The saga of four "left behind"

Monday as we returned to the United States, some eager team members raced to the ticket counter to learn of some open seats on an earlier flight back to Nashville. After the remaining seats were allocated, four of us were left behind to await our original return flight home.

Our story begins with Miller, Tripp, Roger and Brian aimless walking around the Cincy airport in search of FOOD! The choice is Outback , so we head over to concourse A. Miller is beginning to recover from his adverse reaction to some Delta Airlines veggie pizza, and all four of us are ready to eat. Enter our waiter singing"I love my job" ...actually it was very apparant he wanted to be ANYWHERE but at his job. This was very clear when he asked, "Can we finish the order now"?

He was a rather foul mouth young man, and I'm sure he was thinking "Great, I get stuck with the Jesus Freaks". He was bored so he started the usual small talk of where have you been, what did you do there, and where are you headed. After we told about how mission with sweet sleep, he said "So you guys get paid to do this, or do you have regular jobs"? The look on his face was unforgettable when we stated that we actually paid to go on this trip and had regular jobs.

I noticed that somewhere along the line he begin to respect us and he caught himself a few times before using profanity as an adjective. He even gave us our drinks with no charge and said he would have taken our meals off, but they couldn't comp meals.

I say this to make a point. We were exhausted, hungry, and basically zoned out....yet simply telling our story of how we had spent the past 10 days made a small impact on someone that would have (at first meeting) appeared to be the last person that wanted to hear about God's work. This tells me that we need to always be very aware of how we respond or react to anyone or any situation.

After our meal we headed back to our gate. Miller crashed on his luggage and two seats. He put in his ear buds , covered his head with a hooded jacket and dreamed the world away. Tripp couldn't be pryed away from the phone, he was sooo ready to see his family. Roger and Brian wandered around the concourse areas trying to work off sitting for so long on a long flight. Then again, maybe Brian was sneaking off to call Shari?????? ;-)

Finally back in Nashville we noticed that the luggage for Bill, The Bloughs , and The Beasleys were coming off with ours so we gathered it up for them and after not reaching either on the phone carried it over to the baggage service, so it would all be together.