If you wander about these parts we call downtown Boca much (which if you read this article, you probably do), you know that we have railroad tracks. Unfortunately for me, we, like the majority of people that call Boca home, live “on the other side of the tracks.”  Now, Old Floresta and Boca Winds and The Shores hardly qualify for the traditional understanding of “the other side of the tracks,” but, we do have to cross them. And since the advent of Brightline, the odds that you will be stuck waiting for a train has gone from “probably not” having to stop to “probably so.”  Particularly if you add the myriads of “ghost” trains that go through – the times the gates go down but nothing goes by. That’s a new rendition of “the lights are on, but nobody’s home.”

      The other day I saw something new waiting at the railroad tracks. Right there on Palmetto Park, a Brightline train roared northbound (I don’t think it was stopping in Boca), and a Florida East Coast Railway (FEC) freight train rumbled south. It was kind of exciting and interesting to watch them barrel past each other, a blur of color and light. It reminded me of a time Janice and I were riding a high-speed train in Spain, barreling down the tracks at 120-plus mph, when a train doing equal or greater speed passed us going the other direction. Blur doesn’t begin to describe that passing!

      Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s image of two ships passing in the night conjures a much more romantic image than the freight train in Boca. But that sense of missing connections still remained for me as I watched these two trains. Our lives get so full of demands (or perceived demands) on our time that we rush past a lot of beauty, goodness, and truth (to cite the transcendentals). We rush from one thing to another, yes trying to “stay in our lane” (two trains crashed on that same line Janice and I were on in Spain a couple of months ago), but in so doing we miss visiting with people, enjoying things that God has placed along the way, and losing ourselves in our own truths, instead of The Truth.

       In traffic, in the isles of Costco or Publix, in life, like the two trains at the RR crossing, I rush past too many people, too many opportunities for God to pour into me, and maybe pour into others. In slowing down, the transcendentals can pour in. Can we go slow enough to at least say hi to each other?

Waiting for the gates to go up,

Craig

Those who are kind benefit themselves,
but those who go too fast bring ruin on themselves. Proverbs 11:17