Winning Ways: Taking Stock

Let’s see how well you know your Cold War trivia. Recognize the name Matthias Rust?

Rust’s story will let you know why this Sunday’s study is so important. In 1987, nineteen-year-old Matthias Rust piloted a rental plane into the heart of the former Soviet Union and landed in Moscow’s Red Square. Described by his mother as a “quiet young man with a passion for flying,” Rust apparently had no political or social agenda when he took off from the international airport in Helsinki and headed for Moscow.

He entered Soviet airspace, but was either undetected or ignored as he pushed farther and farther into the Soviet Union.

Early on the morning of May 28, 1987, he arrived over Moscow, circled Red Square a few times, and then landed just a few hundred yards from the Kremlin. Curious onlookers and tourists, many believing that Rust was part of an air show, immediately surrounded him. He was arrested and sentenced to four years in prison, but as a goodwill gesture the Soviets released him after a year.

His effortless penetration of Soviet air space raised serious questions about the Soviet Union’s ability to defend itself from air attack, and shook the Soviet military hierarchy to its core. The repercussions in the Soviet Union were immediate. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev sacked his minister of defense, and the entire Russian military was humiliated by Rust’s flight into Moscow.

The Soviets were sure they had the best systems of air defense in the world. But then a teenager penetrated their airspace, undetected, and taxied up to the front door of the Kremlin.

Where are you vulnerable to Enemy penetration? We all have to watch out for things that lead us into miserable choices: aspects of our personality, patterns of behavior, emotional “triggers.”

If you want a life of victory, you have to make a searching and fearless moral inventory of yourself. People in recovery groups remind each other, “A business that doesn’t take inventory will go broke, and a person who doesn’t take inventory will stay broke.” This Sunday, October 4, we’ll get some biblical guidance on taking stock of our lives.

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