Having worked in aviation for well over two decades, I’ve been around aircraft hangars for so long that I don’t really appreciate how huge they are. They were always just everyday items that I didn’t really think much about – kind of like spoons, albeit really big spoons. Then, in Seattle visiting my son, we drove by the Boeing hangars. Holy cow! These things are so massive that although my eyes saw them and knew them as familiar objects, my mind could not wrap itself around the massive buildings. I looked into familiar looking doors, but rather than seeing eight-passenger Lear jets, I saw village-capacity 777s. I couldn’t process what I was seeing. They were just too big.

Kind of like realizing that people who don’t have to, love you anyway.

When my father told me that he wanted my son home for Christmas and that he would buy the ticket, I was way too excited to keep it to myself. I went to work glowing and told a couple of people what my father was doing. I told a couple of people.

Throughout the night, way more than a couple of people came up to me and said that they had heard that my son was going to be able to come home for Christmas, after all. I accepted their congratulations, but thought it was a little weird that so many people that I hadn’t told knew about it anyway. Well, then, one of them told me why so many of them knew.

It seems that one of them had decided to take up a collection to buy the ticket and that several others had already contributed or were planning to at payday.

Wow.

I found out about this over a week ago and it still stuns me. Like the hangar, my mind is struggling to process the information it has received. I really do love so many of those young people I work with. It was overwhelming to find out that they love me, as well. It’s just too big for my brain to process.

You know, love sneaks up on you sometimes. When I first showed up to work, I was nervous, knew no one and was resentful that my life was not going the way I wanted it to. I had bills to pay and this was how I was going to do it. I wasn’t looking for friends. I was just there to do a job. Days passed and I settled in to do the tasks before me as best I could. In my position as peer coach, I spoke directly with many of my coworkers, learning about them, how they came to be there, what they wanted out of the job and some of their aspirations. I heard stories of people out to earn a little Christmas cash, of people who (like me) had hit a hiccup in their careers, of people whose retirement funds were not lasting the way they needed, of people working their ways through school, and of people who don’t plan that far ahead. They lived one day at a time. I heard stories from people whose life experiences were similar to my own and from people whose lives I could not even imagine. I grew to admire and love many of them. They (like me and my beloved son) are not perfect, but I do love my work children and they love me back – warts and all.

Amazing. Humbling. And still bigger than my head can wrap itself around.