Scotland: Riding The Train

"Nobody tells you, when you get born here
How much you'll come to love it and how you'll never belong here."

How much can one drink in with one's eyes? How long can you keep open those two windows we are all born with?

Lindsay and Iain were apologetic that I had to take a train from Glasgow, that no one was there to pick me up at the airport. But their apologies fell on the ears of a man greatly blessed. How can you describe a countryside where you feel that you cannot widen your soul enough to take in all its beauty, where you feel as if every stone, every blade of grass, every patch of dirt, every drop of water, is pregnant with significance beyond the stuttering conveyance of any human tongue? I turned on Andrew Peterson in my iPod and glued my face to the window on the southern side of the train.

The wind raced us over the lowlands past astonishingly yellow fields of rapeseed in bloom, past a young roe buck wandering the tracts of a farmer's field, past rabbits that lolloped in meadows wiggling their ears and noses in their secret language. And in the distance between Perth and Dundee, rainbow after brilliant rainbow fell from wandering storms that scattered the impossibly cerulean sky, ringing of the colors of that final ephod, affixed with the stones of the tribes. I had to work to keep from weeping in front of the other passengers.

What contrast, that hearts so bleak can reside in lands that so profoundly call one to wander the lonely road to Love - lands on both sides of the Atlantic. It was my prayer that I would be given eyes to see the beauty in souls (including potential beauty) as I so quickly see it in lands that will one day be swept away. O, God's great love of beauty! If that which is visible and will be destroyed is so great among creation, how much more that which is invisible, how much greater that which is indelible. May we have eyes in our spirits to see that "which will never pass away," and in the midst of a land where "not one stone will be left upon another," to be diligent in laying up treasures "where moth and rust do not destroy."