Witness Mission: Blog

“That night train’s a mean wine” –John Belushi as Jake Blues

We are sitting on a weathered asphalt pad three feet from the railroad track late night in rural Kentucky waiting on a train already an hour overdue.

Finally warning lights, dim red a quarter of a mile away in the blackness. Then three burning white lights the shape of a pyramid. And it seems the lights are coming slowly so we rise and wait, but as the lights come closer they do not slow but seem to increase speed then in a flash a mammoth steel projectile is blasting across the earth and shaking the air and my bags, mountains of metal rocketing through the night without a passenger except some anonymous figure in an engine I barely see but for a yellow light, the driver not of my train but of that of the dead.

Lori and I stand still for a moment and I think if even a pebble rises from these tracks in the speed of this draft it will shatter my skull, and as if sharing a thought we both step back, then move further and finally enter the agentless station, a plexiglass shelter we had ignored for its chemical stench and the heat. We watched from the dirty plastic as the behemoth roared in and out of blackness, a wink blur of machinery in the narrow path of a single white light on a pole, like a rip in the fabric of night revealing the passage not of a locomotive but of a ship of strange commerce born of blackness and bound for blackness. In the limits of light in that place it seemed an endless train.

Then it was silent again and we were standing on the asphalt again and I was telling Lori I insisted she go and that she had done enough just by driving me to the tracks so late at night especially since she had to drive to work an hour at dawn and that I would text her when I was safely aboard the train and her saying absolutely not and that, what, was she old or something, she was perfectly fine with staying up as late as she wants, and she is an adult, and to stop asking because she was waiting and that was that, and then we were sitting again, now leaning back on my bags stacked around the light pole and our shoulders touching and us talking more and more.

What to the impatient is inconvenient, to the grateful is a gift. Waiting for the train I gained a friend. The terms of our life are that we are either bound or broken by the late tracks.

We are in a hurry or we desire more sleep. He is leaving so I will say goodbye on the steps of my house, she says. What difference is it if I say goodbye here or in the night beside a set of old railroad tracks? Why should both of us be inconvenienced by the threat of a late train, she asks herself? I told him it would be late, she complains to no one. What difference does it make if he is dropped off at the dark tracks by my car or a taxi?

Of course the answer to the question is that the waiting makes all the difference. She who waits for him is whom he loves and who is loving. Love waits.

St. Paul wrote a letter to an impatient and pragmatic bunch of friends in the ancient Greek city of Corinth a letter about this. “Love is patient, love is kind and is not envious; love does not brag and is not arrogant.”

There is no arrogance in the night waiting beside railroad tracks. There is patience. What greater kindness is there but to wait in darkness? No one brags and no one is jealous. That you are missing a little sleep does not matter because what you are not missing is each other.

To imagine a God loves me is to imagine God waiting patiently for me… along dirty tracks at midnight. God knows the train will arrive even when no longer believe.

St. Paul wrote this letter to his pragmatic friends in the magnificent ancient city because they had lost their way with love. They no longer troubled to wait for each other beside the railroad tracks—or at the lonely wharf.

Here is how Paul put it to his friends: “Love… does not act unbecomingly; it does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” He might have added, love waits for you waiting for the late trains.

Love isn’t a poetic expression. Love is patience in darkness.

Lori and I settle into our asphalt sofa, then silence, the kind only known to friends. And it occurs to me Lori and I have become friends. After years of casual acquaintance this is the very first time we have sat beside each other in silence. It further occurs to me this has occurred not by conscious decision like ordering a sandwich at a restaurant, but it is the result of something less mechanical and more organic. Friends are not gained they are grown. Friendship is an organism and it is often fertilized in dark bouts of patience and in waiting. Friendship comes through driving someone to the rail station at night and waiting with them in the stifling Kentucky heat until the train arrives.

My daughter and I are friends. Earlier this same day Sofia and I sat in silence at my little desk in my house, she chatting up friends on facebook and me organizing paperwork and photos, our friendship born from hours of texting across the world, of evening drives to Starbucks for sweets and smoothies, of wandering downtown shops and laughing and listening and waiting for no reason other than it is time spent together. Sometimes Sofia says, sorry, when she rings my cell while I am on the other side of the world. But it is each of these calls that fertilizes the love that is just now taking root between us.

My mother and I are friends, our friendship born—as difficult as it may be for some to conceive—in silence watching midnight reruns of her favorite show, NCIS, and indulging in ice cream.

Finally other people arrive at the tracks. It is now past midnight and the train is almost two hours late. An older man in khaki cargo shorts and clean white shirt comes and introduces himself. Turns out he knows my family, was a school teacher to my older siblings. He and his wife have come to meet an old friend, a girl from Taiwan who was an exchange student in their home 20 years ago when he was a college instructor. She is coming to visit with her daughter. Friends at a railway station in the night.

When the train arrives it is as if a new life has emerged. Friendships have organic personalities. It is as if we can name them apart from ourselves. Like a child incubated in the womb of a mother, friendships are often nurtured in the dark wombs of life’s passage, though patient enduring together—brothers in arms in war, the silent comfort of our presence in the pain of loss to death of a loved one, or simply the kindness of waiting with someone beside the railroad tracks on a weekday night. In the case of Sofia and I it has been through m faithful responding to her texts no matter where I am in the world and her occasional kiss on my cheek, a gift greater than ever she could imagine.

Maybe this is why I hold Lori’s arms and kiss her cheek before I hop the impatient train. It wasn’t the kiss of romance. I have only kissed three women in years—my mother, my daughter, and tonight Lori. I kissed her cheek because I was overcome with gratefulness for her quiet kindness. It was the only appropriate response to the birth of friendship.

The train bore me into the night along rivers and across dark villages and I arrived only a few hours later in the colorful if not depressed Queen City, Cincinnati. There to retrieve me was my sister Barb and her boyfriend, Todd. Barb had insisted I not take a cab but that she come get me. It’s really no problem, really, she insisted. Putting my bags in her car in front of Union station at 3:00 a.m. I felt like one of the luckiest people in the world to be loved by so many friends.

Uploaded by: flip holsinger on 8th July, 2010.