The polka-dot emblazoned woman sitting beside me, who i would guess was in her late fifties, groggily asked "are those mountains we are flying over now?" Apparently her eyesight was a couple decades older than she was. We were flying over the Pacific Ocean as we had been 95% of our flight from Vancouver to honolulu. The shapes out our plane window, which she had mistaken for mountains ,were a glorious blanket of clouds ranging from gossamer thinness to thick pillow top comfoters. The vastness of this "skyscape" blew my mind as I saw the fingerprints of God's hands swirled in the never-ending fushia and tangerine coloured horizon. I was in utter peace.
Not that my trip started so serenely. Flying stand-by is apparently much like gambling. You really don't know until minutes before the flight whether or not you'll get on (ohh thats why they call it stand-by...). Once my friend who had dropped me off at the airport left, full on panic set in. I did not feel like sleeping at YVR, I needed to get to this wedding in Hawaii as cheaply as possible, and every westjet airline attendant I spoke with readily listed the many factors standing in the way of my ticket. All things which were annoyingly out of my control.
I felt God asking me to trust him which caused the following 2 hour long internal arguement:
What if I trust him to get me on this flight and it falls through, then I will need to come up with the reason why he actually meant for me to not get on. Oh but I really want to fly out tonight! But maybe that's not what he wants, maybe this is selfish of me. Maybe I am only supposed to go for a couple of days so he'll make me miss this flight for the later one in the week. Or perhaps this is to teach me how to deal with the difficulties of travel so I am more equipped when he calls me as a missionary to Timbuktu where I will probably die as a martyr...or maybe this flight is going down and that's why I shouldn't push my ticket through or I'll end up dead floating face down in the ocean, my body swollen with salt water and little carnivorous fish feeding on my...
That's the jest of it without going any further into the creative morbidity of my brain.
Then my name was called and I boarded the plane.
This made me realize that I am often trying to outsmart God -- well perhaps not God as much as
much as my faith. I worry that if i can't figure out the big picture and I choose to trust God anyway, I will be let down. My faith will prove ungrounded. My provision and protection will not be there and I will be alone. And I desperately do not want that. Blame it on abadonment issues but i have a fear of God letting me down and me having nothing left to believe in. So I don't ask God to prove himself to me, I make sure he doesn't have to so that I can have a strong belief in his divinity...just not his relationally. Instead I prove myself to him (yes I realize now that God must find that pretty funny).
The plane landed safe and sound in Honolulu 20 minutes ahead of schedule. I was neither saline filled, or stranded. The flight apparently hand not been God's harsh blow of discipline or a painful didactic lesson. Instead, staring out from my window seat at the beauty of the elements spun together in the starry night sky, there was peace. For a moment the anxiety that whimpers its lies in my head was silenced by an overwhelming feeling that I was loved. That God was powerful. That it didn't matter if I was floating my way to hawaii balancing on the surface of a single wine cork, God's plan and majesty are so far beyond me I may as well take a breath, and learn to trust because this ride ain't over yet. And the clouds? ...they are only the beginning.
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