Tomorrow I am flying to the Netherlands to see my youngest son and I have a confession to make.
I. Do. Not. Like. To. Travel. I haven’t seen my son in a year and I am beyond excited to give him a great big hug. I can’t wait to discover new places, see new sights, and try new food, but getting from point A to point B is a nightmare for me. I am a planner who is also a procrastinator. I should be packing right now. I have a lot of essays and articles on faith. I could easily pull one of those, yet here I am, typing something brand new. Why? Well, because it is distracting me from the stress of getting ready to travel.
I don’t like to go on car rides that are longer than half an hour. I don’t like the bouncy trains that continually stop to pick up and drop off passengers. I don’t like to summon taxis or Ubers or Lifts or have any stranger drive me through the unknown streets of a big city at breakneck speeds. And I especially don’t like going through the indignity of the TSA, getting into a giant 875,000 pound tube made of metal and plastic full of people I don’t know packed in like sardines, improbably taking off into the air for 8+ hours, and hoping that the instructions from the flight attendants that I ignored won’t be necessary.
Yet, the destination is worth the struggle. “That day when evening came, he said to his disciples, “Let us go over to the other side.” Leaving the crowd behind, they took him along, just as he was, in the boat. There were also other boats with him. A furious squall came up, and the waves broke over the boat, so that it was nearly swamped. Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion. The disciples woke him and said to him, “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?”
He got up, rebuked the wind and said to the waves, “Quiet! Be still!” Then the wind died down and it was completely calm.
