Not too long ago I found myself sitting in Terminal 2 out at O’Hare airport. I fly out of O’Hare so often that I have favorite places that I frequent, nooks that I know, and tables that are tucked away from the traffic. I feel free to sit back and observe the coming together of cultures. It is delightful to sit with a cup of coffee in hand and do nothing because I am suspended between two tasks with each side believing I’m tending to the other.
From my tucked away table or unknown nook I have been both delighted and horrified by how some of this coming together takes place. Some people dress up but they really shouldn’t be able to go out in public because they’re just not equipped to be around people. I watch them act rude and bossy, racist and pushy and I must admit that when I observe them I have to override a lot of judgment to offer them grace. A little trick of the trade: I try to remember if I have ever been that way and, unfortunately I can almost always conjure up a similar moment in my own history and then I let them off the hook because I’m grateful that God’s not going to judge me by the days I dressed up but should have stayed home. There are, however, other scenarios where I find myself delighted by the actions of others. They are just small gestures, the returning of a security blanket that has fallen out of a stroller, the deference given to someone of an older age group, the courtesy granted to a fellow passenger who has misjudged the amount of time they needed to make it through security, or the kindness offered by someone from the dominant culture who has taken a moment to consider how complicated the world must be if you have to navigate the complexities of O’Hare across cultural and language barriers.
On this particular day I watched a woman in a burqa boarding a plane. She had arrived at the gate with two small children, one about two and a half the other still an infant. She also had with her two bags, one which was obviously too big to fit under her seat and one which was small enough to throw over her shoulder. The luggage and the kids were perched on top of one of those luggage carts you now pay four dollars to borrow. The gate agent told her she couldn’t take the cart onto the jet bridge but the woman didn’t understand what the agent was communicating and just held out her ticket again. The agent rudely repeated her request insinuating that the woman was somehow less than intelligent simply because she did not understand English and then began to forcefully remove the woman’s bags from the cart, all the while wagging her finger at the woman. The agent gestured to the child to get off the cart and the two year old complied but was obviously disappointed as her lower bottom lip indicated.
The woman in the burqa quickly picked up the little one before the agent could beat her to it. Satisfied, the agent pushed the cart away and with a shake of her head took the woman’s tickets. I am aware that the sum of the patience in a line of airline passengers is less than its individual parts and I could see the other passengers peering around each other to see what exactly had delayed their advance. The agent reached past the woman to take the ticket of the next passenger, expecting the woman to figure out her dilemma on her own. The woman tried to calm the two year old who was close to tears and reaching toward the cart while she held the other wiggly child football style under her arm. She tried to get the two year old to walk but if the child couldn’t have the cart she wanted to be carried. It was then that I heard a young man’s voice say, “Can I help you with your bag?”. It was a young man; I’d like to imagine he was a North Park graduate, twenty five or so, with a military crew cut and an Old Navy t-shirt. The woman, not expecting help from her surroundings just kept focused on her impossible task. The young man just leaned in a bit, smiled disarmingly, picked up the bag and said, “I’ll carry this for you.” Her face was covered by cloth and so I am unsure if a smile was offered but the sense of relief in her eyes was more than visible.
The fact that he picked up the bag wasn’t that big a deal. The young man in the plaid shorts was heading in the same direction and the bag was nowhere near heavy for a guy his size. What struck me was his willingness to take himself out of his own shoes and place himself in hers, a split second decision that narrowed the gap between two cultures. As followers of the God who put on flesh to walk in the soles of people I pray that we too would develop the simple discipline of placing ourselves in the shoes of those all around us. Perhaps then we will see that we are more like those we judge than we are different from them. And perhaps then we will be willing to both let them off the hook when they need grace and come alongside them when they simply need to know that someone sees their struggle.
