Fear of Flying

I hadn't been on a flight in almost twenty years; I was not a happy man to be standing at the gate for the first leg of a trip to Europe.  My wife and I had decided that we would move to Europe and participate in evangelistic outreach to people in and around Germany.  In order to set-up our home and gain employment on the continent, it was necessary that I go first and make arrangements.  If successful, then upon my return I would prepare the family to move across the ocean.

Dorothy and I had been married for ten years, and in that time had not been apart overnight at all, except when she was birthing babies or attending a women's group overnighter.  All in all, we had been apart no more than about six days total.  I was now going away for an entire month.  I would not be in town at a meeting, or even in the region at a conference.  I would be more than six thousand miles away in countries with languages I did not speak, and a questionable sense of direction.  It was a tense and tearful goodbye scene.

As I boarded the relatively small aircraft bound for Chicago, my anxiety matured into cold fear.  I tried to take an aisle seat, but the gentleman in my row insisted I have the window.  I could not explain my anxiety because he had only a couple hundred words of in his English vocabulary, and my Italian was non-existent. 

As the plane taxied to the runway and took off in a burst of acceleration I did not remember well, I tried to find some calm.  I looked out of the window and found that it was less scary than leaning back in my seat with my eyes closed in desperate prayer with one hand on my pulse.  Feeling a very slight encouragement, I looked around the airplane cabin a little.  The Italian gentleman was alert and had a friendly expression.  He greeted me in English, heavily accented, honestly just like in the movies.  The conversation was utterly basic, and we probably should not have tried to have a conversation, but I we weren't going anywhere and I felt a little better when I was talking to him.

After some struggling, I got him to understand that I was going to Slovenia to work in a church.  I could not find the words to correct his belief that I was a priest.  He related some form of understanding and approval of Slovenia, but I did not discern any details.  After some time, he saw that I was moving to Europe, and did not plan to live in the United States anymore.  When he said, "It is good you leaving America because is better in Europe, eh?"  When I saw that the sum total of his understanding was that I did not like the United States, I realized I would not be able to make him understand anything, though I did see the humor in it.  When I settled to face the rest of the flight I was startled to find that I hadn't been aware of any fear for the duration of the difficult conversation.  I had been too focused on the task of making my neighbor understand me to think about the flight.  Now it was more than halfway to Chicago and I wasn't scared anymore.  I mused that when flying I should look around for an alert foreigner, to relieve my fear of flying.