hours drain slowly in the airport sitting in the coffee shop.
it is august 8, 2016.
tonight i leave for nine months, but first a nine-and-a-half hour flight to Istanbul, Turkey. but, before that, a 13 hour wait in the Atlanta airport.
here, in the mock french cafe, i think about the irony of airports.
the contradiction is, here I sit in the middle of the busiest airport in the world surrounded from people from every part of creation: businessmen, and mothers, and missionaries, tattoo artists and nuns, soldiers coming home, or sending a lover off to his job across the country. there has never been a more classically interesting place in the universe; yet the voices that carry so many tones and stories and adventures blend together to a monotonous torrent of drudgery and practical torment.
look. i’m not going to waste anymore words describing the airport, you all know what airports look like, it looks like that. And if you don’t know what an airport, especially the ATL, looks like. Imagine Mall of America with a lot of stressed out people who are spending altogether too much money to get the hell out of here. Wherever ‘here’ happens to be. Also, all those angry people? triple that.
a way station- just a place for people to move on from.
and, for my team, a place to drink coffee and post Instagram pictures and Skype our moms. we, racers, moved in packs and with packs, strapped to our front and back, weighing us down. just another layer of gravity holding us to earth as we go a spread our wings and fly. we racers are flighty people, we are dreamers. still i am surprised that i get to be “one of them”. of all of them eighteen year old christian girls in the world who always wished to travel, I’m here. I can’t always say that I deserved it, no one really does. I did nothing to earn my way here, but God did. The Race is God’s truck that needed the oil changed.
Let me explain. A staff member of the race told us this story, of him and his five year old daughter, the one he needed to “get to know”. He convinced his daughter that he desperately needed her help in changing the oil on his truck and she reluctantly came outside. As both lay beneath the jacked up truck he begins to ask her about school and her friends and her favorite things to do, her eyes light up as she tells him. The sun sets on the day and their conversation and the oil was changed a long time ago and this dad started to truly know his daughter. The Race is the truck and the Lord does not need my help spreading the word, in fact: he doesn’t need me at all.
and that’s the good news: the creator of the universe, of all space and time does. not. need. me.
he wants me.
and that defies what the churches expectations of what a good christian is. it defies who i expected myself me to be, before and after the race. it defies all expectations.
the irony of expectations in this material world is that we are so often disappointed, the grass is not always greener on the other side. but, in this case, it was. i carried an expectation of judgement, of standards, of a unreachable goal but here God was, taking me by the hand and just leading me out of the house to a broken down pickup truck that is the world, he tells me to sit with him while he is changing the oil and people’s hearts with a sly grin on his face, happy that i am simply sitting next to him.
a way for the daughter to know the father, and this father to come to know his daughter.
