The Blessings of Long Waits

Dallas Fort Worth Airport Terminal C

Greetings from Utah!  It is so nice to be home for a week and to be able to spend some time with my family and friends.  It has really only been three months since I was home, but it felt like it had been close to a year.  So it is wonderful to be back "in the place where I belong" again.  As I flew in over the city lights of the Utah, Salt Lake, and Davis valleys at 2:30 am on Friday morning, I couldn't help but feel like that was a taste of what it would be like to enter into the Celestial Kingdom.  It was familiar, inviting, and happy.  It was home.

How I got there on Friday morning was a much longer and more entertaining story.  When I had purchased my tickets to come home, I had things all planned out.  I needed to be at the class I TA on Thursday till 2:00 pm, following which I would rush home, grab something to eat, and then wait for the shuttle to come and pick me up where I would get to the airport and be on a plane headed for Denver at 6:30 pm, and then from Denver I would fly into Salt Lake, arriving at 10:30 pm where Julianne had kindly agreed to pick me up.

My plans started out well, despite a little bit of traffic on the freeways headed home from class.  I was at home and ready for the shuttle which came around 4 and made its way through traffic to the airport where I was able to check in and was waiting for the flight with about an hour to go.  That's when things started changing.  They informed us that our flight that had been delayed 8 minutes, was now delayed 2 hours because of weather in Denver, but luckily my flight to Utah was also delayed, so I would be able to catch that plane and just get into Utah a little later than expected.  Then the delay was pushed to four hours and I started to worry.  Then the news came that we would be able to get to Denver, but would have to wait until the next morning to get out of Denver because of the weather.  This was a problem because I found out that night that my Doctor's appointment that I thought had been scheduled for Monday morning, was actually for Friday morning at 10:45 am.

I talked with the attendants at the booth and they told me that they were in the process of working out tickets for passengers that had been connecting through Denver to get on other planes headed to their final destination.  They kindly provided me with a ticket on an American Airlines flight that was direct to Salt Lake City.  It was an answer to my prayers and I was grateful for their willingness to help me get where I needed to go.  I was given a print out with some information that would allow me to pick up my ticket in the new Terminal.  When I got to the American Airlines booth and handed them my ticket, it was about 8:30 pm and the flight was scheduled to leave in an hour and a half.  They looked at the information and told me that they had not been able to find evidence of Frontier having booked me a ticket on the flight, and I would need to go back to the other Terminal (on the other side of the airport) to get that information.  This had me panicked, and racing back across the airport where I was given the needed information.  I rushed back to the American airlines booth and received my boarding pass, thinking the night's adventures had finally come to an end and I could relax and wait for the flight to board in an hour.

Within minutes of beginning my relaxation, they announced that our flight had been delayed until 10:30, inconvenient, but par for the course on that night.  Around 10:00 pm I noticed that there was still no plane waiting to take us to Utah.  Again the staff came on the intercom and announced that our plane was still en route to the airport, and we could not leave without it (naturally).  When the plane finally arrived around 10:15, I thought, "Perfect, now we will be ready to go and maybe by 11:00 pm we will be in the air."  Then came another announcement over the intercom.  We finally had a plane, but no pilot or copilot--again, not optimal conditions for a flight to Utah.  The pilot and copilot were in Austin and had been delayed because of weather, but would be there by 11.  Then another announcement--I was really growing to hate these updates--the pilot and copilot would not be there until midnight and there were questions about whether they could still legally fly at that point.  At that point, all I could do was laugh, because the whole series of events just seemed so absolutely improbable.  In the midst of all this I reworked rides several times.

I am anything but patient when it comes to travel delays and changes.  In fact, I've been known to be quite angry about delays in the past.  This time, I was frustrated, but maintained my frustrations with a decent dose of humor, thinking that it was virtually impossible that this serious of unfortunate events could ever come together again in quite the same way.

On my unanticipated red-eye flight to Utah, as I was completely unable to sleep, I found myself conversing with the woman next to me for the majority of the flight.  We had a great conversation in which we discussed a number of different topics, including the gospel and the Church.  After about an hour and a half, she began asking me questions about the Church and its teachings, giving me a wonderful opportunity to share my testimony and perhaps clear up some misunderstandings about the Church.

At times in our lives, there will be moments when it seems like everything that can possibly go wrong is going wrong.  It may seem as though every announcement that comes over the intercom will be some new bit of bad news making a situation that seemed to be bad even worse.  Our plans will occasionally fall apart and our lives will be rerouted and filled with unanticipated delays causing us to wonder if we will ever reach our destination.  But these are the very times when the Lord is often closest to us.  If things had gone according to my plans, perhaps I would have missed out on the opportunity to share my testimony.  So when our lives are rerouted and unanticipated delays occur, we can stand assured in the knowledge that God is at the helm and that His plans are greater than ours.  In the meantime, perhaps we can find some humor in the unfortunate events that direct us toward the path that the Lord has laid out for us.

Brett