying I know every marriage has its… Tammie:        00:23:15 Oh, yeah… Cissie:            00:23:15 … has its ups and downs and I’m not trying to put you on a pedestal ‘cause I don’t like it when people uh… often say that but y’all are a wonderful example of two successful careers but have put that at the foot of the cross before the Lord.  You love one another, you serve one another, and you never put each other kind of ahead of the other and so it’s been beautiful to watch so thank you for that and thanks for letting him… I love fishing with Dean but… Tammie:        00:23:40 He’s fun. Cissie:            00:23:41 … on that morning of April 17th, 2018, you woke up as a normal day and actually I think you’ll tell the story where Dean was supposed to be the pilot that day on that flight but at the end of the day, the world would know your name and that day changed your life and you’d had a career that prepared you in the challenges that you faced and the adversity you’ve chain… you faced over the years, it prepared… the Lord prepared you for that day but remind… for those who are listening and might not remember all the details… Tammie:        00:24:09 Yeah… Cissie:            00:24:10 … of that day, share with us the details. Tammie:        00:24:12 You know, uh… and before I start that day, I have to fill you in on one thing that uh… it was not meant well at all.  I had a Skipper that uh… removed me from doing what all my peers were doing and sent me as a punishment just for being a female in his squadron, which he didn’t want but he couldn’t get rid of me and I... I sent to teach Out of Control Flight for a year and its… it… it just… it messes with your equilibrium.  Most people’s stomachs empty or it… its just a non-fun flight but the bottom line is teaching that for a year, it wound up being truly the ace in my hand whenever Flight 1380 came up and uh… and the day started like um… like every day at work really.  I set my alarm about thirty minutes earlier than what I need so that I have time to make a cup of tea and sit down with my Bible and I usually choose a Scripture from that day, the day’s reading or uh… that it is in my Bible reading, to put it on a pretty picture of outdoors and sent it to my family as I pray for them and that way wherever we are in… in the world, uh… even though we’re not around the kitchen table, we still have a… a little bit of a… a coming together around God's Word before everybody gets started in the day; and that day’s Scripture was Colossians, “Do what you do as unto the Lord,”and off I went.  Uh… Dean and I uh… Marshall, our youngest, he’s in track and I... I’m his throwing coach so I really wanted to go to… Cissie:            00:25:54 I hope the listeners heard that.  She was also her son’s throwing coach, not that she enough on her plate already but keep going.  Sorry to interrupt you. Tammie:        00:26:01 Oh, no, but Dean, without even asking me traded trips with me because he knew I wanted to be at that track meet so bad.  Uh… I mean, he wanted to be there too but that’s just… that’s just Dean, sacrificial to the end, and so that’s how I wound up being on this trip that was originally Dean’s trip. But I had flown with Darren, my First Officer, Darren Ellisor, just one day before and then we met the flight attendants that morning.  Um… I had stopped by and grabbed coffee for the crew on the way and Darren had hustled on to get things warmed up at the aircraft and the ladies, when they came up to get coffee and do our briefing, uh… just in the words that were spoken,everybody got a sense of uh… you know, I had… of… all three of my ladies were women of faith and I was writing out a journal for Marshall when he graduated just rewriting the book of Proverbs in a journal for him and just saying that opened up the door with all three of the flight attendants to share their little uh… not a statement of faith but just uh… a window into their faith and so we had, you know, we had some good solid ground as a team before we headed out and… and Darren, amazing man under pressure, he… he shared about his Cub Scouts that he was leading and um…   Cissie:          00:27:30 Now let me ask you a really quick… would that be normal?  On a normal day, do you do that with your crew, um… you kind of touch base with them?  You even brought them coffee, which I think is very impressive but is that normal to all touch base like that or when you look back… Tammie:        00:27:45 Yeah… Cissie:            00:27:45 … that the Lord was really preparing for the moment? Tammie:        00:27:47 You know what, it had become normal years ago.  Um… when 9/11 happened, I just realized that we needed to be more tactical in our approach to even commercial aviation and we usually have about five, maybe ten minutes to make a cohesive team out of flight attendants and pilots together, and then we chat about the weather, how far we’re

going, what the loads look like, different things, if everybody’s equipment’s good, so it had become a habit before.  It wasn’t special that day, its was… it had been a habit before then. Cissie:            00:28:26 So after you’ve brought your crew coffee and that has become your routine in your career, bringing your crew and getting to know them, what came after that? Tammie:        00:28:36 We… we took off out of Nashville, had a short flight, not real short but a fairly short flight to New uh… New York, La Guardia, and then we… we um… deplaned and… and reloaded and headed to Dallas.  It was about a four-hour flight.  Every seat was taken and pretty heavy with fuel uh… for that flight and… and headed southwest for Dallas. It… it… it was a beautiful day.  There weren’t big weather systems so um… everything looked great and then passing thirty-two thousand feet, almost at thirty-three, there was a loud boom and there was just this uh… this physical moving of the aircraft sideways.  It was kinda like being hit by a Mack truck or what it looks like uh… when… when you imagine that and Darren and I both thought that… that another aircraft had hit us.  Uh… it was such a violent jolt and then we instantly were… were uh… skidding sideways in the air, the nose pitched over pretty steep.  We lost about uh… twenty thousand feet in uh… around five minutes and so it was a pretty steep dive and then a snap roll whenever I looked at the uh… the report, the snap roll to forty degrees, it… and we caught it going past forty degrees.  It happened in… in less than a second and so it was… it was faster than you ever see airliners uh… roll their wings over and we leveled it and for just a moment we could see the engine instruments uh… rolling back and then suddenly we couldn’t see anything.  There was… it’s such a shuddering going throughout the aircraft that it… we couldn’t focus our eyes on anything and there was smoke pulled in to the cockpit and condensation formed.  I... I looked at some of the details later and uh…  I had the engine shut down within thirty seconds of it happening just because we thought we had a fire and then there was a roar.  We couldn’t communicate and we had this ice pick pain in both of our ears.  Comparing notes later, we realized we both felt like it just… right below our ears were being pierced and… and then we realized we weren’t able to breathe either and so uh… all of that happens and you… you ha… have this adrenaline rush.  I’m sure everyone did and mine, you… you know, your… your mind goes faster where it would normally go.  It doesn’t go in a different direction, just where you would normally go with your mind and mine was I... I really didn’t think it would uh… we’d keep all the big pieces on until we got to the ground and I remember looking up through my windshield which, when you’re at thirty plus thousand feet, you… you… you don’t look through your windshield to see anything but possible traffic because there’s nothing else

up there and I have remembered looking up through my windshield because I couldn’t really focus on anything that was helpful and then just thinking, “This could be the day that I actually meet my Maker face to face” and that speed train of thought that it was just rushing to a… a cliff, a mental cliff just stopped and I stepped back and I realize “I won’t meet a stranger” and I meet with Him every day and just that calm that He promises us. In Philippians He talks about that, peace beyond understanding, that calm beyond reason. Uh… when I look back at what I needed to do, we were still flying and I just stepped back into uh… what I needed to do in the moment but I did it with not only the training of thirty plus years of flying and the experience of out-of-control flight and handling aircraft that didn’t wanna handle be handled normally, uh… I stepped into it with a calm and… and I would… uh… I would need that just because we didn’t have any real indication of exactly what had happened.  We were dealing with symptoms.  We were tr… treating the symptoms and the… the symptoms kept changing.Uh… there was a lot of damage. The engine had blown up and the damage had spread out all over that side of the aircraft uh… tearing out chunks of the leading edge of the wing, the tail, uh… knocking out panels so that they were flailing underneath the wing, as well as big pieces of the cowling.  Uh… we were pulling back kinda like a banana peel remaining attached and it severed hydraulic lines and fuel lines and… and… and it struck a window, uh… a number of windows actually.  One was damaged enough that it gave way and we’re… that caused the rapid depressurization which um… it changes from seven-thousand-foot pressure to thirty-two-thousand-foot pressure in a second and the temperature is twenty-five below outside.  It’s seventy degrees inside so there is just so much going on back there and um… as well as in the cockpit things that we’re trying to make… make an aircraft turn uh… to get its nose in the slipstream and there is so much drag on the… on the left wing that we’re… we’re pulling our power completely off on the right wing to help keep it under control and… and keeping the nose down so that we’re getting into richer altitude and I remember just thinking uh… “I... I’m gonna make a PA.”  I don’t know if anyone will hear it. Once I had my oxygen mask on, I... I punched the button into the PA system and made the PA that “We’re not going down, we’re going into Philly” and then got back into flying and um… Cissie:            00:34:43 Giving ‘em that little bit of hope… Tammie:        00:34:44 Right. It’s amazing how we do well when we have… when our mind can wrap around something with hope.  It doesn’t have to change our circumstances.  It didn’t ours and yet it changed the way they thought. For Darren and I, that… that whole chu… making a choice for a destination and then you can plan.  If you don’t have a destination, you can’t make any plans and so on the way down, um… just keeping it a balanced flight so that we don’t depart the aircraft and then getting closer to Philadelphia, we… we faced some new challenges. As we got over the heart of Philadelphia, which we had to fly over to get to the runway, we thought we could level off at four thousand feet and uh…swing a little wider so we’d have time to get our… our aircraft uh… landing gear down, flaps and things and steady for the approach and we realized we couldn’t level off.  Uh… once we tried to level off, the amount of drag in… in the left wing precluded us using power from the right side because it would turn us sideways, which is more drag and we were now below four thousand feet over a very dense city and so we knew that we couldn’t use that power uh… but we had ninety degrees to turn and the little power that we’d left on the right side, uh… there’s just… we were not able… we were in this… in this moment of we need power to stay airborne but we can’t have it and get turned to the runway and I... I heard on the cockpit recording when Darren and I went back there, uh… there was silence in the cockpit.  Air traffic controller had told us where to look ‘cause he thought we didn’t see the runway because we passed it and uh… not knowing that we were trying to turn and then I hear my voice say, “Heavenly Father,” in this question uh… and Darren, my First Officer, turns to me and he goes, “I knew you were praying.”  I told him, “Yes, all the way down,” but I finished that sentence to myself just thinking uh… and praying to the Lord.  You know, I... “What am I missing? Because I know You didn’t help us to get thirty thousand feet down, runway in sight and not deliver us.  I mean, what is… what am I missing?”  And truthfully, some of it was just from my… from my reading uh… true stories.  I remembered an aviation true story.  Many aviators will remember Al Haynes bringing in a very damaged aircraft and using asymmetrical thrusts to help him turn so I realized asymmetrical thrust was my problem, that was also the answer and pulled the power off but I will say, again, you know, just having someone that we rely on that’s… that’s sovereign, that’s wise, and its generous with that wisdom just like James 1:5 says to turn to because there’s times we just get in this hamster wheel with our thought pattern and prayer can take… take us out of that.  It just lifts that mental cage over our minds.  We… we got it turned around and were able to land.  While we were airborne and the flight attendants coming through there, they found a… a woman with a six month old baby that she was not being able to get the mask on and uh… a little one that tiny, for as long as it took us to get into air that was rich enough that people could breathe without masks, there would have been problems uh… at… at best uh… but because the flight attendants had braved that… that aisle, uh… they… they were able to help her get that mask on and that an EMT, Andrew Needham, turned around and

helped a number of times, more than once, so that the baby kept its oxygen and the mother. They also, Andrew Needham and Tim McGinty got up and helped the flight attendants because Jennifer Riordan was sitting next to the window, 14A, that was damaged and blown out and although she was buckled up, uh… she was also pulled out and they weren’t able to get her back in initially but these men got up, they left their family, their… their oxygen, their safety, to go towards this window and then Peggy Phillips also and I don’t know if I’ve given you my flight attendants names but they were heroic in their actions.  Seanique Mallory, Rachel Fernheimer, and Kathryn Sandoval and one of the things that I’m always amazed at when I play that through in my mind is how these people, no one knew Jennifer and Jennifer knew no one yet they were willing to get up and risk their lives to help her.When we landed and rolled out, um… the entire airplane, not just a pocket of people but the entire aircraft was quiet.  There was no clapping, there was no shouting, it was a silence you could hear a pin drop in and I think that was because everybody there realized the value of human life that day, not just their own, and the… that there was no way, even though they were still doing CPR on Jennifer, that… that there was a life that had been snuffed out that day and uh… that is something that will always weigh heavy on my heart, my crew, and my company and Dean, my husband, uh… amazing man, he called that night just knowing that um… we can give words of… of encouragement, affirmation to each other but God's words, which are… are eternal, they stitch our hearts together… together better than any… anything we could ever use and that Ecclesiastes uh… verse, “There is a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance” because, yes, a hundred and forty eight people returned is… is fabulous but that loss of one will never be eclipsed by the survival of many and uh… I... I certainly…I think everyone had takeaways from that day that will last them a lifetime.  Mine solidified into three… three things: habits, hope, and heroes.  And habits, I realized that day, habits on a good day become our instinct on a bad day and if you’ve ever had the chance to watch animals much and you see how incredible instinct really is but when you see a deer run across a busy road or bang into a deer fence over and over, you realize instinct without reason, without logic, is not always good, you know, and we have that generous gift of choice to choose our instincts and habits are what create our instincts and hope, uh… that would be my number one takeaway probably from this whole um…episode and that is hope doesn’t have to change our circumstances, it changes us and our minds are so powerful.  You… you know from just having situations in life where nothing changes but your… your mind.  Hope is that… that invisible intangible glue that holds us together whenever facts and circumstances would easily tear us apart and so hope not having to change our circumstances is it changes us and that’s longer lasting.  And then heroes, um… so many that day but I was amazed at how many at the end of the day were people that didn’t have um… a uniform, they didn’t have a title, and they didn’t have equipment, they were just willing to take the time to see and the effort to act on behalf of someone else.  And then I... stepping back and looking longer range at the adventures that we look at.  You know, mine, beginning uh… in flight, just dreaming about getting to do…do something and then finding a way to do it and it was not… every day was not a great day.  I mean, there was adversity. But I can look back and I know God uh… teaches us lessons at different times but that adversity is part of what grooms us. And it prepares us so that we meet bigger challenges. When I look at Flight 1380, I can see how well God prepared me, not just in my aviation but in my faith, not just in my faith but in my mental toughness and… and so it's… if you’re facing adversity, then you’re probably getting groomed for something even more important up ahead and it probably is not just for you.  You know, adventure, we never… it… it never leaves us unchanged but it’s rarely just for our own benefit. MUSIC TRANSITION Cissie: 00:44:49 Thank you for joining me on this special episode of Fearless with Tammie Jo.  I encourage you to read her book.  Um… I will put that link in the show notes but also there’s a great children’s version that would be a great gift for children in your life.  Once again, follow me on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, always helping you have a fearless faith in a compromising culture. CLOSING MUSIC # # #