A COUPLE OF weeks ago, I was in Chicago for a business meeting and my return flight ended up being several hours late. I became one of a full flock of travelers impatiently waiting at Gate E17 in Chicago’s O’Hare International Terminal 2.
As time stretched on, mobile phones quit being used for gaming and were used to actually communicate with someone. Most calls were short and under their breath, but I was close enough to one passenger to hear both sides of an animated telephone conversation. The call was with the shuttle company she had reserved to take her home. She found there would be no shuttle waiting for her when she got to Seattle because their last one would leave hours before she would arrive.
I wasn’t exactly eavesdropping, but I thought I recognized the name of the shuttle company and my ears perked up. I began to wonder if maybe she lived somewhere on the North Olympic Peninsula on my route home and I could help.
To shorten a great story, as her call ended, I went over and asked where she lived. She said Port Townsend. I said I lived in Port Angeles and why don’t I just take you home? It would be on my way.
I could tell she was sizing me up as a potential mass murderer or something, but she said, “Really? You’d drive me home?” I said, “Yes, it’s sort of on the way, and I’m not in any hurry.”
I gave her my business card to show I really did live in PA as some sort of assurance.
We introduced ourselves and within a quick minute, we had a plan to get her home and her mood went from very perturbed to relieved.
After the flight finally landed, we took a shuttle to get my car and over the next couple of hours we made our way to Port Townsend and then me to Port Angeles. Tired but animated, friendly conversation kept time and drowsiness at bay.
I’ve thought about this event quite a bit ever since. It wasn’t the fact that a mini-rescue had happened as much as the why and the way it happened.
It came to me that stepping out with a bit of human kindness, coupled with an intuitive trust, was not in any way normal these days.
In these times, with the anxiety meter pegged at max, human kindness might still be there, but trust to accept it is in short supply.
We are warned about what we can or should trust.
Trust is becoming a rare commodity and, without trust, despair sets in.
Peter Marty wrote in his article in “The Christian Century” this month that despair is easy to come by in anxious times, but there is another way. We can choose to live with a posture of hope instead of a disposition of dread.
One of the greatest gifts God hands to each of us is our ability to choose. Through our choices, he says, we become certain kinds of people and what kind of people we get to become.
Peter Marty goes on in his article that “YES might be the most powerful word in the world. It can create, build and heal. Its capacity to change hearts makes it essential to a posture of hope. Hope … visualizes a better way … a way to walk into the future and, even more importantly, create a future.”
For my new friend and myself, our choice to say “yes,” to offer help and then to accept it, as small as that was on a cosmic level, fostered hope, made real that better way and helped build community.
A central tenant of many religions is care for the stranger, and in my Lutheran tradition, we call that “care for neighbor” where everyone is neighbor — wherever they live, near or far.
A neighbor might be within earshot at Gate E17 at a concourse at Chicago’s O’Hare or, as happenstance would have it, that same person just needs a ride home.
The choice to say “yes” to kindness is as contagious as COVID. Be a spreader.
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Issues of Faith is a rotating column by religious leaders on the North Olympic Peninsula. Don Corson is an Ordained Deacon in the Lutheran Church (ELCA) and the winemaker for a local winery. He is also the minister for Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Forks. His email is ccwinemaker@gmail.com.
