One morning last month, I arrived at London's Heathrow Airport at 5 am to check in for an early flight. I was physically tired and emotionally spent from several days of giving lectures and sermons. The woman at the ticket counter hardly looked up as she asked where I was going and how many bags I'd be checking.
"I'm headed for Boston," I said, "and I'm not checking anything."
For the first time she looked up and over the counter at my well-worn Brookstone roller bag (advertised to conform to FAA specifications for carry-on luggage) and said, "I'm sorry, but you'll have to check that."
My amygdala (the fear-sensor in the brain) immediately awoke, prompting memories of misplaced luggage and long waits at baggage-claim in Boston. I said (trying to be calm) that I didn't want to check my bag, that I'd carried it with me on the flight over to the UK a few days before, and I carry this particular bag on flights all the time.
The woman replied rather bureaucratically: "I'm telling you that they're not going to let you take that bag on the plane." I had the distinct impression that we were not connecting.
Conscious of my rising frustration, I deliberately coached myself into calmness and into a choice of words that would not accelerate tension between us. "Is there any way we could start this conversation over again and rethink the problem?" I asked. She took a very deep breath. Perhaps she was trying to keep cool also.
"Do you see that over there?" she asked, pointing to a contraption made of tubes that outlined the shape of an apparently legal suitcase. "If you can fit your bag in that thing, I'll let you take it with you."
I went over to the thing and lifted my bag into it. With a modicum of encouragement, it fit. I returned to the ticket counter feeling inwardly smug but careful not to show it. The woman made no comment except, "Passport, please." I handed it over.
She opened my passport and studied it. Then looking up and engaging me for the first time with any sort of feeling that suggested personal contact, she said, "Are you the Gordon MacDonald who writes books—Christian books?"
"Yes, I do write," I said.
The change in atmosphere was instant. A broad smile came over her face as she said, "I've got several of your books at home. In fact I'm reading your latest book right now. I can't believe I'm meeting you."
It was one of those moments you enjoy just a little too much. I had migrated from chump to champ in three seconds. We went on to exchange a bit of warm conversation (no one was waiting in line behind me). Finally, she sent me on my way to passport-control with my roller bag and a final word of gratitude for my writing.
Forgive me if this story seems self-serving. But there is a point to be made about a lesson that was reinforced in me. Not everything in life has to be learned the hard way.
At 5 am one's capacity not to vent in irritability or contentiousness is strained. While I'm not normally pugnacious, it would have been easy to have expressed my feelings harshly toward the woman who wanted to separate me from my bag. No small matter for a frequent flyer. I'm the customer, after all; she is the vendor. She is a stranger, an employee of an airline that often seems to care little about me. And who would ever know about my less-than-Jesus-like behavior in such a depersonalised location as Heathrow airport?
This time, while tempted to protest in strong terms not necessarily approved by God, I hadn't. But suppose I had. How would the woman behind the counter have felt about my books then? Had I acted rudely, what impression would she have formed of me or the things about which I write?
A few days after this encounter, I was scheduled to speak to seminary students about the "fruit of the (Holy) Spirit," one of St. Paul's many lists of Christian virtues and character-qualities in the New Testament. "The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control," the old apostle wrote to people who had formerly assumed these categories of behavior to be weaknesses rather than strengths. As I prepared that talk, my memory kept retrieving the exchange at the Heathrow ticket counter. If you're a Calvinist, you might believe that God set the moment up to test my worthiness to speak on the subject of the fruit of the Spirit.
Quite likely I will never again meet that woman—whose name I never got—this side of eternity. But I wonder how often she is likely to pick up a Christian book and remember how one such author she met behaved in a moment of stress. Hopefully she'll recall the one she met chose to be patient, kind, gentle, and reasonably self-controlled … a sampler of Paul's "fruits."
A friend of mine has suggested to me that all day long in our human transactions, we inject into the commonwealth of human relationships either a bit of virtue or a bit of evil. It's that simple, he says: one or the other. There is, he adds, no exchange between people that can be considered neutral. It's either value-added or value-subtracted. It's easy to subscribe to this idea when one is among friends. A bit scarier if you believe it can also happen when you're in an airport a few thousand miles away from home where nobody knows your name.
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