Airports bring out the worst in me...

I wrote this blog on the plane to South Africa on December 12:

Yesterday I preached on the lectionary passage for the day. The passage of scripture which I was preaching from was John 1:6-8, 19-28. The main question that I asked in the sermon was, “What kind of a savior are you witnessing to?” Little did I know yesterday that today I would utterly fail at witnessing to a savior. In fact, there was probably little to no resemblance of the savior that John witnessed to, the savior seen in Isaiah 61:1-2 and following. Today I am flying down to South Africa to spend a couple of weeks with family. I’ve been looking forward to this day for quite sometime. In a sense, there’s a real advent them to that.

I arrived at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi, Kenya at around 1:30 today. It’s not a foreign place to me. I flew out of that airport on my way home to Malawi upwards of 12 times during my stay at boarding school in Kenya for my high school years. If there is any place where western culture and Kenyan culture clash, it’s at that airport. In the west, we want things done right away. Time is key not the event at hand. Kenya’s a culture where time is not considered higher than the event going on. This was extremely evident the first night I arrived back in Kenya back on September 6. The visa counter workers were having fat chats, texting and calling friends, all whilst hundreds of passengers queued in their lines waiting to get their passports stamped so they could get into Kenya.

Once again, things were taking a good amount of time today at the airport. I approached the ticket counter and turned over my passport. The desk attendant asked if she could see my health card. I passed it to her. She told me, “Isn’t there a way you can fabricate the date for your yellow fever vaccine?” On my health card, next to the vaccination I had 10 years ago for combating yellow fever, stood the date December 5, 2001. I’d noticed this long before arriving at the airport today. However, I’d seen in the fine print below this yellow fever vaccination that the ten years start ten days after you receive the vaccination.

After saying I’d rather not fabricate the date of my vaccination she called over her supervisor. This supervisor then began to tell me that they look at the date of the vaccination, and that this is the date that matters, not the ten days afterwards like my health card officially stated. I tried to comprehend why, but when I was given the notorious, “that’s just the way it is” statement, I felt the animosity growing within me towards this lady. My voice got a little louder, my face most likely a little more crimson, and my body language a little more stiff. Finally she did let me go through. It was in those moments that I was failing to witness to the Jesus that John was witnessing to. John was witnessing to a Messiah who would handle situations with love, albeit with righteous love at times. In those moments this afternoon, I was not pointing to any kind of love! Sometimes you have to practice what you preach eh?