the journey back home

Paul:
It's becoming a bit of an ongoing joke amongst our youth group that recently all my stories of talking to people about my faith start with "well; I was on an aeroplane.....". Occupational hazard I suppose. To celebrate the end of our mad-season as a family, I traded-in some air-miles and we all went to Orlando over Easter. Our journey back home from Orlando added another story to the list.

Joel and I were in the middle and window seat. I'd tried to co-ordinate our "getting up" to minimise disturbance to the poor guy in the aisle seat. After checking twice with Joel (and despite the vast amount of Orange juice he had consumed) he decided he didn't need to 'pay a little visit' until just after I had sat back down, when he loudly announced "right; I think I need the loo now". I was just deciding whether to throw Joel out the window, when the guy next to me said "it's OK, I've got a boy of my own" and promptly got up for us.

I got chatting to Kevin about kids and life. He was from Ireland but had married a New Yorker and was now living in Florida. We got to talking about what we did - he is in Pharmaceutical testing - and he was quite intrigued when I told him I was a missionary. He'd had a classic Irish Catholic upbringing and although he'd left most things of faith behind him years ago, he and his wife had recently started to become more spiritually interested. "Coincidentally", they'd had a neighbour round a few days earlier, inviting them along to church over Easter. We talked for the rest of the flight about the Bible and church and Catholicism and Jesus and Easter and eternity. I'd love to tell you he made that step of faith into the kingdom as we were about to land in New York, but he didn't. He's still got a way to go on that journey, but I felt privileged to have walked part of it with him. Do pray for Kevin and the Spiritual journey he's on.

We had a grand old time as a family in Orlando. I was working for the first few days and we did some 'connecting' with my team out there, but the 4 days over Easter was just pure fun.