Patty, Seth and I are sitting in the Anchorage airport for a six hour layover waiting for our flight to Fairbanks where our daughter Shelly, her husband and five children live, and it is now 2:45 am with 4 more hours to go.  I have traveled a lot on airplanes in the last 20 years, and have sat a lot of hours in airports watching people. The larger, international airports have people from all over the world walking down the same hall together with people talking different languages, with different dress, and different skin color and features. Airports have their own, unique culture and certain words are the key  ones describing that culture. Except at 2:45 am the main word is “Schedule”, everyone is headed to a gate with a deadline or miss their flight. It is not uncommon to see people running frantically all the while looking at their watch and rechecking the departure time on their ticket. Another major word is “Security” as standing in lines waiting to get “scanned” for bombs or whatever is a major part of the airport experience,  and regular loudspeaker announcements about not leaving your luggage unattended so a terrorist doesn’t plant a bomb in it while you are not looking. My IPad had a big, bright yellow warning announcement that some security lines at the Anchorage airport were taking 4 hours to get through because of some “information” that bad guys were coming through the airport headed someplace to do some bad things. With the “schedule” word, the “security” word, and then you add the “stranger” word, in that everybody is in a sea of humanity and they don’t know anybody and all these strangers are walking together, sitting together, standing in line together and only occasionally does anybody talk to anybody else. An airport is like a hay baler where dried grass gets shoved, squeezed, and compacted together, but with people, and as you watch you realize that you are watching a condensed view of our world and life. So the result of those three  key words is “frantic”, “worry”, “fear”, “loneliness”, “stress”, and on the list goes. Rather than getting sucked into the world of the “airport” I can choose to pray for people as they walk by, I can ask God for an opening to talk and possibly share, I can read my Bible, I can smile a lot and maybe even sing “Jesus loves me”.