Season Greetings from Heiko & Anita in Africa!

Merry Christmas from Zambia!

Love,
Heiko & Anita

Angels In Flight
By Heiko Held

I bank the little aircraft, flying once again in a right turn over the mighty Victoria falls.

The power of the falling water below us, rising in a thick cloud of smoke,
crowned by a colourful rainbow..

Sharon, my passenger, overwhelmed by the indescribable beauty, gasps in excitement.

She is an elderly Canadian, dreamt all her life of only once seeing the Victoria falls and now she is flying in this open Mircolight right above her dream…

I smile, and ask her – like I do with all of my passengers:
 ‘Please, try to describe the Falls…’

‘Beautiful, marvellous, pretty, fantastic, wonderful, incredible…’

are the common answers of my passengers, usually followed by a silence – realising –  that these are somehow not the appropriate words to truly describe this glorious beauty…

And then they start wondering how could it be possible… that there is this place,

called the Victoria Falls  – right below us now -  which has a beauty their eyes are perceiving but yet are not able to translate it into appropriate words..?

Smiling, that maybe the reason that we ourselves ranked it as a natural wonder..?

As in the Oxford Dictionary ‘a wonder’ is described as something marvellous with perplexed (!) astonishment..

Perplexed.

Wondering..? well, one man had an appropriate description in his heart already 153 years ago: David Livingstone sailed down the Zambezi river, in a little dugout canoe, landed on the famous island, right on the edge of the Victoria Falls, where he then stated:

‘Scenes so beautiful like this must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight..’

He compared it to something spiritual, something greater, something divine,

something out of heaven.

Had David Livingstone ever seen an angel..? Have you?

What do angels look like… we imagine them beautiful, with a long white dress, and white wings, indescribable?  yet surely beautiful…

What then do  flying angels look like??

More beautiful than the ones on the ground? Must be. Even more beautiful..??

Do they look like rays of white light -
  surrounded by rainbows around the centre of the source of the light..?

What thoughts or feelings rise within us?

Are they… childlike, trusting, knowing, and compassionate…

What do the flying angels look down upon, at what do they gaze upon??

At the same indescribable beauty – right beneath us now!! –

…and what do we feel, looking down like him???

Is it like an elegant delightful and overwhelming feeling of beauty,

dwelling from the inside of us?

A feeling of humble devotion to something greater, something indescribable,

a feeling of contentment, a comfort of just being,

which fills our hearts overflowing with joy and peace – unspeakable and full of glory–

like the love of God.

Once I had a very special passenger: Josef, a blind boy from Soweto in South Africa.

 As we fly over the Falls, he could describe the beauty with words out of his spirit, because he could see with the eyes of his heart… 

 I pray that the eyes of our hearts and understanding being opened to Gods beautiful creation and salvation.

Merry CHRISTmas!!!

“Glory to God in the Highest, and peace on earth to all men whom God is well pleased.”  Luke 2:14