His name is Gerardo. A tired older man cleaning table tops with lines of sorrow etched into his face.

Our first morning in America on this trip and we had been asleep for a mere four hours (from 02:20 in the morning!). We had been awake for 30 hours the day before as we left Dublin—finally, after a two-hour stint inside a small plane sitting on the runway, unable to leave “because of thick fog in London”, our transfer airport—but too late to make our connection.

We joined about 300 stranded travellers milling about in the chaos that was the “Connections” area of Heathrow’s Terminal 5. People were angry, in tears or just plainly overwhelmed all around us as we rubbed shoulders for a couple of hours in the queues pressing forward to find alternative flights out of England.

It was at last our turn and we smiled and greeted the stern looking woman behind the desk. She tried to initially steer us to another airline, but I smiled and stood my ground saying that BA was in charge of our booking. She sighed and took our passports as colleagues getting buzzing about her, vying for use of her monitor and keyboard.

She was soon on the phone and at the same time looking for flight options for us on the overworked airline computer system. My wife and I began to give thanks quietly for the LORD’s promises for this trip (“Behold, I send an Angel before thee, to keep thee in the way, and to bring thee into the place which I have prepared.” - Ex. xxiii ‭20‬).‬ With a car waiting for us in Miami, and two lodging bookings ahead of us—all would be lost if we did not arrive in Florida that same day—we began looking for our angel in this point of our need for a miracle. All the flights out that day were seemingly gone.

Right after we had given thanks in faith that the angel would appear, the woman brightened up and said, “I have something!” Soon she found “nice seats”, she said, for us on that flight leaving within a couple of hours and with BA on a massive A380 plane (above) without having to change terminal to another airline (as had been our original itinerary). She then gave us some meal vouchers and I asked her when she had last eaten. She said she had eaten a little chocolate some time ago. Soon we were joking with her and a colleague, laughing with them and then left her with mouth wide open as we plonked down a large Toblerone bar of white chocolate we had bought for the air hostesses.

Our angel had been busy, and now, after our nine-hour flight to Miami in wide spacious seating, two-hour processing in a US entry immigration queue, then finding our luggage never made it out of London, and finally, a three-hour drive across Alligator Alley in southern Florida and a short rest, we were looking at a dingy room with cheap breakfast items, as the TV droned on with depressing news about US politics, gun attacks and serious weather coming our way.

And then there was Gerardo. I greeted him brightly and he looked at me blankly with those empty-looking eyes and without comprehension. I switched to Spanish and he replied to my “How are you?” with “Struggling”. I cracked a joke and he smiled. After breakfast I asked him some questions and soon he was giving us a family history and talking effusively. We shared Jesus with him a little and he seemed to ‘connect’ to a dim spiritual past and he responded with thanksgiving and blessing as we ministered to him in a practical way and blessed him in Jesus’ Name.

We hope that we might have been angels for him that day.