Freight train... freight train....

Friday afternoon on the way home from Springfield, we drove alongside a very long freight train loaded with cargo containers heading toward Tennessee. The train was going a little slower than the cars on the highway, so we gradually passed it by, crossing intersections with the four rumbling engines at about the same time and getting the blast of the horn in our ears.

Richard wondered how it is that people pull out in front trains and sometimes get killed. The town veterinarian was killed in that way not too long after we moved here. Two people in the nearby town chose suicide by train in the last couple months, and there was another car-train accident.

We wondered how horrible it must be for train engineer to see impending death in front of him on the tracks and unable to do anything about it.

I wondered to myself how horrible it must have been for the little old woman I visited every week to bury three of her children, unable to do anything about it.

Had I brought my camera with me on Friday, I might have taken a picture of the orange and red engines. I would not have taken a picture of the Amish man in his horse-drawn wagon waiting to cross the highway. I would have tried to take picture of the lake of fog nestled in a field between two low hills.

The waiting room of the neurosurgeon who will remove the tumor from our son’s brain on Monday morning has a marvelous saltwater fish tank. I would have tried to take a picture of the lovely red and white shrimp that was busy patrolling the rocks and the sand looking for morsels to eat. It was the only inhabitant of the tank that didn’t like it was mentally ill. A small trigger fish swam in incessant circles... across, down behind the rocks, out the front, turn, across, down.... over and over and over. It made me sad to watch it.

So much has happened in a week. Last Monday we were in the emergency department, this Monday we will be in the surgical waiting room. We were rather surprised that the neurosurgeon scheduled it so fast. It gives us a feeling of forboding.

The hospital has two amazing courtyards formed by the intersections of very tall wings of the building that are planted with beautiful hydrangeas and hostas, and there is a unique water feature with a large round black stone with veins of gray, highly polished, that rests on a pedestal and is squirted by jets of water that cause it to rotate. I would likely have taken pictures there.

The hospital is a Catholic hospital, and I felt very comforted as we walked from place to place to see scripture verses on the walls and pictures of biblical scenes.

I feel like our little family has been loaded on board a very fast moving freight train and we are hurtling along and it is going to go where it goes and we don’t have much say about it. I am glad that I trust that God is handling the controls.

Two scriptures take turns marching through my mind....

Job receives the news that all of his children have been killed by a whirlwind. At this Job stood up, tore his cloak, shaved his head, and threw himself prostrate on the ground, saying

Naked I came from the womb, naked I shall return when I came.

The Lord gives and the Lord takes away; blessed be the name of the Lord.

And the other one

But he was pierced for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities;

The chastisement he bore restored us to health, and by his wounds we are healed.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God;
Let your healing flow down upon our son.