'Yeah, we'll fly to the east, we'll fly to the west'

The last time I was on a plane before my trip to NYC last week was in 2017. I had a business trip to Miami, Fla. on a freelance assignment for a magazine covering the commercial printing industry.

The thing that made it such an interesting trip is there was suddenly a hurricane threatening to make a direct hit and all flights were cancelled.  As a result, I got a last-minute room at a hotel in South Beach that had a great view of the ocean!

The room had a microwave and I was able to buy a NY-style pizza nearby in the early-afternoon hours leading up to the storm's expected arrival at night, which never happened thank goodness.

In the evening, looking out the windows at the stormy sea, at the same time glued to the TV to see the latest storm-tracking, I had the peaceful thought of, "I can't think of a better way to weather a storm."

Miami has always been what I've named as my sentimental "favorite place on earth." It's where some of my earliest memories go back from when my dad took us there as little kids for our summer vacations.

It's also where we first left the U.S. to become missionaries, first in Costa Rica and then on the edge of the Amazon jungles in Shell, Ecuador. My dad actually left his convertible Cadillac with a missionary family just outside of Miami and came back to find they didn't protect it from sea salt, etc., and it was showing signs of rusting.

Writing yesterday about my niece kissing the Wall Street Bull, I was reminded of how, at age 8, I actually kissed the linoleum floor at the Miami Airport right after we landed coming back from being missionaries in 1973. I remember being so thrilled to be back in the U.S. To this day, I can't imagine where I ever got the idea to kiss the floor in gratitude.

So, at some point after I was up in the air out of Columbus, Ohio on the morning of October 20, looking down on the hills of Pennsylvania (where I once lived as a bureau chief for the Elmira Star-Gazette) from a beautiful blue sky with fluffy white clouds, I thought of this old love song from the early '70s by Lighthouse, called "One Fine Morning," and how it made me think of our future as Believers:

The lyrics include, "And on that mornin' when I wake up

I'll see your face inside a cloud
See your smile inside a window
Hear your voice inside a crowd
Calling, "Come with me baby and we'll fly"

Yeah, we'll fly to the east, we'll fly to the west
There'll be no place we can't call our own
Yeah, we'll fly to the north, we'll fly to the south
Every planet will become our home

Yeah, we'll fly-y-y, yeah, we'll fly"