Stranded

What I'm Listening to: Grow Old with Me (The Postal Service) Airplanes. Those wonderful travel mediums that decimate trip time and make traveling a breeze. Right... For my seventeenth birthday, my parents gave me a plane ticket to go down to Little Rock for a few days and attend a conference with speakers Eric and Leslie Ludy (both of which I highly recommend, by the way!). After waking up at 3:00 a.m. (not without a few yawns and stretches), I left my grandmother's house for the airport. The first flight was as smooth as butter. I got to the next airport in time and made my connection easily. However, sitting on the airplane, the pilot announced that the temperature control was broken and some mechanics were on the way to fix it. Nearly half an hour later, the mechanics arrived and began working on the problem. Paperwork took another fifteen or twenty minutes, but then we started moving again. I was getting excited--I was going to make it after all! Not so. The plane still had to be "de-iced." Unfortunately, the de-icers were the slowest de-icers in the history of de-icing and we weren't on the runway for at least another half-hour. All in all, I missed my last connection by ten minutes, a forty-minute flight to Little Rock from Memphis. The next flight was in about four and a half hours so I decided to grab some Starbucks and a good book and hang out for awhile. Waiting for my next flight, I bumped into a friend who was visiting Little Rock from college and we chatted for a little bit before boarding the plane. To my dismay, the flight attendants "de-boarded" us because Newark-bound customers apparently had precedence over us. We were assigned to a plane with technical difficulties, which--you guessed it!--never ended up being fixed. An airport employee assured us that a bus was coming to take us to Memphis, but we had our doubts. I found some chocolate in my suitcase, hand-delivered by an angel herself (my grandmother), and Jeannie and I enjoyed a few moments of heightened endorphins. Against all odds, the bus finally arrived and we stepped onto our ride home. At first, I was really bitter about the whole thing. The airport wasted my time with my friends and I didn't have much time before I had to go back home. Only later did I realize why the whole thing happened. I think God purposefully delayed my plane to teach me an all-important lesson: it's not all about me. Had I made my connection, my friend Jeannie would have had to undergo that ordeal alone while I partied it up in Little Rock. And I would never have had that incredible opportunity of witnessing God's provision firsthand. I guess being stranded doesn't get the repute it should.