We knew something was wrong when we arrived to check in for our flight and it offered us an option to drive to another airport an hour away if we wanted to fly out and get to our destination on time. I hadn’t slept much the night before, and we were in the next county over greeting friends, saying goodbye, receiving things to take back to Africa, and assisting with a baptism service. Then we rushed over to the airport, only to find that the plane was delayed 3 hours and we would miss our connection. I wonder if we were the only people in the airport who saw that as a grace. We had been going and going on little rest – work, seeing people, traveling to San Diego and Monterrey and San Bernardino in a matter of days. Our bodies and minds craved a down-day before settling in a conference in the middle of the country. And so we rested. We enjoyed delicious airport food with the free vouchers, we slept in our nice, unexpected hotel room, used the gym, and checked out as late as we could. We used the seven hours after that to connect with almost two dozen people. The first day, we were able to find rest and peace and see the delay as grace. When we went to board our flight the following day and found that we had somehow been bumped from that, now that was difficult. We’d already missed the first day of a 5 day conference, we waited 26 hours for a new flight, and now that flight we were supposed to get on – we even had first-class boarding passes for as a concession – that flight was completely full and our seats had been given to others. We sat to the side as everyone else boarded the plane. Now that was hard, not knowing what went wrong or what we were going to do. I don’t know how they worked it out – I think they might have had to go back in and take a couple stand-by passengers out, the details were very unclear. But they found space for us – I was in the last seat and Greg was in the front of the plane. They gave me free snacks to make up for the trouble, and that was nice. We arrived at 3 am, in time for 4 hours of sleep before the second day of the conference. But I was much less exhausted than I would have been if we got there directly. Praise God for knowing what we need (and for our conference leaders being gracious when we came a day late)
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