Perspectives

Airports are fascinating places. There is little that is not in some way melodramatic. The airport is a place where all your best and worst qualities come out; a testing of your will to survive in the brushed-steel jungle of gate D-1. Will you keep your cool? Will your flight leave on time? And what is that long tube-shaped thing that guy is carrying anyway? What’s inside of that tubed-shaped thing?

When flying you learn not to think to hard about things like this.

The airport is where you see people, and lots of them, all different types, like the ones who read those thick, chubby books that have the authors name printed larger than the title; as if the author made the book good just because they wrote it. The kind of people you look at and feel as though you’ve seen them before, maybe even know them. The kind of people that can instantly be identified as a Texan or an easterner or some New York executive.

It makes you wonder what really is in a name and a look. How much can you really tell about a person by the cover? How much can you tell about the book by the author? Well, for starters, the big-author books are usually sappy romance novels or twisted mysteries, a genre that is so well used that the possible original titles are almost entirely used up. They just get simpler, though, instead of more complex which is strange to me. Instead of “The long overdue tragic end of the Bosnian sailor”, they are titled, “The Wave” or “The Shipwreck.”
I think it says something about what we value today. Nothing we do can be too long or drawn out. We want it to make us laugh, move us to tears, laugh again, and then show us that we’re alright and ok and feel good about ourselves, and all in five minutes or less.

Just like the airport forces us to slow our pace at times with delayed flights and long layovers; God too has to make us slow down sometimes. He has to remind us that Salvation and prayer and devotion, loving your neighbor, spreading the good news; they aren’t items to check off on a huge to-do list with five minutes devoted to each goal. God has to stop us and tell us that just like we can’t laugh and cry and change in five minutes we can’t really love our neighbor at 100 miles per hour either. But more than that we don’t have to worry about getting it all done at the exact moment we have told ourselves that it needed to be. He has to step in and say I’ve got it, don’t worry, it will all be done when it is time. That flight you missed is ok, we’ll make it, I’ve got it all figured out…Trust me…