Train Junk

It's interesting to see the world from a train.  Along the way, through the countryside there are beautiful vistas, farms and lakes to enjoy.  then, as the train makes its way though towns you are greeted with a different perspective.

People dump stuff they don't want to deal with behind the trees near the tracks.  Old rusty cars and junk appliances are common.  There is graffiti scrawled across almost any flat structure.  The ornate words and pictures could be the city's subconscious thoughts, unseen and unintelligible to the conscious part of the city but containing messages of frustration and hopelessness that yearn to be communicated.

There are abandoned camps where the disenfranchised and the nomadic wanderers have perhaps stayed over for a day or two before continuing their journey to find rest and comfort.  A quest that, for them, may be in vain for reasons I cannot begin to understand.

Then we approach a train station where appears new and clean. But there is something else.   A cacophony of noise and motion that is invisible but penetrating. There is a weight, a stress, a heaviness of being that comes from travel that is almost tangible in the station.  You can see its weight on the shoulders of people leaving one train and headed for the next. 

Through this thick fog of marginally controlled pandemonium the calm light of simplicity and rest cannot seem to penetrate.  The junk by the  tracks still sit awaiting cleanup, the graffiti grows and colors more surface, the homeless continue to wander and the travelers still carry their burdens.  What makes it this way?

I wonder if God is on a train that moves through my soul, seeing the things I prefer to ignore.  Aware of the junk hidden behind the trees, understanding the meaning of the graffiti that I fail to acknowledge, longing to lift the unseen burdens that I carry and to give me space to rest.