Another Lesson in Perspective

On the flight home from London to Chicago, I found myself sitting next to woman who is serving in the US Navy. She was coming home from Bahrain, where she worked as an information technology specialist, for a two week vacation with her family and friends in Philadelphia.

Since I had gone to college in Philly and had many happy memories of the place, we quickly struck up a conservation that continued, on and off, for most of the seven hours of the flight.

As we were leaving and saying our goodbyes, I happened to gripe a bit about the heat I was expecting to encounter in Joplin and how hard it had been to be separated from my fiance for most of the summer.

"Baby, 103 ain't nothing! It was 125 in Bahrain when I left---and it's going to get even hotter before the summer's over. And I feel your pain about being apart from your fiance, but I ain't seen my two babies or my man for over seven months. We'll have less than two weeks together and then I'm back to Bahrain for two more years. It's tough, but we'll get through it."

I never got the young lady's name, but I want to thank her again for her service and her sacrifice----and for the lesson in perspective.