The Best and Worst of ourselves

I don't mean to brag but i have just had the holiday of a lifetime. No it wasn't at a doctor who convention, although that would be amazing. After always thinking it was out of my league, a dream became reality and my family and I were stood in front of the Disney palace in Florida looking in awe. Ok I will stop bragging now.
The slight blip on the whole experience was our journey home. Just as we were a few hours away from landing, someone unfortunately took ill, so we turned round and landed at a little airport in a town in Canada called Gander. Unsurprisingly people were a bit frustrated and with most people having a lack of sleep tensions were higher than normal. I don't know what you are like when you are tired, but i struggle to cope with normality. I think there were around 550 others on that plane who had the same issue with tiredness. All this meant the atmosphere in the airport, getting off the plane meant there was a lot of pushing and shoving with people just in it for themselves, as long as they were ok, it didn't matter about how other people were feeling or what was the right thing to do. I managed to just sit back and watch rather than getting agitated and was amazed at how people swung from being nice human beings to everyman for themselves. Even after a couple of hours sleep at a hotel while waiting for food you saw some people pushing themselves to the front.
Then as we were sat in the airport the tide started to turn, there was a sense of community, a sense of everyone in it together, Not that i was there but it was what my grandparents used to talk about when they talked about the war. Community, you know what when people come together to serve each other rather than fight each other, when we put others first rather than ourselves first, there is something beautiful, some would even say you can sense the love of God.
I am sure when the stories of the early disciples in Acts get together they didn't always feel like it and the reality was probably they struggled in community as a lot of people do. Yet we look at what the power of community can bring: acceptance, love, joy and security. Is it no wonder that God loves it.

Richard Dawson