They call it the love flight. Several times every year a major airline’s Thursday morning flight from Hong Kong to Chicago is filled with thirty to fifty newly adopted babies and their American parents. The new parents are nervously exploring how to meet the needs of their helpless little ones. For fourteen hours and forty-five minutes they hold, rock, walk and care for their new babies – all the way from Hong Kong to Chicago.
As the proud new parents stroll the aisles of the Boeing 747 with their babies the other 400 passengers smile and tenderly touch the little ones. Everyone seems to be a little more patient, a little more caring on this flight.
Karen, my wife, and I were on the love flight several years ago. The parents spend two weeks in China to allow the babies to adjust to them. That means two weeks of strange food, in a strange place, taking on the greatest responsibility any human being will ever face – the life of a child. By the time they got on this plane to go home, the parents were exhausted and overwhelmed. They nodded off as the little ones squirmed in their arms. It was a night of giggles, burps, cries and more than a few strange smells.
It wasn’t hard to find a baby to hold, to talk to or a parent to help. We spent the whole night talking soothing words in Mandarin to the little ones, holding them and rocking them to sleep as we walked the aisles.
Our hearts burst with love for these precious little children who had no parents until a few days before. And our hearts went out to the stressed out, exhausted new parents.
As God looks at the people around us, I think that is what He sees. To Him we are little children, some rejected and abandoned, making noise and messes. Demanding. Inconvenient. Totally self-absorbed. Some are really messed up. Some smell. And God’s heart bursts for each one.
He longs for us to reach out our arms and embrace them, speak kind and gentle words to them, and to pick them up and carry them for a while.
As our hearts become like His, it isn’t hard to find someone to love. They are all around us.
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. This is how love is made complete among us….
We love because he first loved us.
1 John 4:16, 19
Is there someone in your life who is particularly unlovely today? Ask Jesus, “Jesus, how do you see (that person)?” Then ask Him, “Jesus what do you have for me to give him/her today?” Then do it!
Share your experience and encourage others! Thanks.
Photo credit: endbradley / Foter / CC BY
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