In my work, I fly a lot. I don’t really like flying. But it is a fact of life. Some people love it. I suppose the pilots do. And the flight attendants, although I once overheard one attendant saying to another, “I hate it when we fly through turbulence.” Those were my thoughts exactly at that moment – I wished she hadn’t verbalized them.
Recently on a bumpy descent into Indianapolis, I watched my seat mate grab the armrest as we went through a particularly jarring patch. For the first time in the whole flight I engaged her in conversation. For the rest of our twenty minutes or so in the air we stayed mutually focused on a superficial but intense exchange – not intense as in angry or passionate but as in we were both really committed to keeping our minds off the fact that neither one of us had great confidence in those flimsy little molecules of air keeping us aloft.
As the wheels touched the ground, she turned to me and said, “Thanks for talking me down.” I thanked her for returning the favor.
I’m writing this on another bumpy flight. Nobody’s in the seat next to me this time to bring a bit of community just when needed. But it is making me remember that moment of random “being there” for each other in our common humanity.
A simple act of connecting can go a long way sometimes to bring a sense of wholeness to life. Jesus was the master of those simple acts of connecting – asking a woman for a glass of water, inviting a man down from a tree, blessing five loaves and two fish from a little boy. As I hop from plane to plane, and appointment to appointment, I pray I remember, as a disciple of Christ, to reach out in the simple, random ways – that together add up to a movement for wholeness – in Jesus’ name. . .
