Do you have a “trip from hell” travel story? Mine occurred over ten years ago, when I was trying to get from Vienna to Missouri using my status as a USAirways employee next-of-kin. It’s too convoluted to recount in full, but it began with an accidental upgrade on the train from Vienna to Frankfort (that I didn’t pay for) and ended with me on a plane to DesMoines, which was not my destination. (I got off before the plane left the ground.) The forty-odd hours of delays, close or missed calls, deprivations and misunderstandings didn’t seem funny at the time. But from that experience comes one solid piece of advice: when you are stuck in an airport for several hours because of a missed connection due to a delayed flight, find the chapel, open a Bible, and get a grip.
Chances are your place of refuge will be an inter-faith sanctuary that tries to accommodate everybody: the chapel I found in the Pittsburg airport scheduled Mass every morning, marked off a special praying area on the carpet for Muslim knees, and asked nothing of visitors but silence, so that fellow travelers could commune with their personal spiritual reality in peace. But the deepest imprint on the chapel was left by Christians, as I discovered while paging through the prayer journal on the lectern. Most of the entries expressed faith in Jesus Christ while sharing their burdens or giving thanks. Reading over them was like traveling alongside for a while.
In fact, we’re always traveling alongside: these are the people crammed three abreast on Boeing jets, sharing processed air and hugging their bit of private space. We know them, because we are them. The prayer journal revealed their hearts:
“Thank you Father for this peaceful place and this beautiful day.”
“Lord, please show me if Michelle is the one for me . . .”
“Please pray that this last visit with my dad will be special. I love you Dad–thanks for everything.”
Amid the outcries and the gratitude, I found this fleeting prayer: “. . . and bless those who are in between where they need to be.”
It’s the cry of travelers the world over–I’m here and I need to be there. Oh for wings like an eagle, that I could soar above all that unyielding space that stands in my way. Or a divine bow to shoot me straight home, piercing the hours and the miles.
That’s our wish, even while acknowledging that we’ll never truly arrive. In between–thought and deed, fact and expectation, doubt and assurance, heaven and earth–is where most of us spend our lives.
Abraham was never home. The Israelites wandered for years, and after settling in Canaan, travel became part of worship. Psalms 120-134 is the songbook for such journeys (and more edifying than “Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall.”) Most of the teaching in the synoptic gospels takes place after Christ “set his face to go to Jerusalem”–including the story of the youth who traveled to a far country, squandered his inheritance and made his painful way back home. Paul, that epic traveler of the New Testament, set out for Rome and found himself seriously “in between” on the island of Malta.
We know we are strangers and exiles on the earth, and our journeys from here to there are metaphors for a life lived in expectation of heaven. Of course we tend to forget it, but on that trip I was blessed by a timely reminder.
While I was still reading the prayer journal in the airport chapel, the door opened and an airline employee entered with a guitar. He nodded to me in the wary way of strangers, then took a seat, turned his instrument and began singing praise choruses. After a moment I joined in on the ones I knew, and just like that, we were no longer strangers. Soon three more employees joined us, then two other travelers. The songs gained energy and conviction, especially “This love (joy, peace) that I have–The world didn’t give it and the world can’t take it away.” At the end of the song service, before continuing on our separate ways, we took a moment to shake hands with special warmth. Like the pilgrims of Psalm 84, “in whose heart are the highways to Zion”, we had passed through the Valley of Baca and found it a place of springs. And the very place, providentially, where we needed to be.