Sunday morning at Dulles International Airport…4 hour lay-over until we board the plane for the “long leg” to Addis Ababa.

There is an “interfaith” chapel here in the airport concourse. It advertises Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and Islamic services. I stepped in on this Sunday morning at about 8:00 am. Except for the two sleeping airport employees in the front rows, I had the place to myself.

I said Morning Office under my breath so as not to wake them, and they were kind enough to keep their snoring to a minimum so as not to disturb me.

I was moved by multiple inputs today:

-the loneliness of a place of worship on a Sunday morning in a place as busy as this.

-my growing weariness (next to no sleep on the flight from San Fransico)

– relief from the previous 20 minutes of watching CNN report that -“nothing  is happening…LIVE!” on the concourse monitors.

– conviction as I read from the CDP today: “how many of us go through life with our spiritual eyes unseeing or fast closed?”

I thought of my fellow “worshipers” snoring away in front of me. Then I thought of my own sleepy eyes and how they are blind to the stories of these two men. My regular eyes see men who are misusing a place of contemplation, worship and mystery. But my spiritual eyes see two men who work hard in a world that demands ever more from them in every facet of their lives, and have found a place of quiet and relief…

…the only place in this noisy press of huanity. A place which was set aside to seek God.

God in my sleeping, God in my waking.