Delayed

by Gene Shelburne

During his brief tenure as interim CEO for our local Baptist Hospital, Jerry Blume endeared himself to many of us. At the last prayer breakfast before he completed his work at the hospital, Jerry’s simple testimony touched our hearts.

Most weekends he commuted from his Nebraska home, Jerry explained, so he was used to spending many hours in the air. But the flight back to Amarillo that final weekend turned into a nightmare.

Days of heavy weather on both coasts had backed up air traffic nationwide and played havoc with connecting flight schedules in major hubs like DFW. Expecting to arrive in Amarillo shortly after breakfast on Monday, Jerry was stranded in Dallas all day.

At first he expected the delay to be just an hour or so at most, so he called his secretary to shuffle various morning obligations. Of course that first call had to be repeated. Several times.

As the clock ticked past re-set deadlines, Jerry stewed about missed or cancelled meetings. Important meetings, some of them, that had to do with final arrangements for merging our city’s two Christian hospitals. Meetings that would be hard to reschedule since this was to be Jerry’s last week in our city.

And it wasn’t just his critical agenda for that Monday that pressured Jerry. In a few days he would step into a similar interim leadership role in a hospital halfway across the continent. Multiple preparations for that migration required his attention. This was not a day he could afford to lose.

Several times during the 8-hour delay, Jerry observed a quiet young woman, obviously waiting for the same flight he was. Jerry said he couldn’t keep from noticing the difference in her demeanor and his. Instead of pacing and fuming, she sat reading, with a winsome serenity he envied.

Hours later when they finally deplaned in Amarillo, Jerry watched as this young mother was greeted by a smiling little fellow 3 or 4 years old. “Mama,” he said in a big voice as she knelt to hug him, “God made your plane come down O.K.!”

Humbled by this lady’s poise and by her little boy’s faith, Jerry reminded us of the lesson he learned that day: “God always makes us come down O.K.”