Divine appointment in an airport? Whenever I hear or read about evangelists talk about sharing their faith with strangers on a plane, I slouch down in my chair a bit. That's because, most of the time when I travel, I have my nose in a book or a magazine and am not likely to start up much of a conversation with the passenger next to me. But during my trip home from a speaking engagement in San Jose, California, I had one of those experiences that could be considered a divine appointment.
It happened while I was standing in line to get my boarding pass for a flight to Phoenix. The woman in front of me asked me if I lived in Phoenix. No, I said; I was changing planes in Phoenix en route to St. Louis. She nodded, then told me as tears welled up in her eyes that her father had died earlier in the week, unexpectedly, and that she had flown to San Jose to attend his funeral and to stay with her mother for a while. But she had to fly back to Phoenix earlier than she had hoped. "We've got a bit of a crisis situation in our family," she explained.
The crisis, as she described it, was that her husband had been living a secret life, having an affair. She again began to cry, as she explained she had little hope for the marriage.
Lord, I silently prayed, please give me the right words to speak to this woman. From within, the only words I sensed coming forth were to ask her if she believed in prayer. So I did.
"Do you believe in prayer?" I asked. She paused, and gave me a strange, stunned look, then said, "It's strange that you should ask me that." She then explained that she had become a born-again Christian several years ago, but that she had fallen away from God, and from church. I told her that prayer could change things, and that even though her marriage was in jeopardy, that all hope was not lost.
We continued to talk, as she poured out her heart, and I prayed for her and her family on the flight to Phoenix, and again on the flight from Phoenix to St. Louis, and on the drive home. And again Sunday, and today.
Was it a divine appointment? Or a mere coincidence? I choose to believe it was a God-ordained meeting. But whether it was or not, it gave me an opportunity to share my faith with someone in need. And now when I hear an evangelist talk about how he ministered to a passenger aboard a plane, I won't be slouching down in my seat so much.
Insomnia theater. Because of the time change -- I was in San Jose, but my biological clock was still ticking on Central Daylight Time -- I woke up at 3:45 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time Saturday. That's 3 hours and 15 minutes before the restaurant opens, so I have time to kill. So I flipped on the TV, surfed a bit, and at 4 a.m. found an "Insomniac Theater" on the local ABC affiliate. So I watched Crimes and Misdemeanors, a Woody Allen flick that I had not seen. It has all the Woody Allen movie trademarks: irony, explorations of matters of faith and God, love, death, divine retribution, etc. (And this funny quote, which I'm bound to get wrong, but it goes something like this: "The real world is worse than dog eats dog. It's dog doesn't return other dog's phone calls.") If you're ever up at 4 in the morning in a hotel room in a strange city two time zones removed from home and this movie is among the limited free selections on your hotel television, I highly recommend watching it.
Blogworthy: I see from jordoncooper.com that David Hopkins, editor of Next Wave, is now blogging. His blog is the latest addition to the blogroll, at left.
Another item of interest, with the three-year anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre quickly apporaching: this news article about the Columbine class of 2002, which was the school's freshman class when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold opened fire that fateful day. They are, as the article puts it:
The last class of students to run for their lives on April 20, 1999, as seniors Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold unleashed their fury. The last class to run sobbing into the arms of petrified mothers and fathers. The last class to finish that year at another school because theirs was too burned, too bloody, too spooky.
Thanks to Pop Culture Junk Mail for the link.
:: Andrew 10:42 + ::
...