A Deeper Intimacy
www.margaretdmitchell.com
I worked as a flight attendant for 16 years. For ten of those years, I struggled to do it my way. I tried to fit into social groups, combat loneliness on layovers, and hold my breath and count to three in the face of difficult passengers. But as I entered into my eleventh year, God began to move mightily in my life.
I had been living on my native mainland of Maryland, based at the Baltimore Washington International Airport. And I had wanted to relocate. My heart was to move to Atlanta, but I surrendered my heart to God, asking Him to place me wherever He wanted me to go. He chose Kent Island, Maryland, a somewhat remote area that seemed a strange choice to me. He led me to buy a condo at a marina, which adjoined 1,600 acres of pastureland. When I moved in, I knew in my spirit that I would remain there for four years.
I soon realized that God had taken all my distractions away: My parents moved to North Carolina; my brother’s kids suddenly became occupied with their friends; my brother remarried and became occupied with his new wife. God suddenly transitioned all of us, and, as a result, I felt like I was drowning in loneliness. He set me up, and He used the very emptiness in my soul to catapult me into beseeching Him and depending upon Him alone.
Jesus wanted to be my husband (Is. 54:5). Nothing was to come before Him. He expected the faith of Abraham, and He wanted me to trust Him enough to step out of the closet of fear and into boldness. I found that as I did, He met me with His amazing grace and love, and He encouraged me to keep stepping. Through this process, He took me to a deeper level of intimacy with Him.
These were big steps for someone who hadn’t had a home church for 17 years. One of His first directives was, “Get in my word!” My Bible had been packed away for years as I traveled about. At this point, I had skimmed by as a carnal Christian, bound by fear most of my adult life. When I heard His words, it rocked my soul, and I couldn’t get to church fast enough. If God ever raised His voice, He did that day.
One Sunday after church, I prepared to make a grilled cheese sandwich. As I placed the sandwich on the countertop grill, I accidentally bumped the grill, which slid back against the wall. As it hit the wall, the grill top fell upon my hands. Naturally, the pain was intense. I yanked my hands out from under the grill top and immediately under cold running water. After a moment, I patted my hands dry and looked down upon them. What I saw sickened me: grill lines of liquid skin. What’s more, all of the intense pain I had felt immediately departed. I blinked my tear-filled eyes repeatedly as I stared at my hands because what I saw wasn’t congruent with what I felt. As I stood alone in my kitchen, divine peace came over me, and I could hear God’s voice speak, “I don’t want you to hurt anymore.” God’s words touched my heart so deeply that I dropped to my knees and wailed. In that moment, I came to know in my soul how much God loved me, how important I was to Him.
One by one, God began to reveal His assignments to me. I had been a freelance journalist for a number of years in the secular marketplace. Now, God expected me to include Him in my stories, even the ones I wrote for my airline’s newsletter. Then, He led me to start up my own newsletter, which was an outreach and activities newsletter to new flight attendants based in Baltimore. All of this meant that everyone I worked with would know that I was Christian. Bound with fear of man, I stepped out and wrote the stories as God instructed. He met me in this process and delivered me from the bondage as I obeyed. What’s more, no one persecuted me, and my airline paid to print several hundred copies of the newsletter each quarter.
Soon after, the Holy Spirit revealed to me that He wanted me to begin to move in the gift of healing. “You’ve got to be kidding!” I thought. “You want me to pray for people out loud, in front of everybody?!” I knew enough about obedience to know that I had to do what God instructed. So I purchased books on healing. As I read them, God revealed to me that He wanted me to start with my neighbor, who had been struggling with Parkinson’s disease. I watched my neighbor weep as I prayed for his restoration. This touched my heart and encouraged me to move to the next step: praying for people I didn’t know, such as passengers and crewmembers in airplanes and airports.
God actually had me down in the aisles of airplanes at 35,000 feet, praying for people in need. I recall one man who asked me for a bag of ice to put on his knee. I smiled, returned to the galley, filled a plastic bag with ice, and tied a knot in it. Then I lifted it up to God and prayed over it, asking for His mighty anointing to heal the man’s knee. I walked out, handed the man the makeshift ice pack and continued to serve the other first class passengers. Then I approached the man again and inquired about his knee. He said that it felt better but that it still hurt. He shared that the pain was a result of an old tennis injury and that he was out of pain medicine. I don’t like to see people in pain, and I knew the Holy Spirit was prompting me to pray for this man, so I asked him if I might do so. He agreed, confessing that he was a non-practicing Methodist. I knelt down in the aisle before everyone and touched his knee and prayed. Instantly, the man’s pain departed, and he was so relieved and excited at what God had done that he wrote a complimentary note and sent it to the airline. This encouraged me to keep praying for passengers. I realized that when all we have is God, that’s all we need. This is one of many lessons God taught me as I stepped out and prayed in my workplace.
Then came 9/11. As God would have it, I had one vacation day that my airline assigned to me. It was September 11, 2001. For months prior to this date, I tried to move this vacation day to add it to a string of other vacation days. When my attempts failed, I tried to swap it with co-workers. This attempt failed too. So when I began my two-day trip on September 10, 2001, I was forced to split off the trip that evening and drive home because my airline’s policy did not permit me to fly on a vacation day. On the morning of September 11, I decided to drive to a furniture store, which was about an hour and a half away. On route, my cell phone rang from concerned friends and family, informing me of the terrible tragedy. When I arrived at the furniture store, the salespeople stood frozen in front of the television sets, watching the horror. On my way home, I prayed. When I walked into my condo, I sat down, and I felt the manifest presence of the Holy Spirit wash over me, beginning down at my toes and up over my head. With this, I felt sorrow and despair depart in an instant. And then I heard God tell me that He was lifting me up above the pit so that He could use me to help those in need. I never felt stronger or more equipped in my life. I felt like a runner in the starting blocks, a racehorse at the gate, a soldier full of courage. Days after the airports reopened, God sent me out to pray for people, especially crewmembers. Within two months, my Baltimore crew base closed, and I transferred to Philadelphia. At this point, I understood better why God chose KentIsland as a residence for me. It was closer to Philly than my previous residence, and there was a direct route to get there, which saved me considerably in tolls, gas, and time. So for my next 29 months of flying, I would commute an hour and a half each way to work and pray for the hurting.
God had me document these divine appointments in a book entitled, 100 Passengers. I was totally dependant upon Him for each healing, each story, each chapter. He taught me patience, submission, and obedience as a writer. As I moved forward in His precepts, He increased His presence of love within me, and it became easy to pour out His love to others. The more He dispensed in me, the more I wanted, and the deeper my intimacy with Him grew. He turned my loneliness into longing for more of Him as I spent hours and days alone with Him, both at the condo on the island and in hotel rooms on layovers. There was no place I would have rather been.
Right before my four years on the island was up, God brought my husband, just has He had promised, twenty years earlier during a visitation. It was bittersweet because I knew that my heart would be shared with two. It happened that my new husband lived in Atlanta, the very place that my heart longed to be four years earlier, before I laid this desire on the altar. Four years to the month, I sold the condo and moved to Atlanta to be with my husband. God even gave me the sale price in a vision, which was substantially higher than any condo model like mine had ever sold for within the development. The sale price was so high that I was tempted to think that any realtor might view it as unrealistic. Within three days of placing the condo on the market, I received three contracts. The realtor hadn’t even posted the sale sign on the property. God completed this quick work. And it all happened in His time, His way. I moved off KentIsland a more sanctified woman, sold out to God, and excited about my new journey.
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