It was way past my bedtime. For years now, I have lived by the motto “early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise”. I don’t know if that is true, but still I head to bed pretty early. However, on this particular night, I was up late and proud of it. Why? I was headed home. Our trip to Peru had been great, but it was now time to come back to these United States of America. The flight out of Peru does not leave until a little after midnight, so we got to the airport around 8 pm, made our way through customs, and was at our gate with time to spare. The departure time neared, one more security check, and before long we were boarding the plane and getting settled. I sighed, one step closer to home. It was then that the glitch occurred. We were instructed to watch the overhead monitors for the customary FAA spill about seatbelts, exit rows, oxygen masks, and floatation devices. However, all we saw was some wavy lines on the screens. I was reading, so I really wasn’t paying close attention to the proceedings. My seatbelt was buckled and I knew the spill. I did notice someone was trying to reboot the thing, but nothing happened. Then it hit me. What if there is some rule that this plane can’t take off if it has a faulty video player? What if they cancel the flight? What if we don’t make it to Atlanta? What if we have to spend another night in Peru? I was ready to stand up and recite the whole “in the case of emergency” routine myself complete with hand motions, but then to my relief we started backing away from the gate. The flight attendants started positioning themselves to give us the spill the old fashioned way. All was well. Come to think of it, how foolish it would have been to disrupt our travel plans over a faulty video machine. Now an engine would have been a different story, but a video player you can live without. Thankfully, the airline knew the difference between a major and minor problem. Sadly enough, often the church does not. We become grounded by issues that are non-critical or non-essential to our main purpose which, by the way, is like the airlines, to get people safely home.
Buckled Up,

Bro. James