Which daughter do you hold first when the plane falls?

Lital Hirschl-Shahar was in row ten of Flydubai flight 1073 on Wednesday, September 30, sitting next to her five-year-old with her three older daughters close by. Somewhere between Dubai and Tel Aviv, the co-pilot attacked the captain with the cockpit's crash axe. By the Daily Mail's count, the jet fell about 14,000 feet in 29 seconds. "We saw death coming," she told the paper, and her oldest daughter looked at her and said, "Mum, you are all grey."

With four girls and only two hands, she remembers asking herself, "Whose hand to hold first? Who should I hug?" She tried to stay calm for them. So did Adam Polovincik on the same flight, who hugged his son, 6, and his daughter, 3, as hard as he could. The two parents differed in what they said, though. Polovincik told his kids it was "just a malfunction," which anyone who has held a frightened child will understand, while Lital told hers, "We are in God's hands. And especially now, we just need to pray." Her words left the danger in the room and gave her girls something to hold on to inside it.

That is very close to what David does in the psalm on today's card, and he knew the same fear. The heading places him in Gath, on the run and caught by the Philistines (1 Samuel 21). So he opens by admitting he's afraid, and then he says what he'll do with the fear while he still has it. He doesn't wait to stop shaking before he trusts.

Faith, in that psalm, is what you say with a grey face.

None of it was a deal for a safe landing. The flight came down in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, because Captain Smit Machchhar forced the door, passengers held the attacker, and two off-duty pilots took the controls. Other mothers have prayed the same prayer on planes that didn't land, and the Preacher says it bluntly: "time and chance happen to them all" (Ecclesiastes 9:11). What Lital told her girls would have been just as true if the jet had gone down, and that is what made it honest to say.

She still couldn't hold all four daughters at once, and her oldest could see the grey in her face. What she could give all four at the same moment was the thing she was holding on to herself. It turns out you can hand that to your children while you're still afraid.