Extending the Glide

On Building Communities That Sustain One Another Through the Descent

Every pilot learns it early: when the engine falters, you do not simply let the plane fall. You ease the nose toward the horizon and glide, using what you already have — altitude, momentum, the physics of lift — to extend your time aloft. The goal is not to stop the descent. The goal is to stretch the distance between where you are and where you must eventually land, buying time to find a clearing, a runway, a safe place to touch down.

I have been thinking about this image since Monday night, when a group of us gathered to share a meal and watch the documentary Living in the Time of Dying.¹ We sat together with the quiet attention that comes when people know the world is changing faster than our institutions can keep up. In the film, Jem Bendell uses the metaphor of a glide path to talk about how communities might respond to climate disruption and systemic instability.² It was a reminder that we may not be able to restart every engine. But we can choose how we travel the descent.

As I watch so many people moving through difficult seasons — job losses, grief that refuses to resolve on schedule, loneliness that has quietly become ordinary, families stretched beyond what anyone should be expected to endure — the question is no longer how to fly. The question is how to glide. And whether we will glide alone, or together.

The Theology of Shared Altitude

There is something deeply scriptural about the glide. The Hebrew word ruach — breath, wind, Spirit — moves across the waters in the opening lines of Genesis, bearing creation above the face of the deep. The Psalms are full of people who have lost altitude: “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.” And yet those same Psalms are filled with the discovery that even in descent, something holds. Something moves beneath the fall.

A pair of red-tailed hawks nest in the tall firs across the street from my house. On still afternoons they soar, barely moving their wings, tracing slow circles above the neighborhood, reading the invisible architecture of rising air, thermals born from sun-warmed earth. They lean into them.

The hawks are not self-sufficient. They are responsive.

They have learned to receive what the world is already offering.

This is not weakness. It is attentiveness — the wisdom of creatures who know they are sustained by forces larger than themselves. And it may be a picture of what the church was always meant to be: a community that teaches one another how to find the thermals, how to share the lift, how to extend one another’s glide.

What Resilience Actually Looks Like

We have told ourselves a damaging story about resilience, that resilient people bounce back quickly, dig deep into inner strength, and soldier on pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. But decades of research tell a different story. Studies consistently show that the single most important factor in navigating hardship is the presence of supportive relationships.³ Resilience is not primarily an individual trait. It is a relational capacity.

Theologically, this should not surprise us. Paul’s image of the church in 1 Corinthians 12 is not a collection of self-sufficient individuals who happen to gather on Sundays. It is a body: “If one member suffers, all suffer together with it.” Suffering is not private in this vision. The theologian Stanley Hauerwas wrote that the church exists not as a gathering of religious individuals but as a community that learns to bear one another’s suffering truthfully.⁴ When one part of the body loses altitude, the whole body responds, not with judgment or quick advice, but with presence and the sharing of whatever lift remains.

Extending the glide, in community terms, means we do not try to fix one another’s descents. We join one another. We bring what altitude we currently carry — a meal, a phone call, a willingness to sit in the difficulty without rushing to resolve it — and we offer it freely, knowing that next season the roles may be reversed.

Building the Runway Together

And, a glide is only as good as the runway it finds. This is where community becomes not just comfort but infrastructure. A resilient community builds runways; practical, visible, accessible places where people can land safely when life tilts unexpectedly.

In our congregation we are building something like that runway. The Resilience Hub we are creating is one expression of this hope: a place where neighbors, nonprofits, and community partners can share resources, strengthen relationships, and build the networks that help communities endure difficult seasons. But the runway is not only a building. It is a culture.

It looks like a congregation that quietly notices which families are struggling with food insecurity and finds ways to help with dignity. It looks like people who check in not only after funerals but months later, when the casseroles have stopped and the grief remains. It looks like small groups where people have practiced enough honesty that saying “I am not okay” does not feel like confession but like the space of healing. It looks like leaders, pastors included, who speak honestly about seasons of uncertainty so that everyone understands that faith and struggle are not opposites.

Over the past four years I have watched this kind of shared lift happen quietly among

us. Through a long season of challenge, you have sustained something like an updraft — the quiet infrastructure of care that allows people to keep moving forward when the engines fail.

An Invitation

So I want to invite you to notice two things this week.

First, where are you in your own glide path? Are you carrying altitude you could share, or are you in a quieter stretch where you might need to let someone else come alongside? There is no wrong answer. Both are holy. Both are human.

Second, who in your orbit might be gliding without knowing you are nearby? You do not have to fix anything or say the perfect words. You simply have to draw close and let your presence say what the Spirit has always been whispering over the deep:

You are not falling.

You are being held.

That is gospel aeronautics. And when the church remembers how to practice it — by

sharing lift, extending the glide, and building runways for one another — we become what we were meant to be all along: a community where no one descends alone.

Thank you for being part of my glide.

Pastor Robin

Notes

1. Living in the Time of Dying (2021), featuring Jem Bendell.

2. Jem Bendell, “Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy,” Institute for Leadership and Sustainability, University of Cumbria, 2018.

3. Ann S. Masten, “Ordinary Magic: Resilience Processes in Development,” American Psychologist 56, no. 3 (2001): 227–238; see also Ann S. Masten, Ordinary Magic: Resilience in Development (Guilford Press, 2014).

4. Stanley Hauerwas, "A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic" (University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).