Phyllis Nissila

Somewhere in North Dakota

a young girl stands in her driveway

watching

as our train traces

the long curve west

around her land.

From my window seat

I watch her turn

and walk, slowly,

toward a brown house.

I wonder:

does she go back inside

to her chair and oatmeal

this morning

and ask—for the first time—

“Momma, where

does that train go?”

As our train lumbered west I thought about revelations tucked inside ordinary Tuesdays, about epiphanies winding alongside country roads. I wondered if what I had witnessed was such for that little girl, if, as the same old train rolled past at the same old time in the same old place in front of her brown house, she watched with brand new eyes.

I wondered if the eight-oh-five a.m. winding past to its usual destination became, suddenly, a string of possibilities she had never thought of before and if perhaps I’d witnessed that very moment in time for her.

Spiritual epiphanies—both sublime and subtle—can also occur amid the ordinary. Believers report visions but also fresh insight into well-worn verses, prophetic dreams or simply deeper understandings, mountaintop thrills along with rest in the valleys—even as God speaks through both Revelation’s trump and, say, the cadence of an Amtrak ambling west on its appointed rounds.

And He speaks just now, perhaps, right in the middle of this collection of ordinary nouns and verbs–but with extraordinary longing and hope:  “Call unto Me,” says the Lord, “and I will answer you, and I will tell you great and mighty things, which you do not know.” *

Any questions for Him today?

~~~~~

* Jeremiah 33:3, NASB

Photo from public domain collection: http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/view-image.php?image=10125&picture=the-train-is-gone