Homeland Security and I are Good Friends

Chicago - There is a certain gamble you take when you get on a plane for a transatlantic trip – as you wonder who the airline is going to seat next to you, some total stranger who you are going to sit closer to for the next eight hours than you even sit to your own spouse or loved ones when you are at home. I know some guys who pray for someone they can evangelize on a plane, I always find myself feeling sorry for the people who sit next to them, which is probably a bad thing for someone in my position to say but I don’t feel bad enough about saying it not to say it. Let the blog comments from those saved on planes come rolling in, I can take it. The least I can say is that this is not an approach I am comfortable doing myself. I used to pray that 1) the person next to me would not be monstrously obese or have any huge hygiene issues, and 2) that it would be someone inclined to leave me alone. But I am turning over a new leaf in middle age, I am committed to abandoning my misanthropic tendencies and bringing my honest self to every encounter I have while I trust God with what happens. I have decided I have wasted too much of my life worrying and wondering what others think of me. I want to be free of that and just be open to what happens (as long as the person isn’t monstrously obese or has hygiene problems).

So, today as I was waiting for the plane in Amsterdam I looked at the sea of people also waiting and wondered who I would sit next to and I prayed, “God, send the right person to sit next to me.” He did!

The God I believe in surprises me all the time. He really did today. So, when the young Muslim woman sat down on the plane next to me, I said hello and then thought, “This could be really interesting.” I asked her if she spoke English and she said yes, and then after we got in the air we started talking.

I asked, “How long have you worn a hajib?” And she said, “It’s pronounced hijab” and I apologized for not speaking Arabic correctly and she said, “I am totally amazed that an American knows what to call it,” and then told me that she’s worn it since she was fifteen, and mainly wears it not to cause problems in her family.

I said, “I don’t know, I think it makes Muslim women look mysterious” and a huge smile came across her face and I could tell that made her really happy. Turns out she was from Bahrain and was going to Chicago to attend a convention for architects. (Okay, who saw that coming? The Muslim woman is an architect? I could have guessed all year and not gotten that one.) She had lived in the US for two years in college at, of all places, Mississippi State University. She said her impression of the US had been informed by “Friends” and “LA Law” and she was really surprised when she went to rural Mississippi. She confessed that the first time she flew into the US when she landed in Atlanta she thought she’d be able to see the Statue of Liberty from the plane. I chuckled at that.

Then she turned toward me and said, “Don’t tell me, I want to guess what you do for a living.” “Okay,” I said, “but be prepared to be wrong.”

She said, “You are either a professor or a journalist.”

“Wow,” I said, “those are really good guesses. I studied Journalism in college and I taught as an adjunct professor for about 10 years, so you aren’t far off.”

“Then you must just be a writer.” I told her I like to think of myself as a writer, but sadly the world doesn’t pay me for that. Then I went ahead and told her I was a Christian minister and told her a bit about what I do and where I live. I was fully prepared for “Christian minister” to end our conversation.

“Is that sort of like a missionary?” she asked.

“Yes, it is exactly like a missionary,” I said.

And now it was my turn to be surprised because she said, “I really like missionaries. The first ten years of my education I attended a Catholic school in Bahrain. They were great people, and I often think how blessed I am in life to have had contact with those missionaries.”

Our conversation went from there. Like every non-US person I encounter she asked a number of questions and made a number of comments about US foreign policy. Among the most poignant:

• Saddam was a truly bad man and I am glad the US took him out. I just wish you could have taken him out in a way that didn’t cause my cousin in Iraq to lose his eye and my family in Iraq to lose their homes.
• I have traveled in the mountains between Pakistan and Afghanistan and it is a wild place. I think the United States and other nations of the world need to be there.
• I don’t understand the health care debate in the United States. As a non-US citizen, it makes no sense to me that your country will spend trillions of dollars for aid to Africa and not figure out a way to insure your own poorest and most vulnerable people.
• What was that Sarah Palin thing all about?
• I wish your country would send more missionaries and fewer soldiers around the world.

I asked her if she felt judged by Americans she has encountered and she said that she has had some very ugly experiences in the United States with people saying very mean things to her, but that the Americans who have taken the time to get to know her find she is very different from the prejudices people have. I also asked her about how it is for her to get into the US, wondering if she has a hard time at customs. She said, “Homeland Security and I have become good friends, they add an element of adventure to every trip to the US I take.”

I said I was sorry for the Americans who judged her and that was their loss for not meeting an exceptional person. I told her how sad I was that some of those people were Christians and that as far as I can tell Jesus is about love and not hate, and I thought she appreciated hearing that.

As we approached Chicago the plane banked over Lake Michigan and she said, “Is that a lake? It’s bigger than the Persian Gulf!” The pilot come on the intercom and said the temperature was 8 degrees (about 46 fahrenheit) and she shivered and said she’d never seen snow. I told her about how much snow we got in Michigan and about snow days and she said, “The one day it rained last year it lasted for two hours and I stayed home to watch it” and I thought how very, very different our worlds and life experiences were. She stuck out her hand and said, “By the way, my name is Shaima” and when she was doing her customs form I saw that she had five names on her passport and one of them was Jasmin and one of them was Mohamed and again I thought about what different worlds we came from. And then in a moment of inspiration I said, “I don’t think you have to worry about being cold here, Shaima,” and she asked me why not and I said, “you’ve already got your head covered” and she laughed and laughed and I thought “I’ve still got it” and “I never, ever imagined a day would come in my life when I could make a Muslim woman laugh about her head cover." What a world we live in.