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On my way home from Romania, I spent three hours standing in a line in the Detroit Airport. The line was for those who needed to be re-ticketed. It was a long line.
One redeeming factor in all that waiting was a couple I met while standing in line. They were from Arizona and they were very nice people. This did not surprise me at all, since some of the best people I know are from Arizona. Chatting with them helped to pass the time. I learned that they had been to Paris for a trade show. She runs a company that makes tasers. I was on my best behavior after I discovered her line of work.
Somewhere along the way, our conversation was interrupted by a man with a stern voice talking to one of the ticket agents. This man came from way back at the end of the line, and he came with an attitude — the wrong kind of attitude, needless to say. There were between six hundred and eight hundred people standing in line waiting for six ticket agents to help them. The man from the back of the line decided that these ticket agents needed to be told they have a problem. He proceeded to cut in front of waiting travelers so that he could share his concerns with the supervisor. He explained to the supervisor that the whole situation was a mess. (I am certain that the supervisor had no awareness of the mess until the man from the back of the line pointed that out to him.)
With what had to be the firmest grasp of the obvious that I have ever personally witnessed, the man from the back of the line said, “You should have a system in place for dealing with situations like this.” I wish you could have seen the face of the man from the back of the line when the supervisor politely said, “We do. This is it.” At that moment, I immediately thanked God for every metal detector I had walked through and every X-Ray machine that had scanned my bags. My gratitude was based on the assumption that the man from the back of the line had been screened by the same machines. Knowing that the man from the back of the line in all likelihood did not have a gun gave me a warm fuzzy feeling.
As the man from the back of the line turned around to head back to the back of the line, I started looking for his replacement. Who was going to be the next angry traveler to let the good folks at Northwest Air know that they had a problem?
Happily, I am still waiting. All those people, and only one person felt the need to speak his mind. I may well refer to this incident from now on as the Detroit Thanksgiving Miracle. All those people, and only one person behaved poorly.
A miracle may be overstating what happened, but not all that much, considering the circumstances. There was a long, long line full of tired people. Most of those people had been traveling for at least 15 hours. I figure I had been awake for 20 or so hours when the man from the back of the line came to the front of the line. All of the people in the line wanted to be somewhere else. We all would have eventually realized that we were in a messed up situation even if the man from the back of the line had not made that clear to all of us.
While this long line of people had an understanding that the quickest way out of our messed up situation was to wait patiently and allow the ticket agents to do their work — unmolested — the man from the back of the line did not see it that way. Perhaps he had some special knowledge. He certainly acted like he knew more than the rest of us. Perhaps his fatigue was greater than everyone else’s. I know this could not have been the case since there were parents with small children in line as well.
I think he had a greater need to be somewhere else than all the rest of us. I am just not sure that he knew where that place was or if he would recognize it if he should happen to get there. The journey makes the destination all the sweeter.
As we journey through Advent toward the birth of our Savior, we need to keep in mind that how we get there is important. We are not alone. Others journey with us. What we expect to find in the manger, we may well see glimpses of along the way. Yet, we will almost certainly miss those glimpses if the journey is just about ourselves. What is worse — we may miss the manger and the child altogether if we do not realize that others journey with us.
Joy and Peace,
Ed
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