My hus­band likes to take me fly­ing. He’s a pilot. That’s what they do. He some­times wisks me away for my birth­day or our anniver­sary. We have fun, of course. I guess that’s stat­ing the obvi­ous. Funny thing, I never flew with him until recently. He was this fighter test pilot in the Air Force, and that’s just what he did. After he retired, he started fly­ing gen­eral avi­a­tion air­craft. He would take the kids up on short lit­tle local flights, much to their delight, but I just stayed home with who­ever wasn’t fly­ing that day.

Then, one day he said he had planned a sur­prise get­away for us, and that I needed to pack an overnight suit­case. Um. Small air­plane? Are you sure you know how to do this? Did I men­tion that he had been fly­ing fighter air­craft as a test pilot? He had oodles of train­ing and expe­ri­ence. So, I packed my bag and off we went.

Ready for the flight

When we drive some­where, I find that I feel like I can offer some sort of help in his dri­ving. You know, “We need to turn left in 3 miles, you might want to get over.” That sort of (non)helpful com­ment. I was in the air­plane with my hus­band and was speech­less. I had noth­ing to offer. I had no idea what he was doing with all those switches and all those radio calls. Nothing.

And at that moment, my respect for my hus­band shot up 1000%. This man was fly­ing a basi­cally sim­ple air­plane, but had 20 years of expe­ri­ence fly­ing the world’s most com­pli­cated and dif­fi­cult planes. I was in awe. I had never really had a glimpse of what he did. I mean, I’d take the kids to the run­way when they were lit­tle, and they would wave at Daddy as he taxi’d by in his F15.

Mike return­ing from a deploy­ment in the F15, greet­ing Jack.

But, I didn’t grasp how well trained and capa­ble he was.

Does that sound weird? Our hus­bands go off to work and do their thing, regard­less of what it is, and then come home at night to eat din­ner and kiss the kids good­night. Right? What we don’t see is the respect other men give them at work. And the respect they give to oth­ers. We don’t see the bat­tles they fight, the drag­ons they slay. That day, I felt I had my first aha moment about what he was doing all those years. Maybe I’m slow.

But my esti­ma­tion of my hus­band was increased. And I was ashamed that it wasn’t up there all along. But, at least I finally got it.

…and let the wife see that she respects her hus­band. Eph 5:33

The tricky part is remem­ber­ing to respect and honor my hus­band in the daily grind of life. At least he tries to make it easy for me. He’s a good man that way.

The cock­pit after landing

Is this some­thing you strug­gle with also? How do you remem­ber to respect your hus­band? How do you han­dle it when you for­get? The thing is, we aren’t mar­ried to per­fect men. The per­fect man doesn’t exist in mere mor­tal men. And, guess what? They aren’t mar­ried to per­fect wives either. Funny how that is easy to for­get as well.