Article July 30, 2001 Issue

IF I TAKE THE WINGS OF THE MORNING ...

Ryder Stevens

I was in my office, and my buddy Frank came in and said, "Hey, you want to go jump this afternoon?" We were in the US Army's parachute division at that time. I said, "Sure!" I was going to be able to go out, jump, and still be home for dinner. I thought this was a good idea.

So we went up in a C-130, and I jumped out. My chute malfunctioned and didn't open up all the way. At 800 feet you're falling at about 125 feet a second. And so there isn't a whole lot of time to make choices. I did something that was totally against what I'd been taught—I didn't deploy my reserve parachute. Instead, I just pulled on the good part of my chute—the part that was still working—to make it work better and catch more air. And I made a safe landing.

I found out later that at that very time my wife, who wasn't part of this expedition, was led to pray aloud the "scientific statement of being" from Science and Health (p. 468), and as she did this, she was thinking of me. There's one part of the statement that says, "All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation." I think of that Mind, God, as the place where you get solutions to problems.

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