Funny how
quickly your mortality can get all in your face all of a sudden. Like when the plane you're on suddenly dips,
fish tails to the right and pops back up and corrects itself slightly to the
left. Why am I on an airplane? Let me back up just a few hours.
My wife had been scheduled to go to
an industry conference in Las Vegas for the past few months. We had thought that it might be a nice little
vacation for both us if we could swing the money for my plane ticket. But we thought it was too much to spend, and
decided against it. But as the date got closer my wife starting asking me if I
was sure I shouldn’t go. She’s a very
intelligent, capable and independent women.
But somewhere inside is still the small town girl I married 15 years
ago, and the looming specter of Las Vegas was making her a bit nervous. I grew up in large, busy suburbs and actually
lived in Vegas about 20 years ago. That,
and the simple fact of her husband being with her would make her more
comfortable. So on the morning of the
day she had to leave I finally gave in.
It was last minute but we got a really good deal on a flight so I got
packed.
We had to take separate flights but
they were to arrive about the same time.
Hers was direct, mine had a connection in Houston. The last time I flew was Christmas and as we
taxied towards the runway I finally admitted to myself what I had only
suspected those ten months ago: I don’t
like flying anymore. I used to when I
was a kid. But I didn’t have a whole lot
of sense when I was a kid. Now I could
comprehend the irrational physics of moving a metal tube through the air at
several hundred miles per hour 34,000 feet above the ground. So here I am on this plane getting ready to
take off and the captain informs us that there is a line of “significant”
weather moving just on the outskirts of Houston. So here I was, flying through “significant”
weather on the outskirts of Houston, keeping my best poker face on for the
benefit of the woman next to me who was pretending to sleep, but was actually
praying more fervently than even I was, since we boarded.
It wasn’t death itself that made me
nervous. Being dead is the easy
part. It was the prospect of how getting
that way might come about that was a little nerve wracking. But even that wasn’t my primary concern. It was my kids. What would they do without a father? What if today was to be a day of freak
accidents and sad, impossible-to-believe Reader’s Digest stories and both mine
AND my wife’s plane went down? Then what
about my kids? Who would they end up
with? Would there be a fight between the
families? I’ve seen the pain of children
mourning parents – how would they cope with that through life? Would they know how much I loved them, or just
remember the conflicts?
All of this was very irrational
because I knew very well that I was not going to die today. But fear has a way of creeping in and
paranoia strikes deep. And it doesn’t
help when the stewardess comes on to tell you to buckle up and that she has
been order to sit down and buckle up because of some upcoming severe
turbulence. And then plane does its
little dance as described earlier.
But all that aside, what is really
striking (and what I started out wanting to talk about) is how we think when
suddenly faced with the fact that we are not given forever. Jesus uses the parable of the bridegroom to
warn us that we never know the hour at which he might come back and that we
should therefore always be prepared. I
was amused at the way I was running over in my mind the times in the past week
or two that I had fallen short of the glory of God and how I would suddenly do
anything to make it right again. I was
thinking about the times I was a little harder on the kids than I should have
been, analyzing whether or not I spent enough time with them or had always
seemed to be too busy for that game of soccer.
Wondering how long it takes a plane to fall 34,000 feet and if that
would be enough time for a quick call to my kids, or to leave a last message
for them all on my wife’s voicemail. I
was worried about whether the people I loved knew I loved them and how
much. Just a few hours earlier death was
nowhere to be seen. I had plenty of time
to correct myself, and strengthen the bonds with my family. And all of a sudden (however irrational it
might be), time was not a certainty. My
house was not in order and I was not prepared for the bride groom. I had used the oil in my lamp carelessly, and
was earnestly begging for more.
The moral of
the story: take a bus.
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