When a train goes through a tunnel and it gets dark, you don’t throw away the ticket and jump off. You sit still and trust the engineer. -Corrie Ten Boom
I have become well acquainted with train rides over the past year. Not owning a car lends itself to some creative modes of transportation; I appreciate public electric scooters/bicycles more than most since moving to Washington D.C. I’m incredibly grateful for the rise of Uber. My friends tease that I’ve deemed two-three miles as *walkable*, but such is the life of a walking commuter. Over the past year, though, my long distance relationship necessitated a new mode of transportation: train travel. I don’t know if I’m about to sign up to be the poster child for the greatness of Amtrak. As someone once told me in regards to train travel, “When it’s good, it’s very good. When it’s bad, it’s the absolute worst.” Agreed.
Trains are fickle things. If you’re running late for a plane, you’re in luck. They’ll yell out your name throughout the airport, giving you constant warnings about the boarding process. It’s actually quite difficult to miss a plane out of sheer personal tardiness. Trains pull up to the station and stop for a few minutes, people wordlessly scramble on and off, and then they pull away with equal speed. There is no such grace if you miss a train. And at times that system works. I’ve had train rides completely uneventful that had me arrive in Norfolk a mere few minutes late and when I have those rides, it’s bliss. I leave Friday afternoons, am able to telework or curl up with a book. Drifting through woods and over rivers, it’s a lovely ride.
My last experience, though, left a lot to be desired. About a half hour away from our final destination, the rain pouring outside our windows, we abruptly stopped with a jolt.
The porters and conductor were hopping on and off the train, jackets dripping, as we all wondered what was happening. We’d been on the train since 2:00 with an arrival time at 7pm, but 7pm found us stopped on our tracks. We sat there for an hour before they spoke to us at all, finally telling us we had hit a tree that had fallen on the tracks, but they thought maybe they could fix it. And so we waited, and waited, and waited. Our lights flickering on and off, the power outlets coming in and out. Finally, we were told that they thought the brakes on our train were out, which meant they couldn’t allow the train to move anymore. All of us passengers squinted out the window, trying to see if there was civilization around us. We saw a road in the distance, through the trees, and a few joked about making the sprint to the road and calling an Uber from there. Not a bad idea when we weren’t given any alternatives. But still we sat and waited.
My own emotions would pass from being hungry, to being tired and cramped, to trying to nap on the train, to frustration, to actual anxiety and worry about when I’d finally pull into the station, starting to wonder what the rest of my life would look like on this train. You could hear a baby crying a few seats back, loudly expressing what we all were feeling. Murmurings and discontented mutterings trickled through the train. The whole affair felt exhausting.
The longest I’ve waited for take off on a plane was 2.5 hours, definitely not pleasant, but after a certain amount of time airlines are required to let you off. There is no such allowance on trains. In fact, they can’t let you off. Probably not a good idea to send a bunch of passengers off into a rainy, dark night to slog through the woods. So we sat there for hours, not moving. Finally, around 10:30 at night, they told us there was another train behind us. When they got to us in an hour they would switch to our track, pull in front of us and couple with us, and tow us into Norfolk. You could feel all of us exhale a bit. So, there was a plan all along amidst this chaos, someone would come to get us.
The other train finally arrived and around 12:30 AM we very, very slowly started moving again. When I counted the hours up, I realized we had been stuck on the track for nearly six hours, not moving. To be sure, everyone can spew tales of horrific travel disasters. A night spent on the floor of an airport, multiple canceled flights back to back, feeling a stranger in a strange land when you’re stuck at an airport that was only supposed to be a transfer point. There is such a feeling of helplessness, of situations far outside your control and you feel rather stuck. You can’t go up to the cockpit of your plane and take the controls yourself, just because you’re tired of waiting. So you wait.
The Christian journey is often referenced as just that, a “journey,” a long day traveling, not the worst discomfort but not particularly comfy either. Certainly nothing like the cozy bed that awaits us at the end of the trek. Some days our Christian journey is just the normal jostle and delays, much like the annoyance of TSA security lines, but sometimes it’s actually quite bleak. Not just bumps on a road, but more a dark night of the soul. A lonely sleep in a cold, unfamiliar airport because a connecting flight was canceled. Or six hours stopped on the tracks on a rainy night.
Maybe this is all just an excuse for me to complain about my train delay. Perhaps. Recently I’ve been working through my own sort of dead-in-my-tracks moment, outside of a train ride. When my own little plans, so carefully laid out, were suddenly held at a standstill. My world shifted in a way I hadn’t asked for or wanted, and I felt a bit helpless in it all, especially since it had felt that I’d done everything right, why was this happening? When I’m my most stressed and the world feels chaotic, I almost never just sit with it. Stress drives me to busyness, I’ll take on more, hustle harder, write massive daily checklists for myself. But there are moments where despite all my busyness, the world around me freezes.
The phrase I hate the most is “sit tight.” It was the only thing we were told to do for hours on the train, it was the wise words my mom said to me as things felt like they were unraveling, and it’s where I find myself at now in my own chaos. I have done my part, now I must let things unfold in the sovereign will of God. No offense to Corrie Ten Boom, but my first reaction is not to jump off a train in the tunnel. I’d rather get behind it and push it, regardless of what’s in my path, but that’s not my job. No, we must sit still and trust those who are greater.
When they finally revealed to us that another train was coming to get us, there were audible sighs of relief throughout the train. “So there was a plan all along! There was a rescue plan!” And in my own struggle right now, in another dark period of waiting, I can only trust the same is happening right now. Only this time my fate lies not in the hands of an imperfect train service, but in an all-knowing and powerful God. I am told to sit tight and trust him; there is a plan in all of this, some greater tale unfolding I don’t know yet. But I will, in his time. My life is not my own, though my own prideful confidence tells me otherwise. We all must come to terms with a certain level of helplessness, that we are not always able to help ourselves, but we are never abandoned. He is more capable than I will ever be; sitting tight with him is the best place I will ever be.
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Very well written ❤️