A few days ago, I was waiting for a flight in a shiny new wing of the Houston airport. I stopped to buy a banana, but there was no cashier, and my banana had no bar code. I stood in front of the scanner, wondering. A young woman came up, took the banana from me without a word, scanned it somehow, and handed it back to me without looking in my direction. Apparently, she worked there.
I asked whether many people take things without paying. “There are cameras,” she said, “and nobody knows that I’m here. When I see people stealing, I just ask them to check to be sure they’ve scanned everything.” I said something about that being hard for her. She was still looking straight ahead.
“Yea. I don’t let it bother me though. I’ve got hard things going on at home, so I don’t need to carry this.”
“Hard things at home?”
“Yea. I just got a diagnosis.” She paused, still not looking at me. “I tried to commit suicide a few days ago, but I have a little girl, and that’s enough to live for.”
“I’m so sorry.”
Then, for the first time, our eyes met, and now I can’t forget. Somehow, she came home with me. I hope with all my heart that, somehow, in some small way, I went home with her, too.
"There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematician that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one." G. K. Chesterton
“Jesus, weary from his journey. . . .” John 4:6