Humble -- Meek -- Submissive

To make an analogy, I read some time ago about a U.S. Navy dive bomber pilot from World War II.  A dive bomber, of course, attacks its target by making a steep dive and dropping its bomb between 1,000 and 2,000 feet; this has the affect of turning an ordinary dumb bomb into a smart bomb as the pilot can place his bomb on the target with great accuracy.  On the particular mission I was reading about, the pilot was attacking an airfield when his wing was hit by antiaircraft fire.  The pilot held his dive and hit his target, and when he pulled up the fire in his wing was out.  Concerned that he might not make it back to his aircraft carrier, he considered ditching in the ocean to be picked up by a friendly submarine, but his rear gunner said he was injured and that he didn’t think he could deploy the raft after ditching.  So the pilot flew back to the carrier.

Since his plane was damaged, the pilot was forced to circle the ship until all the planes from the strike had landed.  If he had crashed on the deck during his landing, he would have fouled the deck preventing other planes from landing, so he had to wait.  Finally it was his turn.

Carrier landings during the pre-jet age were accomplished by flying around the ship and taking directions from a man with paddles standing near the stern of the ship, the Landing Signal Officer (LSO).  This was done to allow the pilot to see the LSO and his signals which would have been blocked from the pilot’s vision by the nose and wings of the aircraft in a longer, straighter approach.  While flying down the port (left) side of the carrier, the pilot is reading the signals from the LSO before making the final turn.  At the proper moment the LSO gives the cut signal, the pilot chops power and the plane falls to the deck where its hook catches a cable.

However the pilot in this story, instead of getting the cut signal got the wave off signal, meaning come back around and do it again.  After getting waved off a second time, the ship radioed that he should make a bigger circle and turn in from farther out, because he was approaching too fast for the normal procedure.  The pilot had to approach at a faster speed because of the damage to his wing.  A big hole in the wing meant less lift, which meant a faster stall speed.  Go too slow and the plane stalls and falls into the sea.

Around he comes, this time making the turn from farther out, and the LSO gives him the cut signal while he is farther from the deck than in a normal approach.  “Normally,” the pilot would write later, “when you come aboard, you’re almost over the end of the carrier deck and he gives you the cut . . . you’re right there: bang, bang!  But this time he gave me a cut way out, and I could see the stern of the ship!”  The danger here was that if he cut too soon, he would slam into the stern.

Still, when the LSO gave the cut signal, the pilot pulled the throttle back to zero and the roar of the engine faded.  “Oh, I had to trust him,” he said -- in other words, he had to have faith in the LSO – “I can’t do anything else.  I just got to do what he tells me.  He knows what he’s doing, that's what he’s there for.”  The aircraft, with its damaged wing, glided in and the hook caught an arresting gear cable.  The cut had been timed perfectly.

You are the pilot and God is the LSO.  It is His work and He knows what he is doing.  He knows where His sheep are, and where you need to go to find them.  You have to trust Him and exercise faith.  If you have faith, then you must have hope, and what is it that you should hope for?  Eternal Life through the Atonement of Jesus Christ.  If you have faith and hope, then you must have charity.  If you do not have one, then you don’t have the other two.  So pray to be filled with charity.  One of the things that charity is is being humble.

President Dieter F. Uchtdorf echoed President Ezra Taft Benson in General Conference a few years ago in warning against pride.  Believing that you are a better missionary than others because you are working harder than others is fraught with danger.  Believing that you are better than anyone for any reason is to place yourself in the hands of the devil as he seeks to lead you carefully down to hell through flattery and deceit.  Avoid these dangers at all costs by humbling yourself and praying to be filled with charity.

Missionaries should always be striving to humble themselves and exercise faith in the Father, whose work this is.  On on particular morning while on my mission I tired to do just that; I prayed to God that He would guide me and my companion in what streets we should tract that day.  After praying we looked at the map of our area and focused on a few streets.  We then prayed again, saying that we felt directed to these streets by the spirit and asking if we were right, and we felt a confirming spirit.  We went and tracted those streets, and found a woman who was baptized within two months.

This woman said she had been baptized in Hawaii when she was much younger, but a diligent search could not find her records.  While the search for her records was ongoing I prayed that they would be found, even though that would cost me a baptism.  I wanted to put the will of the Lord ahead of my own desires; I wanted to be humble, meek and submissive.  As it turned out, her records were not found (back in the day some wards did not always do a good job of sending records of new members to Salt Lake City) and we had a baptism.  But more importantly, this woman was one of the Lord's sheep, He always knew where she was, and she was found by us because we humbled ourselves and asked for His direction.  Oh, we had to trust Him, we could not do anything else.


Source: Ambrose, H. (2010). The Pacific. New York: Penguin Group (USA).