“Cast your burden on the Lord
and He will sustain you…”
--Psalm
55:23
This summer, I went to visit my Dad and his wife for a few
days. I don’t travel much, so for me this was a bit of a challenge –just
getting on a plane and going somewhere. It makes me uncomfortable to be in a
strange place. I like to imagine that
somehow this discomfort might be linked to my writing—to my imaginary life and
imaginary travels. I excuse my homebody
nature by with the idea that I’m too busy travelling in my imagination to think
about travelling in the real world. And
I think there is some sense to that.
But, I also think I’m a little bit afraid of letting go of control. If I go somewhere else, I won’t have control
of the environment, I won’t know my way around, I won’t know which way to go or
who to ask for help, I won’t even have control over the ac or the gas station
bathroom… I will, like Blanche Dubois,
have to depend “on the kindness of strangers.”
But all in all it wasn’t bad. Seeing my dad and his wife was wonderful.
They were so kind and welcoming, made me tomato sandwiches straight from their
garden and gave me all the chips I could eat and all the coffee I could
drink! The very picture of perfection
when it comes to being a host, and family.
I had a wonderful time with them. Sitting on the porch, enjoying my dad’s
beautiful black-eyed-susans and towering sunflowers and watching the small yellow
headed birds pop in and out of the bright yellow blossoms. It was a taste of
heaven. I also had the pleasure of
hearing my father’s stories of his childhood, selling popcorn at the wrestling
matches, and delivering groceries, selling Bibles door to door to pay for school. All his adventures and misadventures. What a
blessing to have that time we spent together on his porch, sipping our coffee
and chatting, or just sitting in silence as the sun settled and the geese at
the lake by the church across the road honked their evening prayers. Truly a blessed time.
Something else interesting happened on this trip; and I
would like to meditate on it for a moment. As I was packing to go, I had a
sudden anxious sense that I shouldn’t bring my special Bible with me—just in
case. I wouldn’t want to lose it on the plane or accidentally leave it at Dad’s. So, I unpacked it from my bag and threw in
one of my miniature New Testaments with Psalms. In my Bible reading I had just started
Proverbs, and one of my little paperbacks has Proverbs in it, and I thought I
was grabbing that one. When I sat on the porch that first morning at my Dad’s
to do my morning prayer: read some scripture and write a little bit, I found that
I had grabbed the wrong one. I was
disappointed. I like my routines. They give me comfort. But, I would have to make do. So, I opened to
one of the psalms and settled (quite by accident) on:
“Cast your burden on the Lord, and He will sustain you.”
And it seemed good enough. I read over the whole psalm a
couple of times, wrote a few notes in my journal and went back to my coffee and
the birds and the flowers. Feeling sustained.
But then, on the way home things changed. My trip went from ideal to my perfect travel
nightmare. At the airport I forgot to
take my Kleenex out of my pocket and was pulled out of line and frisked during
the security screening. It was
embarrassing, but—nothing terrible, and I guessed I deserved it. I just didn’t think about the package of
tissues in my back pocket. But, when we deboarded the plane (after sitting on
the runway close to an hour, I started to feel a little anxious. And when (after
about 5 hours of waiting in the terminal) they put me on a different flight –through
Charlotte— to sit in another terminal for another 3 hours and catch another
flight to Houston that would get me home close to midnight, I was starting to
feel a little frustrated not only with United Airlines, but also with God. Hey –Lord!
I cast my burdens on you. I don’t like to travel, but I did it anyway! And
look what happens! Why aren’t you
sustaining me? I need to get home. And
of course, as things go, around 11pm I was still in Charlotte and my flight to
Houston was cancelled. I had now been in
one airport or another for over 18 hours.
And I was feeling a little unsustained.
Plus, everything was closed. I was wandering through an incomprehensibly
huge airport far from home and far from anyone who cared, and all the lights
were going out. As if they were actually shutting down. You’d think that at least the bars would stay
open! But no. It was me, and a few
thousand other anxious travelers and the cleaning crews, caught in a strange
Kafkaesque nightmare of cheery signs and gliding walkways and rows of empty wooden
rocking chairs, and that voice overhead that kept calling out its messages welcoming
us to Charlotte and reminding us not to leave our luggage unattended. Luckily, I still had a granola bar and some
chewing gum. At one point it was almost
comical. I couldn’t even find a help desk or an airline person to ask what I
was supposed to do about getting a new flight. Of course, finally I did. But I want to talk about something else that
happened.
As I was wandering through the airport feeling a little
sorry for myself, I saw a sign that said Chapel with an arrow pointing upstairs.
So I took followed the arrow up the stairs and found a tiny room with a few
benches and what looked like a makeshift altar (made out of a school desk).
There were “inspirational” posters on the walls that also looked like they
might have come from a classroom. And as I sat down, I noticed, there was also
a man on the floor. My first thought was
that it was someone sleeping. And that he looked terribly uncomfortable, sleeping
all balled up with his face to the floor. I thought: this poor man. His flight
has been cancelled too, and he has found the one quiet place to curl up and
take a nap. Taking out my rosary, I made
the sign of the cross and began to pray. The man on the floor moved. He hadn’t
been sleeping, he’d been praying. He rose up on all four and looked at me –probably
as shocked as I was to find someone else in the chapel at that hour. We nodded
to each other and he finished his prayers, rolled up the prayer rug he was
kneeling on, and put it atop a pile of prayer rugs in the corner and quietly
slipped away. I prayed my Rosary and did
the same. But all the time I was
thinking of that man; how the two of us had found our way to this place at this
hour, in some sense we had found each other.
And somehow that comforted me. I
had been walking through that cavernous building, looking at all the closed
stores and the desolate food court, noticing all the shadowy, isolated figures slumping
over on benches or in chairs, sleeping, waiting. Occasionally, I would catch sight of someone
rushing up to hug someone who had just arrived; taking the suitcase from their
hands, they would walk away together arm in arm, talking excitedly, heading off
to family, friends and a comfortable bed.
And, past midnight I was still wandering, feeling desolate, alone, until
I found the chapel and the skinny little Muslim man down on his knees, saying
his prayers.
You see, I was trying to bear my burdens, I was trying to be
strong and self-sufficient and good-humored and cheerful, but I was (in fact)
simply clinging to my burdens as if they were trophies. I was feeling sorry for
myself, and feeling like somehow, I was earning something special by suffering
all of this. God was going to owe me!!
But, instead I was being taught a lesson. I was being taught how to let God sustain me.
And the way to do that isn’t by sucking it up and “being strong,” or ‘taking it
like a man,” but it is simply by letting go and giving it to God. When things
are going badly, times are hard, life is rough, give it to God. Go into some
quiet place and sit down (or kneel down) and offer it to Him in prayer. He will sustain you.
Soon after leaving the chapel I found the help desk and was
rescued by an attendant who arranged a flight for me that didn’t get cancelled,
and even got me a voucher for a hotel room (so I could go sleep for 4 ½ hours
before coming back to the airport to try my hand at the security scanner once
again.
(on the other hand, I still don't like to travel....)
