The miracle of mechanics and my fascination with flight
Photo: Gerald Farinas.
For anyone who has ever spent an afternoon tracking flight numbers on an app or standing by an airport fence just to feel the rumble of a jet engine, the feeling needs no explanation. There is a whole community of us who look at an airport and think it is the coolest place on Earth. It is one thing to watch the numbers on a screen, but it is something else entirely to see it happen live, right as the day is turning into night.
My absolute favorite thing to do is take a short walk from my residence down the block to the lakefront boulder promenade at Loyola University Chicago. When dusk settles over the water, a special kind of magic happens. If you look out over Lake Michigan, you can see them: a perfectly spaced line of lights in the darkening sky. They are jetliners, waiting in a quiet queue to land west of me at O’Hare.
Standing on those rocks, watching those lights move across the horizon, you cannot help but feel a quiet awe.
It is easy to look at a modern airplane and see only metal and fuel. But inside that plane is the ultimate achievement of the human mind. For thousands of years, people looked at the sky and thought flying was impossible. It was a boundary we were never meant to cross. Yet, through generations of trying, failing, and slowly learning, we figured it out.
When I look at that line of planes over the lake, I do not just see great engineering. I see the miracle of God right there in the science and the mechanics.
The ability to look at the universe, understand how it works, and build something that can beat gravity is not an accident. It shows how humans have gradually unlocked understanding, which is a beautiful gift of God. The Creator did not just hand us a finished world. God made a universe full of hidden rules and elegant physics, and then gave us the minds to figure them out.
Aerodynamics and mechanics are not things humans invented. They are part of the way God designed the universe. Our job was simply to learn how they work. Every time a massive airplane lifts off the runway and glides through the clouds, it proves what we can do with the intelligence we were given. It reminds us that human curiosity is a gift, meant to help us reach new heights.
So as the night gets darker over Chicago and the next plane passes overhead, the roar of the engines sounds less like noise and more like a thank you. We were given the earth to live on, but through a divine spark of understanding, we were given the sky, too.
