Observations in Transit

An airport is one of the most interesting places to me. For those of us that enjoy people watching its hard to beat the incredible array of people across ethnic, cultural and religious lines. I like to people watch and try to guess where people are from by their appearance or what their language/accent sounds like. Religion is too easy or too difficult, so nationality has to suffice. Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jews are easy to spot, but the Christians essentially look like they could be Atheist, Agnostic or any of those western philosophies if you only get one glance.

You can learn a lot and prayer as you go is so important. Prayer is important because the people around us need the Lord. Our thoughts can only scratch the surface of the depths of the people’s lives; the same goes for the depth of their pain, sin and brokenness. Could you just imagine taking the time to go into a busy airport lobby in Heathrow or LAX and just get the stories of the people there? It would blow our minds and they’re just people like you and me. Yet their lives are so unique and so precious, yet so under attack from Satan and their own flesh; present company included.

You do get a picture of our depravity across the board and sin is infused in different cultures in myriad ways. I have seen a man of a particular religious tradition with an entourage of what clearly are his four wives. You see how rude, mean and discourteous people are across ethnic and religious fronts. Little things become big things and any small thing can be taken as an attack on self.

Its not only “those people,” unfortunately I see it in my own culture as much, if not more, than any other. Most in America don’t realize the depth of our materialistic idolatry. That drum has been beat undoubtedly, but no matter how many times we in the church call out the materialism, little changes (do you know that this holiday season in the “tough economy,” Americans exceeded previous holiday seasons in regards to purchasing? Will we ever learn?)  So I think the drum can afford to be beat again. Why do we need Duty Free shops? We can make fun of their weird or unnecessary products all we want, but the fact is Duty Free shops exist because people buy from them. How pathetic is that? We are so addicted to entertainment and materialism that we can’t just enjoy traveling thousands of miles in hours, but we in fact must spend that time indulging ourselves in sin.

I was reminded of this again in the plane as I watched a couple movies. I try to beat jet lag by timing when I go to sleep and if I need to be awake, watching movies is a way to pass the time relatively quickly. The first movie that I watched would seem innocuous enough, but it in fact glorified the act of adultery and sex before marriage; two things that as a follower of Christ I am against. Yet I watched most of it. The other one was about some bank robbers and glorified violence, greed and lust; all of which are spoken against in the Bible. Yet I watched most of it. Its bad and inexcusable. Trying to watch something more light, I found myself watching one of my old favorites as a kid, Aladdin. Oh boy, am I about to go there and rob us all of our fond childhood memories? Yep. The movie makes light of poverty, even romanticizes it. Furthermore, some of the elements of the “magic” in that movie come from what most would call ancient Middle Eastern fables. But to look at it from a biblical worldview, we realize that these “fables” have their root in the occult. Of course, I’m a twenty-four year old follower of Christ who can’t help but analyze these things and a six year old wouldn’t pick all that up, but it doesn’t make those things any less true. And I certainly hope that it wouldn’t surprise anyone to hear that Disney, despite the bells and whistles, is not a godly organization, not at all.

I see two things in every person in the airport and on the plane. One, a precious person created in the image of God that I’m called to love. A person that the Father loves more than I can realize. Two, I see sin and bondage. And it is being enacted by and enacted against the beloved of God. I see the way that this sin infiltrates every crack in society from novelty stores to children’s movies to the way people dress to the way people live. An airport is a very easy place to see why the earth needs the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of Heaven, to come.