The Blessing of Delayed Flights

I’m up, packed, ready to head to the airport. I’m on an early flight from Dallas to New York City. I’m scheduled to appear at a huge concert sponsored by McDonalds. It’s a huge annual event I’ve done before so I know the potential impact. The flight was scheduled to leave Dallas at 8:00 A.M. and land at LaGuardia Airport around 12:30; enough time for sound check, a quick run to the hotel, change into my fancy concert pants, and prepare for the event. I arrived early for the flight — something that’s not the norm for your boy Kirk Franklin – and boarded the plane totally unaware of the lesson I was about to learn.

As we prepared to pull out from the gate, there was an obvious long delay but no announcement. We were left to assume that it must’ve been a minor problem. Until minutes turned into hours. Before you could even grip your mind around it we were stuck on a plane on the runway for three and a half hours.

Tempers started to fly, the toilet started to stink. And still no final word from the guy in charge; the pilot. I finally took matters into my own hands and called my guys who were already in the city. I asked them were they having a hurricane or a tsunami in New York because we were stuck on the runway and planes are stacked up behind us waiting to take off. He told me the weather was fine there and he didn’t know what the problem was. After a long period of frustration and confusion and leaning to our own understanding, the pilot finally came on the p.a. and informed us why we’d been stuck in a tight, stinky, frustrating situation with no communication with the one in charge. A terrible lighting storm between Dallas and New York hit hours before we were to take off. The air traffic control guys were scrambling to help get flights that were already in a holding pattern in the air, because of the earlier storm, safely on the ground.

In other words, we were delayed so we wouldn’t run into another plane already in our airspace.

Wow!

How many times have I shook my fist in anger because I hated being stuck on the ground while other ministries or businesses or lives were seeming to take off and fly high while I felt delayed and denied? When, in reality, God was protecting me from life’s winds?

In the great scheme of directing all of the destinations and dreams of billions of His creations on the planet, he knows what lives should take off when, and what lives are actually paving the way for other lives to come. Her knows they can’t crash into each other or overlap purposes and dreams so he’ll hold one back for a season to refuel and mature while he lands the other one safely to its destination. And while the other soul may feel left out or rejected, at the right time, the right season, the right idea or invention at the ordained moment, that soul will step into its destiny.
What was once anonymous is now necessary.

Amazing how the air traffic controller of our souls takes off and lands our lives like a symphony of many different instruments playing a melody that creates one voice.
Amazingly after I finally took off, I still landed on time to do the concert…
I was protected from a crash in route to my destination, and still made it on time because someone with a higher seat than mine could see what I couldn’t.

Though I was delayed, I wasn’t denied.

It was a dope concert too!

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