A Short Faith Story About Obedience and Grief
He wasn’t exactly intending to miss his flight. Nobody does that, right? Honestly, he’d been excited to see his plane arrive and the crowd piling out. When they called for boarding, he was going to be one of the first in line.
But a small, whispering voice in his heart said no.
That was all it said.
No.
Well, what the hell does that mean?
No.
He sat back down, placed his bag on the floor, and looked up.
“No, what?” he asked.
A stewardess came to him with a polite smile and asked if this was his flight. She asked if he was alright and if he was coming.
He shook his head to all of it, his attention turned inward. He wanted the whispering voice to come back.
Lord? Are you there? No, what?
Silence swelled around him as the flight continued to board and he missed his final chance to take his seat. Still, he sat. Intentional, and more than a little frustrated.
Lord? he asked again.
Look forward, came the voice at last.
He opened his eyes, lowering his gaze from the ceiling.
People moved in pockets of bustling bodies, with stragglers trailing behind each dense group. Some dodged through the current in the opposite direction. They were like leaves caught in the wrong part of the wind.
Then he saw her.
Her long, auburn hair was woven into a thick braid that swayed as she walked, her eyes flicking down to the ticket in her hand every few steps. She didn’t see him when her focus narrowed on the gate number displayed above his head.
Her, Lord? he asked.
Yes.
What about her?
Silence.
He exhaled and closed his eyes for a moment, trying to steady himself. His faith was old, but hearing and obeying like this was still new. This was only the third, maybe the fourth, time God had spoken to him so clearly in his life.
When he looked again, she had taken a seat across from him, her attention fixed on her phone.
The red rims of her eyes told him she had been crying.
Her jaw was set, teeth clenched, as if she were holding her emotions in place now that she was in public.
He watched as the crowd swelled again for the next flight. Wheels hummed over tile. A couple laughed too loudly nearby. She startled at the sound, and something in his chest tightened.
You have been delivered to her.
He almost laughed out loud, the kind of startled, disbelieving laugh that might have earned him a few strange looks. He stopped himself.
He had been praying to be used, hadn’t he?
He stood before he could talk himself out of it.
“Ah, excuse me, ma’am?” he said, already aware of how awkward he sounded.
She tensed, lifting her eyes without fully raising her head.
He tried for a warm smile. “I… um. You seem upset.”
Her eyes narrowed. “I’m fine.”
“Look, I don’t know entirely why I’m here,” he said, honest to a fault, “but I do know that God didn’t want you to be alone.”
That caught her. Her pale eyes widened, and for a moment she just opened and closed her mouth, searching for words.
He shrugged, gentle. “Want to talk about your woes with a stranger you’ll probably never see again? I hear it can help.”
She looked back down at her phone, and his heart sank. Then she let out a long, frustrated breath.
“It’s… really stupid,” she said.
“Stupid is fine,” he replied softly.
She took a breath. “My grandma passed away. And I have a lot of confusing feelings about it.”
“How so?”
Another breath. Longer this time.
With her eyes closed, she said, the words tumbling out in a rush, “I loved her like a mother. She raised me. But she wasn’t exactly kind. Not in the ways that mattered. I’m still healing from a lot of what she did. And now she’s gone, and I never got to finish healing, never got to forgive her properly, never got to go back and try again. And part of me feels relieved, and I hate myself for that. And I’m heartbroken. And I miss her. And I don’t understand any of it.”
He held her words carefully, like something fragile. He waited until she was done.
The confession seemed to empty her. Her shoulders slumped, and tears slipped free again.
“I feel like a horrible person,” she added quietly, “for not being able to mourn her the right way.”
He shook his head, gentle. “There isn’t a right way.”
She looked up at him then, searching his face.
“It sounds like you’re having a very human response to losing someone who both loved you and hurt you,” he said. “You’re not doing anything wrong by feeling relief that your abuser is gone, while also grieving the woman who raised you.”
She swallowed. “Then why does it feel so wrong?”
“Because,” he said slowly, feeling a warmth rise in his chest that was not entirely his own, “you didn’t get the ending you hoped for. You didn’t get to finish healing before she was gone. That kind of loss is lonely.”
He realized, somewhere in the middle of speaking, that he was no longer speaking alone.
“Two things can be true at once,” he continued. “You can love someone, and still carry wounds from them that you’re protecting while they heal.”
She didn’t answer right away. She just sat there, studying him, as if deciding whether to believe him. Then she nodded once, small and uncertain, and wiped her cheeks.
“I don’t think that makes it hurt less,” she said.
“No,” he agreed. “I don’t think it does.”
They sat with that.
Her flight number crackled over the intercom, threading through the noise of the terminal. She startled, then gave a short, humorless laugh. “That’s me.”
He stood with her. For a moment, it felt like there should be more. Some perfect sentence. Some prayer that tied everything into a bow. But his voice wouldn’t come. The Spirit, for once, held him still.
“Thank you,” she said instead. It wasn’t steady. But it was real.
“You’re welcome,” he said.
She picked up her bag and joined the slow river of people moving toward the gate, her braid disappearing into the crowd. He watched until he couldn’t tell her apart from anyone else.
Then he sat back down.
His phone buzzed with a notification, but he didn’t look at it.
“Was that it?” he asked quietly, to the empty space in front of him.
There was no answer. Just the low hum of the airport.
Just the sound of leaving.
He stayed a few more minutes anyway.
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