It was August 2009. My husband had been asked to give the address at his Christian Science Students Association in Chicago, which I have also been visiting each year. It was the first time a speaker would be addressing the association since the teacher’s passing that summer.
Our flight was to leave New York City at noon on Friday, and the association meeting started at 9:00 a.m. on Saturday. Our plane left the gate on time, but then sat on the runway for three hours, third in a line of 60 planes, due to a large band of severe storms and tornadoes creating an impassable wall between New York and Chicago. The pilot explained that no flights could leave the East Coast, as all routes heading west were closed from Boston all the way down to Washington, DC. He explained that he couldn’t take us south and then north because the airways were already jammed with planes trying to get around the weather. He offered to keep our plane third in line, and wait out the storm, but warned that it could be several more hours on top of the three we had already waited. He also explained that if even one person wanted to go back to the terminal, he was required to take the plane out of line, return to the gate, and then re-enter the line of planes—but at the end of the line! Sure enough, one person wanted to go back.
The Christian Science practitioner I had called to pray with us about this (I was keeping her updated step by step) said that all the metaphysical work we were doing was only going to bless the association day even more; and also that the significance and importance of this meeting would bring us to where we needed to be.
