Blessed Are the Border Control Agents I Belittled in Montreal

Blessed are the weak, the powerless, the outcast, the demoted—for theirs is the kingdom of God.

This is the “backwards” gospel, the upside-down nature of God’s Kingdom that I love so much. The times in my life when everything has fallen apart and I’ve been hopelessly disillusioned, this is the only truth that saves me. Our weakness is God’s strength.

When we are vulnerable, we are most likely to have eyes to see and ears to hear what the Spirit is saying to the church and to the world around us.

Barbara Brown Taylor says that these thorns in our flesh are “how God defends us from . . .stainless steel Christians who want to cleans the church of problematic people.”

My weakness is temper tantrums. When things don’t go my way, I turn into an adult-sized toddler. I was in Montreal on my way back from vacation earlier this week. I was happy, relaxed, content—I had just been on vacation! They made us de-plane in order to go through border control (which we then had to repeat in Toronto), but didn’t give us tickets for the next flight. It was the same flight . . . even though we had a 2-hour pit stop and plane change in Montreal.

The border control agent asked me for my plane ticket and I gave it to her and she said, “No, the one to Toronto.” And I said, “This is all they gave me. I also have the one from Toronto to—”

But she’d already sent me back to another desk to “print the ticket again.” I start walking back, annoyed and self-righteous, and then I saw my husband who was already through. We had the same tickets, you see, just different border agents. And mine, apparently, didn’t know how to do her job.

I made a scene. “What? You got through?” I said, not quietly. Then I stomped back to the desk I was sent to and that agent was nonplussed.

“You don’t need another ticket,” she said.

“I know that,” I explained, sass in my heart, “but they don’t.”

We stomped back across the border control area to the original agent, who blamed it all on me: “You showed me the wrong ticket,” she tisked at me.

“I had them both on the counter!” I said, incensed. I was not quiet. I was not polite. My heart was pounding and I hated this woman for being so unhelpful.

There was, you may have noticed by now, literally nothing at stake here. She was doing her job. We had mis-communicated. I had to walk a grand total of an extra forty steps and used maybe five minutes of a two-hour layover I had no plans for.

And I was having a tantrum.

My poor parents have dealt with this my whole life, and they can attest to the stupidity and frequency of these outbursts. I bet they thought I’d “out-grow” them or maybe that God would hurry up and sanctify me out of this horribly embarrassing personality trait. I’m 29 and this has not yet happened.

Instead God uses me. Like Paul, I am an embarrassment to the gospel—loud, angry, and entitled. And God chose me and gifted me for ministry in his body.

Backwards. Upside down. Kind of stupid, frankly.

When a Christian’s faith makes a little too much sense, when it keeps her safe, or keeps him in power, or protects anyone from embarrassment—how can we trust that? That is not the faith we see in the Bible—the faith of an aged man certain he will have millions of descendants or the faith of a family building an enormous boat for no apparent reason. The faith of Paul, who died boasting of the power of Christ in his weak and ridiculous body.

Blessed, instead, are those confronted with the ways they aren’t in control. Blessed are the people who accept their weakness and learn to rejoice in it, that God’s mercy might be better known.

But once you get your statue on a cathedral doorway,
you get to look pretty cool.