We have an eight hour layover.
This isn’t the first time. Sometimes it feels like the hours between flights take forever and other times it seems like just a few minutes. Today it’s a weird mixture of loving the time to write in a new environment while also being impatient to load onto a plane and get to the people we love in Romania as quickly as possible.
When people ask where my favorite places are in the world, I tend to forget the international terminal of the Chicago O’Hare airport. Call me crazy (it wouldn’t be the first time), but I love it here. I love watching people and there’s no better place to do it than an airport.
This is only a tiny glimpse of the terminal and the only one I could get without being even more creepy than I already am. There are hundreds more people here.
Side note: I just got a text from my BFF telling me to interview the basketball players at the table beside me and make it a project like Humans of New York and call it Humans of O’Hare or Humans of the Airport. If there’s a better idea out there, I’m not sure what it would be.
But the awesome thing about this particular layover is that it’s filled with beautiful people from all over the world, heading to all different places in the world.
I keep thinking about God’s words repeated throughout Scripture: “I will gather all nations,” “I will gather all nations,” “I will gather all nations.”
Sitting in this international terminal, watching all the nationalities and cultures stream through security, it’s not hard to be caught up imagining the Great Day when we will be gathered in the international terminal of heaven (the only terminal that exists there). There, in the glow of the glory of Jesus Christ, we will join to worship the Lamb who was slain to ransom every tribe, tongue, and nation, in the greatest symphony the world has ever known.
So while I’m getting caught staring at people here, I pray for all those bustling around us trying to get food, find their gate, and make flight connections, that one day they would join us there. May we be scattered today only to be gathered in the throne room so soon.
Even so, come, Lord Jesus. But until then, use us to gather more voices for the song that never stops.
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Sophie Miller 