Jeff Adams

Sorry. Never bought into the fad. Never wore the bracelet. The question, though, is quite often valid.

Take the other day, for example. Cheryl and I are just settling into our seats having boarded our flight from Anchorage to Houston on the way home from our Alaskan adventure. When we travel together we agree to sit in aisle seats across from each other. We can both potty when necessary without having to inconvenience fellow travelers and neither has to sit in the dreaded middle seat. One of the advantages of having a lot of FF miles is that I and a companion of my choice can board early with the elite people (usually about half the frickin’ plane) and get a first shot at the overhead bins.

Our flight is jammed packed and the herds of weary, greedy, aggressive passengers have begun their charge down the aisle. Facing them, my mind flashes back to the thousands of salmon we saw swimming, jumping, slithering upstream in their mad race to spawn and die. I try to read, but think that the Grizzly Bear we saw could make his way down the aisle more gracefully than many of these humanoid travelers.

Suddenly, my head is driven to the left with synchronized pain. A backwhacker nails me with a force that smashes my glasses into my eye and temple, knocking them off and leaving my forehead with broken skin and a red knot. The nice and nerdy 14-year-old in the middle seat even looks up momentarily from his video game to say, “Geeze, mister, you OK?”  Don’t know about you, but any blow hard enough to distract a 14-year-old from a video game is pretty serious stuff.

I know this must sound cheesy, but do you ever think, “What would Jesus do?” I mean, really! I know he had to deal with the Pharisees and that wouldn’t have been pleasant, but Jesus never had to travel on an overbooked 737. If he had, I’m pretty sure he would have jumped right over the present age and gone straight to the Great White Throne Judgment.

I sit nursing my wound, alternating between feeling severely irritated and sorry for myself. I know, you’re shocked that the man of God would not automatically say, “Father, forgive these morons, for they know not whom they whack.”

Not so! The man of God IS irritated and IS feeling sorry for himself. Oh the thoughts that come to mind! What would Jesus do indeed! Satan himself is breathing his fiery dragon breath in my ear.

“If thou truly be the servant of God, then command him to move you to first class.”

Come on! You have those weird thoughts sometimes, don’t you?

Wait! There’s more. As I try to adjust my attitude, another drama unfolds across the aisle. Cheryl, unaware of my trial of faith, sits contentedly reading her historical novel as a 50-something graying blond swaggers toward her with a defiant look in her eye. OK, maybe she was 40-something and just didn’t do her makeup that day. Or, maybe she had just spent too many years in the Roller Derby. Whatever, she reached directly above Cheryl, removed Cheryl’s backpack and headed down the aisle to deposit it in a bin or two behind her. This broad was not even sitting in the aisle with Cheryl, but two rows ahead of her.

I see Cheryl lift her head in disbelief. She can’t believe what is happening. My normally cheerful and pleasant wife begins to sputter,

Excuse me, Ma’am. Ma’am, excuse me! That’s my bag.

Not to be detoured, the blond pauses in her mission no more than a mother Grizzly separated from her cubs. Without a word she then lifts up her roll-on and hoists it with a flourish into the bin above Cheryl’s head.

“Ma’am, excuse me, that was my bag that I put there and that you have now moved.”

Finishing her bin invasion, the blond stops, glares and growls,

“I know. I moved it back there because I need to  put my bag here. You got a problem with that?”

I sit paralyzed with amazement in my aisle seat. What would Jesus do?

To start with, I know that Jesus would have been in an aisle seat like mine. Not even Jesus would want that middle seat.

Would Jesus punch a woman? Would Jesus cuss a woman? Would Jesus begin to pull out hunks of dirty blond hair? I’m running down my check list of options.

Had she been a man, I probably wouldn’t have been asking what Jesus would have done. I probably would have finally found something useful to do with over 20 years of martial arts. I probably would be having a discussion with a room of air marshals trying to explain what I had just done.

Had she been a man, I would have chosen from those options. But, then again, she wasn’t a lady.

My poor mind was trying to process all this information in an eternity of mili-seconds when God sent an angel to intervene before I did or said something stupid. This angel miraculously appeared from the midst of the carbon 14 units crowded in the aisle, gently took the blond’s roll-on and turned it from its horizontal position, inserting it once again wheels in first. Voilà! The roll-on now occupied only half the previous space freeing up just enough room for a — backpack!

Grudgingly, the blond looked at Cheryl and said,

“Well, you want me to move your bag back here? I think there’s room now.”

Cheryl - “Yes, I would prefer that. Thank you.”

This all happened so fast. I looked across the aisle at Cheryl. We stared at each other, mouths open, eyes wide in amazement. What had just happened?

So now I’m really thinking – I’m serious about this – what would Jesus do? Funny how we seem to pick scriptures out of context in moments like that to justify just about anything. For example, I’m thinking Jesus might,

• Grab that Klondike souvenir bull whip and being to run all the Bullwinkle look-a-likes out of the aisle as he proclaims in a thunderous voice, “You have taken my father’s plane and made it into a den of obnoxious, rude and ugly people.
• In a more loving moment, he might have said, “If any woman moves your backpack, let them move it one bin and then even go the extra bin. But by all means draw the line at three!”

The backpack was eventually moved back to the proper bin, but even then I fought the urge to say something, to put her in her place, to let her know she can’t get away with stuff like that. Or, maybe I should just do as Jesus did with the woman caught in adultery and say, “Go, and bin no more.”

Seriously, I struggle with these things. If my faith doesn’t work in a stuffy, stinky oversold 737, then I don’t want anything to do with it. I mean that. It’s easy to sit in the sanctity of the sanctuary and theorize about what would Jesus do in all the great issues of life. But it’s usually the little stuff that brings out the reality of our faith – or not.

And, even when our faith is genuine, it’s always God’s grace that ultimately comes through and saves the day. It’s God’s grace that uses the momentary short-circuiting of my brain cells responding to the surreal circumstances around me to overcome my natural temptations and inclinations to protect me from doing or saying something stupid that would discredit the holy name.  Wow! Did you catch all that last sentence?

If we are really going to grow, it will show in the little stuff of our daily lives. As Solomon said, it’s the little foxes that spoil the vines.

What would Jesus do?