The Lucky Stick

Paul …

Paul has logged nine thousand hours in the air. He built one of the top warbird museums in the country, flown in formation with Navy F-18s as one of eight civilians chosen for the program, made and gave away more money than most people can imagine, loved two extraordinary women, raised three children, served wounded veterans, and looked up one night from a garden path into something he still cannot fully explain.

But luck, Paul would be the first to tell you, is not the whole story.

A life examined honestly is not a highlight reel. It is something messier and richer. Along the path, doors swing both ways. He’d seen good friends die in fiery wreckage on airfields he loved flying over. Insurmountable tragedy pressed upon his shoulders. The need to endure much longer than you could have thought possible was required as a baseline for moving forward. There were health disasters, fears—so much out of his control—and a carried grief that no amount of fortune could dissolve.

Being hit by the lucky stick, then, is not a fairy tale. It is a way of seeing. Paul’s way was a stubborn, faith-grounded insistence on finding the grace inside the hard thing. Throughout the pages that follow, the unlucky moments are real, and they are not glossed over. What makes Paul Wood’s story worth telling is not that he was spared hardship. It is that, hit again and again by the unlucky end of the stick, he kept finding his feet. He kept being open to the opportunity that joy might reach out for him once again.

Real life, as Paul knows better than most, is an up-and-down enterprise. The lucky stick just means that you notice the ups. Standing on the other side of all of it, looking back, the only word that fits his story is wonder.