Eric Wollesen dropped his wife Jennifer, Wendy Jepsen, and myself (James) at the airport on Wednesday morning at 6 AM. Check-in, finding Brooke Gecsey (our accountant Debbie Turner’s daughter: actually Brooke found us!), our pass through security, and our first flight on Continental on a Boeing 737-800 to Houston Texas were all uneventful. We asked a barista at Starbucks in the SLC airport to snap our picture. [DENISE/FFEG: please add an instruction about where they can see the photo so you don’t have to email it to everyone].
We had a scheduled 4 hour wait in Houston before boarding our Lufthansa flight for Frankfurt, Germany. The Boeing 747-400 jet is one of the reason they coined the term “Jumbo-jet.” It seats over 300 people. There were no empty seats. We were in the very lowest class of service, at the back of economy section. I have never had a flight to Europe with so many children. All but one of their mothers had their heads covered, and I’m guessing they were Muslims from somewhere in the Middle East. For the most part, the children were well behaved. Brooke had a great window seat with lots of room. Although I confirmed aisle and window seats for Wendy and Jennifer, they wound up with non-reclining seats in the middle of a four-person center section, and just in front of the bathrooms. They listened to toilets flush the entire way to Germany!
I had an aisle seat eight rows from the back. I was seated next to one of the largest men I have ever seen. He wasn’t tall -- about 5’10” -- and he wasn’t fat. But he easily could have played line-backer on any college football team. His chest was wider than the seat so that his arms took about six extra inches on both sides. He had asked for an aisle, and got stuck between me and a woman in her 60’s from Sweden. We were all uncomfortable. I had to lean into the aisle to stay in my seat. For ten hours... Oye! Of course then I didn’t get to sleep on the plane...
But here is where it gets interesting: He is a petroleum engineer from Kazakhstan and specializes in “additional extraction methods.” I think this means that he specializes in getting even more oil and gas from otherwise exhausted wells. He had just finished an executive MBA at Texas A&M and was returning home. And he was a very talkative and inquisitive Muslim. I am the first pastor he has ever met and so we talked about God for almost an hour. He told me he was not a good Muslim, because he no longer prayed or kept Muslim customs. He asked a lot of questions! The focus of our conversation came down to this: We agreed Jesus was not God’s son conceived via a sexual union, for God doesn’t have a body. We agreed that one man could take the punishment for another man, but not for two or five. Since Jesus took the punishment for all people in the world, Jesus must be more than just a man, and so maybe there were other ways to understand him as God’s Son. He seemed satisfied with this logic, and so we talked about how one person can represent the character of another. Ambassadors do this. Sons represent their fathers in many Middle Easter countries. My fellow traveler was eager to agree that Jesus could represent as much of God as we humans could learn. It was as close as I could bring him to recognizing who Jesus is. He agreed that he needed to think more about Jesus.
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