Take the time to stop and stare / Heaven’s beauty everywhere.

I flew over Chicago coming into O'Hare on the way to Cambodia a couple months ago, and it was really something else. We were in one of those small planes that makes the Harrisburg-Chicago type trip, the planes with one seat, then an aisle, then two seats. I had the one seat on the Chicago side of the plane, so suffice it to say I lucked out. The city seemed so precarious, right up against the water like that. It struck me how flat the city was and how white, being covered in snow and all. It looked like everything was totally under control, everything in order, everything quiet. But I'm sure you get a different impression from being in the thick of things. I thought about SimCity which lets you design a city and pretend you're in control of things, and I thought about what a daunting task that would be if it were real-life, to make sure the city maintained its peaceful image for those who fly overhead when coming into O'Hare, not to mention looking out for all of the millions who actually live there all the time, who need to work and eat and get around and do things with their families.

And so as the downtown Chicago skyline faded into the grey sky behind us and we descended upon O'Hare, the grids of blocks and buildings and highways and roads took on some character and the dots on the roads took shape, and you could see distinct colors and the cars were moving at various speeds and some were changing lanes, and it became a lot more believable to me that we were not flying over some virtual SimCity, but we were entering, if only for a very short time, into the lives of the people of Chicago. And if we took the time, we could talk to these people and realize that the black lady selling the coffee at the kiosk at the airport is worried about similar things as we are, and that the overweight businessman waiting for his connecting flight to Cincinnati wonders if his wife will be there when he gets back or if she will have left him for someone else, and the little girl putting quarters in the gumball machine is just happy to be alive in such an amazing and fascinating world.

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i don't normally tell you what to do, and you know that, but go to iTunes and check out the song breathing air again by the robbie seay band. i normally get sick of music pretty fast, and even my favorite cd's, like stuff by derek webb, i can only listen to maybe once a week. but when i came across this song late last summer, i was blown away. i don't want to talk it up too much in case it doesn't do for you what it did for me, but let me just say that for the month of september when i drove places, chances are i was listening to breathing air again and come ye sinners, tracks seven and eight on the album better days, back to back, over and over. i would literally play these two songs for entire drives to and from places all across the county. it is not even that the rest of the album is bad, because it is quite good, but these two songs were what i needed. one night i was driving home and i pulled over and left the cd player running and i got on the back hood of the car with my back to the window so i could feel the beat pulsing through me and i looked up at the stars, as i sometimes do. just before track 9 would begin, i'd hop down and reach in the driver's window and skip it back to the beginning of track 7. this went on until i felt that the people in the house across the street might call the cops, saying some crazy guy was parked outside, engaging in who-knows-what.

so listen to the song and buy the album. that is a rare all-out plug from the good folks at tjhoiland.com, which we all know consists of, well, me.