Have you ever felt like you haven’t been properly rewarded for going the extra mile?
I’m guessing Robert Ford might have felt that way.
Captain Ford was piloting a Pan Am Boeing 317-B just two hours out of Auckland, New Zealand, when his radio officer relayed the news about the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Opening top secret instructions, Captain Ford was told that his aircraft (essentially a flying boat able to carry 74 passengers) was a strategic military resource and must not get into enemy hands. Toward that end, he was ordered to take “the long way home” to New York City—and fly under strict radio silence.
This odyssey of more than six weeks took the crew 31,500 miles from the Far East, to the Middle East, Africa, South Atlantic, Brazil, the Caribbean…and finally home to New York City.
They had no suitable navigation charts, no certainty of obtaining fuel, no assurance of spare parts and had to fly under a veil of total secrecy.
They endured sleepless nights, the banging of a damaged engine, long flights, gunfire from a German submarine, the danger of a mined harbor, and rifle fire over the Arabian Peninsula. At one point, they were nearly blown out of the sky.
But upon arriving home and debriefing, the crew was given a mere two weeks off before being returned to regular flight duties.
When I read this account in Ed Dover’s remarkable book, The Long Way Home, part of me was a bit put off. These guys were heroes, weren’t they? And yet, that’s what the war effort called for—at a minimum—heroes.
The words of Jesus come to mind: “So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, “We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty” (Luke 17:7).
You and I are in a spiritual war, make no mistake. Maybe going the extra mile doesn’t make us heroes after all but rather, “unworthy servants” who “have only done our duty.”