Airline Testimony

I started feeling really bad, really fast. I called my parents and of course they insisted I come home right away. My dad immediately bought me a plane ticket for early the next morning with Continental Airlines. Houston is about an 8-9 hour drive from Harding. I couldn’t even sit up in a chair for 5 minutes much less sit in a car for that long, and I surely couldn’t drive. I generally fly Continental Airlines when I can because it is a non-stop, one hour flight. We made all the proper arrangements, and everything seemed to be in order. All I had to do was survive through the night.

I didn’t sleep at all that night because I was in intense pain. I just dealt with the pain instead of going to the ER, purely because I knew I would be home the next morning. I knew my parents could take me to some real doctors and I was pretty fed up with Arkansas docs at the time. Finally, it was morning, and the phone rang. My dad called to tell me that all flights to Houston Intercontinental had been canceled due to fog, but that he arranged another flight with another airline because we both knew there was no way I would last another day here and I was definitely too weak to try for stand-by. My dad found a flight with Southwest Airlines that had only one stop in Dallas and no plane change that left that very morning. It ended up being cheaper than the Continental flight, there was no assigned seating and I somehow ended up being the first person on the plane, I sat in a front seat with extra leg room, and fell directly asleep for the next 2 hours. All these things I totally attribute to God watching out for me. The most awesome part is that the Southwest flight took me to Hobby Airport. What difference does that make, you may be wondering…well, it made all the difference in the world.

The fog that I thought was a terrible inconvenience, forced us to find an alternate flight, that forced me into another airport. I don’t know if you remember but on February 22, 2006 there was a security breach at Houston Intercontinental and all of Terminal B, the terminal I was supposed to be arriving at, was evacuated and people were standing outside for hours that day. I know that I would not have had the strength make it.
Looking back, I can see that God was totally in control. A situation that started out being absolutely terrible, ending up helping me tremendously. Just think how easy it would have been to be angry and have the attitude of “Why is God doing this to me?…Why fog? Why now? Why today?” I think that sometimes, actually most of the time, we can’t see the bigger picture, and what we can see seems like it is random cruelty from God. But we must remember it never is. We have to remember that God has plans to prosper us and not to harm us. We must persevere as Job did. We must trust Him. If we do, he will go so far as to make even the littlest details work out.