Posted August 12, 2026
President Trump confirmed Tuesday night that he secretly switched planes when traveling back from Turkey in July.
As the Washington Post first reported, when the president left a NATO summit on July 8, he climbed the stairs into the old Air Force One jumbo jet (not the former Qatari jet the president has begun using) in view of television cameras. He then secretly shuttled minutes later to a smaller Air Force C-32A plane via an airport catering truck usually used to load meals and other supplies preflight. This was because of a credible Iranian assassination threat against the president that set the “deception operation” in motion, according to officials.
The US president is not the only person facing aviation concerns: an American Airlines plane made an emergency landing in South Carolina on Monday after the aircraft reportedly struck a bird and flames were seen shooting from an engine. Further from home, a baby was rescued from the rubble of a destroyed building in Colombia after a 7.4 magnitude earthquake struck the country Monday. At least 181 people have died and 2,595 were injured; nearly 4,000 are still unaccounted for.
At this writing, fifteen bodies have been recovered from a lake in Zimbabwe where a passenger boat capsized Tuesday; at least twenty-seven are still missing. And the World Health Organization is reporting that the fastest-growing Ebola epidemic on record started in February, months before it was officially declared in mid-May.
None of this is good news you were perhaps hoping I would discuss. Like fish fleeing a shark, we instinctively avoid death as well as thinking about death. But there’s very good news about bad news we can embrace today.
I recently commented on a landmark study focusing on religious participation and mental health. Its very positive findings are mirrored by the same study’s conclusions regarding physical health. Researchers examined 1,067 high-quality studies across fifteen physical health domains, finding that positive correlations between religious involvement and physical health outnumbered negative correlations by a ratio of roughly seven to one.
The ratios were ninety to one for cigarette smoking, forty-three to one for substance abuse and addiction, and fifteen to one for mortality and longevity. Even for chronic pain and cancer, positive correlations with religious involvement outnumbered negative by roughly a four-to-one ratio.
Researchers explain these positive outcomes in three ways:
However, as with our conversation regarding mental health, there is a “threshold effect”: the benefits of religion are concentrated among those with sustained, high religious engagement. Consistent weekly religious attendance is powerfully associated with significantly lower rates of cigarette smoking, heart disease, hypertension, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, physical disability, and chronic pain, along with markedly lower rates of substance abuse and addiction.
An intimate relationship with Jesus is not only a proven pathway to increased health outcomes—it is also essential for the days when a health crisis strikes.
Not if, but when.
I spoke the other day with a friend from many years ago who told me he had recently been diagnosed with ALS. He is only a few years older than me; he and his wife had the rest of their lives before them to enjoy the results of their many years of hard work and faithfulness. And now this.
And yet, my friend has not lost his joy. I would not have known of his devastating diagnosis if he had not told me. He was just as vibrant, positive, and encouraging as I remembered him from years earlier.
I told him that one of the ways God is redeeming his illness is by using his joyous faith to show others the reality of Jesus in his life. When times were good, skeptics could dismiss his faith and faithfulness as the obvious result of God’s blessings. Now that he is up against this terrible disease, the faithfulness he and his wife continue to demonstrate is marking more lives than they can know.
In heaven, they will meet people who will thank them for the impact of their courage on earth. God is using their pain to demonstrate the power of his presence.
One day, the time of our “departure” from these fallen bodies will come (2 Timothy 4:6). The word means “to loosen or unloose,” as when oxen are unyoked from a plow or a prisoner is set free from the chains that were binding him.
On that day, “death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away” (Revelation 21:4). In the meantime, the closer we walk with the living Lord Jesus, the more we experience his “abundant” life (John 10:10).
Henrietta C. Mears was right: “A man who walks with God always gets to his destination.”
How close to Jesus would he say you are today?
“Smart men walked on the moon, daring men walked on the ocean floor, but wise men walk with God.” —Leonard Ravenhill
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