ABOARD UNITED FLIGHT 828 (RNS) I settled hesitantly into seat 15A on a United Airlines flight from Denver to Newark. It was the same seat I had occupied earlier on my flight west, and it had been scrunch time in the cramped quarters of an Airbus 319.

A mother and her 18-month-old daughter took the middle seat next to me. A frazzled woman took the aisle seat after much fussing over luggage.

I resigned myself to four hours of torment — and then I began to see grace at work.

The passenger on the aisle told the mother she would move to a middle seat across the aisle so that the mother and child could have two seats. A flight attendant admired the little girl. Passengers helped to stow the family’s gear overhead.

I compared travel notes with the toddler, even though I knew she didn’t understand. Her big brown eyes followed my gestures.

Mother showed infinite patience with the little girl as she got scared during takeoff and restless during the flight. It looked like lonely duty.

As we neared Newark, I congratulated the mother for her daughter’s calm ride. “We’re in the Army,” she replied. The girl had taken her first airplane ride when she was five weeks old.

She went on to say that her husband had just shipped out to Afghanistan. She and her daughter were going to stay with her parents in New Jersey until he came home. She seemed to be wincing at this turn of events.

Her words changed everything. This was deeper than I had imagined.

I told the little girl she had been a “big girl” on this flight and she was “making Daddy proud.” I asked her if she was proud of her Daddy. “Yes, she is,” her mother said.

I rarely talk to my seatmates on airplanes. But something about this situation seemed different. I think the woman who gave up her aisle seat had sensed it, too. So had others who did small things to ease their journey. These weren’t two more passengers sharing crowded space. This was a mother and child, a family being held in God’s hands.

While the man in their lives went off to do his duty, the God of creation came to them and made a home with them.

I didn’t ask whether she was a Christian and thereby, as some see it, deserving of such grace. I just saw two people cast adrift in a drama not of their choosing, and I saw God loving them, just as Jesus promised.

I doubt we ever know fully what is happening in the lives of people around us, but God knows. And God melts our hearts and enables us to care.

This whole flight, in fact, seemed held in grace. We were coming home to a city where a terrorist bomb had been set to destroy lives in Times Square. We know more attempts will follow.

It might have been my imagination, but I sensed that many passengers had set aside the usual “New York attitude” and were speaking “softly and tenderly” to steel themselves for living in terrorism’s prime target.

In a sense, the war had come to us all now, and mother, child, fussy lady, exhausted church consultant — everyone on Flight 828 — were being sheltered in the hand of a loving God.

(Tom Ehrich is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest based in New York. He is the author of “Just Wondering, Jesus,” and the founder of the Church Wellness Project, http://www.churchwellness.com. His Web site is http://www.morningwalkmedia.com.)