The Power of Prayer in the Ordinary

Yesterday my daughter and I enjoyed an everything-goes-right travel day. I’m taking some time to write about this because I see it as an answer to prayer. Now when we have one of those atrocious everything-goes-wrong travel days, that doesn’t mean that God doesn’t love us. Rather I’m taking yesterday as a gift of love – an extra grace.

I worked to keep calm and in the right frame of mind throughout the day, with just two blips. One was a moment of reckoning on the way to Heathrow, when we were two-thirds of the way there, our flight delayed by an hour meaning that we’d not make our connection in Atlanta, meaning an extra six hours would be added to our journey. Meaning I’d be driving to our friends in Virginia at 11:30pm (which would have been 4.30am British time).

The longest and hardest wait was at the beginning, at the airport, not knowing if we’d find a solution or if the long, long day lay ahead. Is that true in life? We don’t know what next steps to take or what the final outcome will be. The miasma of uncertainty can throw us at this point, when having faith while waiting can feel excruciating.  

I went to the wrong queue, waiting at the Virgin Atlantic service counter instead of going to Delta. That cost us some time. More time at Delta as the queues moved at a seeming glacial pace. So much to check these days with covid certificates, travel attestation forms, and so on. At the Delta line when my turn came, we had a switch-over of employees. The woman who arrived seemed flustered from the start as she searched and searched through her purse/handbag, looking for a pencil as it turned out. Then she found she couldn’t log on. She’d been furloughed for over a month and the systems had changed. After more than twenty minutes I started to waver in my patience when I saw people at the next line over moving through the system, and finally asked if I could change queues.

That was a good move. The person there was clearly very competent, and when I asked if anything could be done in terms of finding a better flight – without nearly 5 hours in Atlanta – she said she’d work on it. She got a supervisor to come over, Mohammed, and as she moved her screen and keyboard for him to reach over the counter to see what he could do, I joked, “Ah, do you have the magic hands!” (Meaning the secret codes released to those at a certain level.) He smiled and kept on typing.

After a few stops and starts, he smiled and said, “Yes, this will work.” He routed us through New York’s JFK airport getting us to our destination two hours before our original time!

Flight to JFK went well. I started to wonder if we would make the connection when getting through immigration took a long time. Then security took a long time, and I left my iPad in a bag, which meant that it had to be rescanned. And our gate was B51 – almost the most far away in that terminal from security. We were cutting it very tight and because my daughter got scraped up in a mountain biking accident at camp (she’s fine but it’s sore), she couldn’t walk hugely fast. So when we got to the gate, although we were 10 minutes before the flight and it still said, “Boarding,” the gate agent was gone and it appeared we were too late. Sigh.

After resigning ourselves to time in the airport – at least I could get some food for my daughter who hadn’t eaten either of the meal offerings on the plane – the gate agent came out and said that we could board because there was a malfunction on the plane. Now no one likes to hear of a malfunction but it was simply the deliberator’s batteries weren’t working. So we boarded, waited just a half hour, and landed – still ahead of time.

I write this sitting in one of the Adirondack chairs in the photo above, looking at the lovely view, hearing the birds, cicadas, satisfied from a breakfast of croissant and eggs from chickens raised here at Corhaven. Giving thanks for these answered prayers for this day of travel, received with gratitude. Reminding myself to think back to the day-where-everything-went-right the next time I’m traveling.

How to you exercise faith when the outcome isn’t clear?