Scripture: 2 Corinthians 4:16-5:1
“Therefore we do not give up. Even though our outer person is being destroyed, our inner person is being renewed day by day. For our momentary light affliction is producing for us an absolutely incomparable eternal weight of glory. So we do not focus on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. For we know that if our earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal dwelling in the heavens, not made with hands.”
I am sitting on a plane waiting to take off from Reagan Washington National Airport. I have been sitting for a while. Long enough for me to finish the book I’m reading (Where’d You Go, Bernadette), and begin another (This is my Body). Long enough for me to take a nap (I’ve been up since 3 in the morning). Long enough for the sun to rise and color the sky a blue I feel I haven’t seen since at least October.
“Folks,” the pilot says. “We’re going to be a bit longer.”
He tells us we’re something like 250th in line to take off.
“This is so DC,” I mumble, opening up Cameron’s book. “For Callie,” she wrote on the inside cover. “Who shines.”
Finally the plane begins to move, lining itself up with the Potomac River, the Kennedy Center, Georgetown, the National Cathedral. I close the book so I can watch. I’ll wax poetic about the Chicago skyline until the el stops running, but truthfully, there is nothing as impressive as flying in and out of Reagan.
It is also painful. The plane rises and I see the Jefferson Memorial, where Hadley, who’d just figured out how to run, spent a humid July morning doing just that while I waddled along behind her, pregnant with Harper. Jesse and I were still in the phase of believing we’d be able to make a life for ourselves in this town. We were months away from the housing market crashing; our condo’s worth sinking lower than the Titanic.
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