Questions and Answers

Some photos from a friend's garden in Connecticut :) 

Life as an MK is full of different foods, cultures, and languages. It also involves much travel. Since I was thirteen, I have been on at least two plane trips a year. I've found that the flying experience can vary from being completely horrible to mildly pleasant and is usually coupled with different levels of fatigue, cramped muscles, and stress. The last flight that I took back to Mexico, however, made for one of my favorites. My first departure had been from Indiana and the second from Georgia. By the time my second flight came along, I was tired and ready to be finally home. I had planned to be spending the next couple of hours either sleeping, watching a movie, or getting lost in the pages of a Ted Dekker book. As it is, I was not often social on long flying days. However, as fate would have it, my neighbor on the plane struck up a conversation with me before we had left the ground and that would last for the majority of the flight. Had I known I would be speaking and listening in Spanish for some hours that day, I would have reviewed my notes and brought a dictionary. However, for the first hour I got along fairly without either, to my great surprise and relief. After a few minutes speaking, he remarked that my Spanish was pretty good. I smiled, shrugged sheepishly, and thanked him; the next moment I was looking out the window and silently berating myself. Had I actually just giggled? But the moment passed and the conversation continued. We spent time on topics such as where we were going and where we came from, where I went to school and where he worked, and other subjects like interests, family, and religion. Nearing the end of a few hours, however, my Spanish grew worse as my head became foggier. I tripped and stumbled all over myself as I attempted to answer his questions about Christianity and what I believed. I stuttered along, getting frustrated, as I forgot the words I would have liked to use and confused my tenses and grammar. However, he was a patient listener and his curiosity encouraged and emboldened me to press on.

After we landed my head felt brainwashed from all the thinking and concentrating that it takes me when speaking Spanish. I strode up to the custom’s counter and was told to fill in a part of my form that I had accidentally neglected. Of course, the only thing I could find in my purse to write with was a sparkly blue gel pen. I smiled apologetically and scribbled out my information. By the end of it all, I felt ridiculous and thought I looked as though I had never been in an airport before. 

The sight of my dad waiting outside the gate made me smile with relief and the ride home provided me with enough time to think over the conversation I had had on the plane which had given me a thrill inside. How cool is it to witness to someone who was really curious about God and the truth? As I thought this, I realized something. The questions he had asked me are the same ones that everyone who does not know God is asking, whether they speak them out loud or not. Everyone ponders the purpose of life. Even people who don't believe in purpose have to have thought about it to come to that conclusion. 


C. S. Lewis once said, "If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning." 


Whether people choose to believe it or not, we are made with purpose, and thus, that is a knowable and undeniable element of our existence. Everyone is searching for answers. Why are we alive? Why do we suffer? What happens when we die? What can satisfy us? Not everyone may be as open in their questions as the stranger on my plane, but they're there. There's a hole in their hearts where there should be God. There's despair where there should be hope and loneliness where there should be prayer. We have the answer to their questions: God. The Lost are all around us, looking for answers. When will you tell them?