Intersections

It’s that moment of dread, as you’re settling into your seat on the plane and wondering who’s about to plop down beside you. Someone too chatty for your mood, you suspect, or too brusque for your sensibilities, or too big for your too-tight space.

The dread is magnified when the flight is five hours long, as mine from the East Coast was the other night. Happily, the smiling face that scooted in beside me belonged to a warm acquaintance … a co-worker heading back from the same conference. I knew her a little, not well – but well enough to know she would be gracious and cheerful and respectful if I took it in my head to sleep the flight away. In fact, we enjoyed a fun and thoughtful conversation, all the way home.

Five hours behind a mask is not a bad exchange for a new friend. Makes you wonder what the good Lord has in mind, sometimes, as He puts together His great big seating chart in the sky.

More, perhaps, than we realize.

A few months ago, a pastor friend caught a flight to a less populous area of northern Minnesota. He had made his reservations six months earlier, greatly underestimating just how unpopulated the area was. He landed close to midnight. No rental cars available. No Uber. No shuttle. No restaurant or hotel for miles in any direction.

He huddled in a corner on his phone, talking with his wife back in Phoenix, trying with no success and growing stress to figure out options. Suddenly, a middle-aged woman’s kindly face leaned into his line of sight.

“Do you need help?” she asked, hesitantly. “The Lord is telling me to … help you.”

They looked at each other dubiously. She was picking up her daughter, she said. He explained who he was. On impulse, she asked him to pray, then and there, for her and her family. He did. His intercession seemed to remove any doubts she had about the Divine nudge.

She invited him to stay the night with her elderly father, just down the street. He was lonely, she said, and would enjoy playing host for a night.

By the time he sat down in her dad’s living room a little while later, the pastor and the family were old friends. They have FaceTimed and texted several times in the months since.

My pastor friend smiles, telling this. “I have a new sister in the Lord,” he says.

A month later, the same pastor was sitting with an old friend in the food court of a Vancouver mall. Laughing, loud and deep, at stories old and new. Enjoying that happy ease one feels with those rare, wonderful souls who can always pick up the friendship wherever it left off.

Nearby, a man about their age sat at a table with his 10-year-old daughter. The pastor became conscious of their stolen glances, listening to the laughter, bemused by these two odd men’s obvious affection. Finally, the dad called over a comment about the T-shirt the pastor was wearing; it had the word “Jamaica” on it. The dad said he’d been born there; “Me, too,” the pastor replied … and soon the dad and daughter had come over to join in the cheerful conversation.

The father wondered aloud that two men could so freely relax and delight in each other’s company. The pastor suspected it was a freedom this man had not enjoyed in some time. Later, standing to go, he offered the fellow his business card.

“Let’s stay in touch,” he suggested.

To his astonishment, a few days later, he received from the man a three-page email. A longtime police officer in Canada, the man was now on his way to Turkey to launch a new business. God, he confessed, seemed farther away than Turkey. He hoped the pastor might help him change that; he yearned to know the joy and contentment he’d heard in that food court laughter.

The two now keep up a busy transcontinental texting. My friend has a new brother, as well as sister, in the Lord.

Last month, vacationing in Belize, the pastor was again engaged for a word on his T-shirt: this time, “Canada.” The tanned, aging couple who greeted him by the pool hailed from the Great White North. Next day, he found himself sitting by them in an airport lounge, heading home. Conversation ebbed and flowed; finally, he asked about their respective lines of work.

“Law enforcement,” they told him. He mentioned the name of his new friend, the cop from Vancouver.

They blinked, then laughed. One of their best and oldest friends, they said. Soon, the pastor was hosting a flurry of texts between them and his Turkey chum, and the world suddenly seemed a very small place, indeed.

“I think of all of the people I walk by every day,” my friend says. “People who try to make conversation with me, sitting on an airplane, or waiting for a table in a restaurant. How many wonderful connections has the Lord had in store for me, and I just kept walking? Buried my head in my cellphone. Or turned my head to the window, and went to sleep.”

We live in dispiriting times. Ukraine. The border. Social upheavals, political battles, the economy. But, in the words of an old song, “some fundamental things apply, as time goes by.”

Our God surely knows where we are – and who’s watching. Where we’re going. And who’s waiting there.

Be careful what T-shirt you wear.