There's a Cadaver in Seat 12A

The morning we returned from Mombasa area back to Nairobi I dropped into bed and didn’t get out for two days: high fever, chills and a bladder infection.  I don’t think Brooks has ever seen me stay in bed for one entire day, so you can imagine how sick I felt.

Really, by day two, I just wanted to die.

In fact, in the middle of the night I’m thinking, I better just go home.  This is bad.  But then, in my feverish mind, I began to imagine this scenario: I get on a plane for the 30-something hour journey home, and exactly half way over the Atlantic I die—I just don’t make it.  As I thought about going home and how bad I felt, I just ‘knew’ that this would be the most likely scenario.

I then found myself thinking, ‘That’s just plain unacceptable.  There is no way I could subject a plane full of people to deal with my cadaver for hours on end!!!!

“Don’t look over there at seat 12A; it’s a cadaver!”

“What?”

I mean, what would they do with that left-over human shell.  Put it in the bathroom?  “Please use only the bathrooms toward the middle of the plane; the one in the rear is permanently occupied.”  And everyone would know, “Occupied by that cadaver!”  They would be wondering what I would, "How'd they stuff it in there?"

They couldn’t lay my body down in first class.  “We paid good money for our seats.  I’m not traveling with a cadaver.”

In the pilot’s room?  I hope not.  They need to be able to concentrate on whatever-it-is they concentrate on!

So, due to the wayward imagination of my feverish mind I thought, "No way am I heading for home and subjecting passengers to all of that!” Uh-uh.

So, I just hung in.  And, with God’s help, your prayers, and some antibiotics, I got up on the third day, stumbled my way onto a plane to Burundi, then spent the next three days working in the Congo as my body recovered.

It seems that God still has a seat for me here on planet earth which I am happily occupying, glad that my body still has something to contribute!