Spiritual Magneto

Our airplane was grounded last week. We had a bad magneto, which is pretty important. A magneto is a simple but vital aircraft engine component, that is driven by the spinning engine and uses magnets to produce pulses of electricity for the spark plugs. Airplanes have two for redundancy, so even with one bad magneto, I was able to keep flying and landed safely.

The beauty of using magnetos for airplanes, instead of a conventional distributor or electronic ignition found in automobiles, is that they work independent of the electrical system. If your car’s ignition fails, your car quits working. You don’t want that to happen when you are 8,000 feet in the air. So, an airplane’s magnetos generate their own power off the engine, providing electricity to the engine. It’s an energy circle: the magnetos fire the engine and the engine turns the magnetos, which in turn, fire the engine.

Some older airplanes still flying today have no electrical system: no battery, no lights, no radio, and nothing to send electricity to the spark plugs, except the engine magnetos. To get the engine going, you spin the prop to turn the magnetos which then send voltage to the spark plugs, starting the engine. Once the engine is running, it keeps going on its own. But you have to spin the prop to get the cycle started.

I was thinking of that with my prayer life. The more I pray, the more I want to pray. But the less I pray, the less I want to pray. Our Father invites us to interact with Him. He wants us to pray. But we have to spin the prop. We have to set aside uninterrupted and undistracted time, and get ourselves started.

My “spinning the prop” is getting on my knees (something about that is good for me) and putting The Lord’s Prayer into my own words: 1) Thanking God for being my Father; 2) Recognizing He is right about everything; 3) Asking Him to come and take over; 4) Submitting what I want to what He wants; 5) Asking for provision for myself and for those I love; 6) Confessing sin and asking forgiveness as well as forgiving those who’ve offended me; 7) Asking for protection from sin and the evil around us.

That spinning of the prop helps me to stay in touch with God daily and throughout the day. I even set an alarm to remind me to do this three times a day.

I know that sometimes you feel like your spiritual engine has quit. I hear from you, and I’m just as human as you…we all have that experience. But that’s how you get it started and keep it going. Actually praying with words (I like to whisper and pray with moving my lips to make it real) is like the spiritual magneto. And the more you do it, the more you’ll want to keep going.

But you’ve got to spin the prop.