"Ooh Child....."

Just before getting back to work last week, I spent 90% of my two and a half week winter vacation traveling. I was in Las Vegas, Park City, Salt Lake City, Cancun Mexico, Aspen Colorado, and Mesa Arizona. It was a lot of flying and driving. I enjoyed it all..... well most of it. Since nothing really eventful happened this weekend (with the exception of my pending root canal) I thought I'd post an older story from my journal. Here it is:

As a part of my recent travels, I needed to make a flight from Denver Colorado to Phoenix Arizona. I was coming from a day of snowboarding in Aspen to my cousin’s wedding. I was pretty tired from lack of sleep and long flights. Prior to my day in Aspen, I had spent a week in Cancun Mexico with my family. All the time changes and long flights had started to wear me out. Then to spend a day on the mountain, really wearing myself out and drive 4 hours to the airport only to miss my flight by a few minutes really just made me feel frustrated and down. I had never missed a flight before. I got stuck in an awful snow storm while driving through the Vail Pass. I had planned for this and even after slowing down to between 30-40 mph for about an hour, I knew I could still arrive on time. It wasn't until I hit a traffic jam created by the police that I began to realize how late I might be. They were trying to diminish the volume of cars going through this one tunnel on the I-70 headed to Denver. To do so, they literally stopped traffic and made us wait for an hour. By the time I got my rental car returned my flight had taken off. So, I was able to get my flight refunded. Still, I needed to be in Arizona that night. That meant that I would need to get another plane ticket. I tried to get a little lady who worked at Frontier Airlines to make a deal for me (which, without going into much detail, wasn’t all that far-fetched). It didn’t work, so I had to forfeit over a lot of money to get a last minute flight. Even then, I needed to run to the gate to catch it. I had been traveling without my cell phone for about two weeks at that point. I had no real way of contacting anyone to tell them that I would be coming in at a different time. So, I was a little stressed, tired and frustrated as I waited for the tram to take me to my gate. As I waited, the most interesting thing happened.

I was standing at the loading gate for the tram, tired and hot, holding my two bags. As I stood there, in a crowd of about 15 people, I heard a man approaching with a rather brisk step. His pace was quite reflective of his attitude, cheerful and confident. I heard him begin to sing, and as he walked on by me, he looked right in my eyes, from about 10 feet away, and without breaking his step sang the intro to the song Ooh Child by the Five Stairsteps. The words go like this: “Ooh Child, things are gonna get easier. Ooh Child, things are gonna get brighter.” He didn’t stop to talk, he didn’t even wait for a reaction. He just motioned towards me with his hand as he strolled on by, singing and looking right at me. The words of that song hit me and I really couldn’t help but smile. It was then that I realized that God was just finding a simple way to comfort me and lift my soul. That song will always have a greater meaning to me now. I’m thankful for the hand of the Lord in my life that day.