From a Train Window

Riding along through the mountains of Pennsylvania at sunset, I notice that the scenery passes with a certain amount of intimacy that I never really thought of before. There is so much that you can see from a train window that you can’t from a car window and certainly not an airplane. It’s like seeing lost nooks and crannies of creation that are only really seen when they are “looked” at.

Part of my trip was spent watching a movie on my computer or reading, but as the sun began to take on a golden hue and the trees began to dapple the hillsides and rocks beside the tracks, I suddenly found myself compelled to search the scene outside my window for something…what? I don’t know. But what I saw made me feel one with the scenery.

I saw a river running beside the tracks. At some bends, a clear stream rippling over rocks in miniature rapids. At other stretches, a muddy, slow-moving slag of mud that couldn’t reflect the trees even at the height of the sun. I saw little league baseball being played at the small town park and I could almost feel the pride of community coming together on the coach-pitch field while the littlest ones dug their grubby fingers into packets of M&Ms. I saw a levy half dry, factories abandoned in piles of bricks and rebar. Shoots and conveyors stretched across the tracks from the cliff face on the left to the plant on the right. Soaring bridges of modern engineering meant to connect these small towns with the rest of the world.

How easy it would to be able to close the curtains in the coach and shut out the world? How easy would it be to ignore the “wrong side of the tracks?” The abandoned houses, the rotting vehicles, the crumbling factories. How easy would it be to turn my head from the window and only look when the purple blossoms on the hillside or the swaying leaves of the summer lush trees appear? But, I am part of this world. I am part of this creation that has been divinely formed and humanly corrupted, this marvel of brilliant innovation and ruthless natural selection. How can I not look? Here is a soaring steeple reaching to heaven, cross at the pinnacle. Here is a teenage mother, pushing her baby to the local market, learning how to nurture “on the job.”

It’s all part of the world. It’s all part of creation. It’s all part of the Kingdom of God. As a resident, I have a role to play. Perhaps it is to look out the window and “see.” Then, to live as if I have “seen.”