In his book Making Life Work, Chicago area pastor Bill Hybels cites a study that was published under an intriguing title: 178 Seconds to Live. The study concerned twenty pilots, all seasoned veterans in the cockpits of their small planes, but none of whom had ever taken instrument training. One by one they were placed in a flight simulator and told to do whatever they could to keep their planes level and under control. The simulator generated the conditions of a storm, including impenetrable, dark clouds. Even though the pilots had exceptional intuition born of years of actual flying, every one of them "crashed." Their planes went down, on average, within 178 seconds, or less than three minutes after they lost their visual reference points. 

It may seem an odd way to put it, but it takes …