dis. connected.

Travelers wait for their connecting train in Amsterdam's
Schiphol Airport station while a train rushes past behind them

My bro and I were talking about traveling on planes the other day. The paradox about plane travel is that it has now become so easy to travel anywhere you'd like, and yet one loses the sense of movement when you hop on a flight to the other side of the world. You step into this machine, sit uncomfortably for hours while it makes loud noises and shakes, and then you step back out of it - this time into a different airport, and for all you know you could have flown from Vancouver to Abbotsford - or from Vancouver to Amsterdam. Somehow intercontinental flight has made the world a much smaller place, but in the process of doing so has made it more dis-connected.

I am writing this from Stefan and Caroline's place in Frankfurt, in a living room with 12-foot ceilings and creaky floor boards. The Urbans came to Canada some three years ago and got plugged into our church during their six-month stay in Vancouver. The last time I saw them was two years ago. But as I stepped off the train from Amsterdam and into a big hug from Stefan, we picked up a friendship which hadn't been touched in two years. The three of us bantered the rest of the evening away, reminiscing about West Coast church life, catching up on details of life, discussing the current job market, and the German school system. Funny how one can leave something dormant for so long - and then on a random Thursday afternoon in an old apartment in a side street of Frankfurt, on the other side of the world where I was 24 hours ago...we can re-connect.