Catching up with a friend after 20 years at the conclusion of a 9 hour Seattle/Paris
flight is a lesson in humility. I am always pale and crumpled when I come out
of such flights, and tired enough to feel I am floating inside my own body… And
I have not got any younger, obviously, since the end of the last century, which
is the time I was a student with Pierre at the Faculté protestant de théologie
in Paris.
Pierre is a chaplain at the Charles de Gaulle airport and
he looks surprisingly like the Pierre I knew. Same bright smile, same slender
figure with long legs that now allow him to walk by lost souls and guide them
to their boarding gate and/or the shore of spiritual solace. We arranged our
meeting via Facebook messenger.
" You did not change at all!" he declared,
establishing in one sentence that he was both a tactful gentleman and a heck of
a liar.
We sat together for breakfast in the vast
cafeteria reserved for staff.
Pierre is fluent in English. Irvin explained his work
with the Presbyterian church (USA) where he supports Native churches in the country.
Pierre asked us if we knew about the Toba Indians.
Pierre spent a year in Argentina as a student and that’s
where he learned about this Native tribe. They discovered the Gospel through a
travelling missionary who shared his passion for Jesus with them.
The missionaries that came later expected to teach those
Natives everything they should know. Instead, they were welcomed with very
specific requests. “We are already organized in parishes but we need to learn more
about the Bible.”
“The Tobas are our missionaries. We learn about the
Gospel from them!” commented one of them, impressed by their faithfulness.
Pierre wrote his Master dissertation on the Tobas, and in
English! Irvin and I are looking forward to reading it.
Pierre is not on his own in this airport that covers 25
miles. An imam, a rabbi, a priest and several pastors team
up to look after the travelers and those who work there, sometimes walking
miles and miles so they can be where they can be supportive.
Knowing they are present every day in the midst of
stress, worry and possible dramas is comfort in itself.
