...Like the First Morning

Every day, I take a train from a stop near my house to my job downtown. I get the idea from most of the people that come in the shop that taking a train is not the usual first choice of transportation. I'm not sure if it's because I just moved here, or if it's in my make up, but I love the train. In the small town I lived in until I was eight and where I afterwards returned weekly to visit my Dad, there is a train that does a thorough job of blocking traffic by crossing for long periods of time the one road out of town. It was often the cause of tardiness to school, or a late dinner. But, it became a familiarity, which like a habit, brings comfort and attraction.There was always a disappointment in the fact that there were solely freight trains running through.

When I work in the mornings, I leave my house at 5:15 a.m. to take the 5:30 a.m. train. I enjoy the 25 minutes it takes me to get into the busy city. I love the early morning walk a few blocks to work. I enjoy people watching and being still, listening to a Ferguson sermon, or reading. I love the fact that I ride the same track everyday. It's allows me to feel aquainted with this city, being able to look around- not just ahead, to recognize, to be familiar with a place, as if its mine. In studying the ride in, day after day, I have found my favorite part of the trip. About half-way through, the train crosses the Steel Bridge over the Willamette River. This is a beneficial height for viewing both sides of the city at any time of the day. However, there is a still to the early morning that takes up every bit of my mind. The train is loud over the tracks. Everyone is still waking up and quiet and usually alone, and the sun is rising. As soon as I get on the train in the morning, I try to find a seat facing the back because I know it will be facing the sunrise as I go over the bridge. It is to the right that the sun rises, and it is from that direction that the clouds turn a peculiar shade of pink many mornings. Even on the cloudiest mornings, it is from that direction that the light creeps up on the darkness. Every morning that I wake up, I feel a heaviness of anxiety on my chest and my mind. I keep thinking I will wake up one morning with it gone. Within the past few years, there have been only enough mornings free from this to count on a hand. So, rather than despising this heaviness, I have begun to find gladness in the fact that as sure as I wake with this, a little time remembering Christ...mostly knowing I'm remembered by Christ, steals the anxiety away, and turns it into another day's worth of restoration with God.

In light of this, I have felt such an assurance in this sunrise. I've felt many a quiet, lonely morning the Lord asking me to remember him as Creator, and to look around and see his way is faithfulness, steadiness, beauty, and return. The clouds that the light rises upon take on the the pink and orange, telling of the sun before it reaches the high skies I can see. Just by glancing to my right, I meet mercy. In contrast, out of the left side of the train is a building that still baffles me. I have no idea what company it belongs to. It is right on the water, high and and cement, and in front of it (because I assume they belong to it) is a stream of connected trailors that are on crooked-leg-like stilts, dirty and steel and haunting. They look like something out of a nightmare. They are as high as the building and they seem top heavy. There is a little ladder up the side that crooks back and forth with the legs, and I fret over the man who has to climb it, and wonder if they were built for a man to climb or solely as a fright of an eye sore. The other morning, as the train was heading up the bridge, they caught my eye with all of these thoughts crossing my mind. I could not take my eyes off of these skyscraping trailors. As I was heading down the bridge, I was still left trying to figure out this painful view. It was at this point that I decided to turn to the sunrise, but because the morning was so early, and I had descended from my usual look-out point, I could not see the sun. I knew it was there, and that it was on it's way out, and that the following morning I could look to the right of the train and see it as surely as it was there unseen by me that morning. But, it hurt me that I'd missed it. I rode the train in, thinking, "Isn't that just like me? Looking in on the dark and painful, when hope is right in front of my face? Seeing what is tragic and evokes an emotion that is cheap? Isn't that just my tendancy?" The truth is, it is. Still, I found grace in the fact that the sun rose that morning, not because I saw it, but because it is the sun.

I got off the train at my stop, and began walking the blocks to work. As i turned the corner, I was caught off guard by a high rise office building, covered with rectangular windows. In their height, the individual windows reflected a hundred times over the sunrise I had missed. And I thought to myself, "Isn't that just like the Lord? If it were up to me to judge myself, I would be waiting until morning, but instead the Lord restores all we have broken and all that is broken in us a hundred times over." My mind was not meant to imagine the depths of God's grace, but to live in it and rest in it and know it.