My husband and I decide to visit the Caribbean. Our journey begins with a flight to Florida via Baltimore which is the airline’s most efficient way to move people around the country. The four hours in the air, the 4-hour layover, and the additional three hours in the air don’t matter near as much as filling a plane. And who doesn’t mind extra hours in a cramped airplane seat, right?

Our final destination is a Florida airport. We are not prepared for the crowds there. We overhear an employee complain to another about the record number of cruise ships in the surrounding ports. Thousands of passengers disembarking from last week’s cruises join thousands more landing at the airport to board the ships. Compounding the problem further are TSA employees, embroiled in negotiations with upper management, who decide to skip work this morning resulting in massive mayhem. And here we are, in the middle of it all. We have impeccable timing.

Lines splay out everywhere, beginning at the entrance where people press in from a line outside that stretches farther than we can see. We stand in the check-in line, baggage line, and, of course, the security line. It’s the longest line and offers the greatest opportunities to be gracious or awful. We view both. We watch a fellow give his place to a tired mom with several kids. And the entire airport hears a woman who loses it when a fellow cuts through in front of her to get to another line. She explodes in a voice so loud that heads turn and mouths silence to hear her raving rant which escalates until an airport employee steps in to invite her to either calm down or leave. She goes angrily silent.

It is the best of lines, and the worst of lines.

In the security line I explain I have metal joints. I get wanded anyway, then patted down. Airport intimacy in the other lines can’t hold a candle to that moment.

Then the fellow at the bag x-ray motions me aside to ask if I have anything in my carry-on I want to talk to him about. My diary is in there, but I’d rather not discuss that, so I say a cautious, “I don’t think so?” He opens the bag, stirs the contents, then tells me my electrolyte drink mixes showed up on the x-ray. After a stunned moment I throw them out.

You meet all kinds of people when you shuffle in lines that snake back and forth in an endless trek. You start to recognize faces as you keep passing them by: the excitedly noisy family, the businesswoman anxiously checking her watch, the ski guy hauling ski gear, the elderly couple that looks lost. Oh, wait, that’s us.

The tediousness of our shuffle and halt, shuffle and halt progress is further impacted by the luggage trundling along behind us. Everyone has at least one piece of luggage tagging along through the maze, a constant companion that requires hauling, lifting, and guarding — a collection we drag everywhere we go, even to the restroom, a container filled with supposedly essential, important-to-us stuff.

I comment to my husband that entering heaven might be like this — endless lines of people zigzagging in every direction pulling luggage behind them — and that perhaps our final destination will be based on how we handle that last leg of the journey. He laughs, then says, “I bet the first thing we’ll hear is, ‘Drop the luggage. You won’t need it anymore. That’s been taken care of for you.'”

Profound wisdom right there in the middle of mayhem.

I don’t know how many more flights I’ll take in my life. I hope they’ll be nothing like that day. But even in the midst of chaos I come away with a changed vision of priorities: Drop the luggage. Give space and grace to others. Be kind to people in distress. And realize that when we fly away, something flies away with us. We return, changed a bit.

Perhaps that’s reason enough to go.