airports

literally. at the airport. with much too much time on my hands. i initially caught myself feeling sorry for myself. thinking about the day's muck up: a missed connection flight, weather delays, a suitcase transfer, and burned coffee. until i told myself to get a grip. because then i remembered this. and then i got a starbucks. which made it a lot better (small things and such).

and then i also had time to wonder about airports in general. remember the scene from Love Actually, where the cast spent days at the airport filming reunions of people? it was in the opening scenes of the film. a conflation of so many events, so many things happening in one scene: children back in the arms of a parent, couples long separated reunited, grandparents greeting grown children (who never cease being parents and children who will always be their children). i love airports. because life almost seems to be condensed into one space in an airport.

i watched a couple push three children around in one stroller. and i thought of their bravery. and i wondered how anyone does it.

i watched businessmen and women sit alone at tables in the coffee shops that littered the spaces between boarding gates, and i wondered how long they'd been away from their families. and i wondered if the cost was worth it. is the cost ever worth it? can you gauge the cost, if you don't know the price you're paying? most of us will never know how much we've traded in without knowing what we've lost.

i watched pilots go through special doors reserved for flight crew. secretly wishing i knew what was behind the special doors. thinking that these people were consistently allowed to defeat the rationale of gravity. catapulting tons of heaving metal into the sky, while the rest of us sit in cabin seats intended to look like mini-versions of our living rooms. doesn't it defy reason? that i would trust someone i've never met to get me across an ocean, rock quarries, and desert in a piece of tin? it is crazy.

and i'm sitting in a departure gate, watching a new friendship form, the language barrier between two people disregarded for the sake of conversation (secretly happy no one is talking to me). Glad that people make these connections. grateful that i've been blessed with all the friendships and family i have.

don't let me get carried away with the airport talk. there's a creeper staring me down and i've wondered if i need to move. which also means airports aren't glamorous. they're just a slice of life in a microcosm.

fire

A few weeks ago I looked at the effects of fire on gold. Fire burns impurities out of gold. and gold without it's impurities has more value than gold with impurities. gold refined by fire goes for a lot more on in the marketplace than any other gold. gold that proves itself to be real, not fool's gold, withstands the fire. in order for gold to have value, it has to go through the painful process of being burned in a refinery, melted down to a liquid form, in a state where it is completely reduced to reliance on the master craftsman to determine how he will shape the gold: will it become a ring, a necklace, a vase, a trinket? Whatever it is intended to be, it can easily become whatever form it needs to be. And, even after it has become a necklace or a ring, refined gold is more malleable than unrefined gold. Which means that at any point, the gold can be altered at will.

it shouldn't take a stretch of the imagination to think about this in our own lives. I never know why we have to walk through fiery trials, or go through things that hurt. I do know, however, that trials can makes us more refined, result in lives and hearts that have more value, and make us more malleable than we were before.