Today I Rode a Subway
It's a funny thing isn't it, a subway? All of these strangers. Thrown into one cramped tube, together. I'm surrounded by people I've never met, but know all too well. I don't know them and they don't know me, and yet I can sense that we know each other intimately. All from different walks of life, but all our paths on the same earth. Similar in very few ways, but having much in common. I'm sitting by a women I've never met and know nothing about and yet we share a common bond. We've played the game of life and have come out on top and bottom.
You can tell by the looks on the people's faces that they have been around the block more than a few times. From vacant stares, to happy laughs of children, to the man in the corner falling asleep. We have all tasted of this bitter-sweet life, and what a bitter-sweet taste it is. We have all wrestled with men, God, and ourselves and come away with a limp. And our limps our visible, no matter how much we try to hide them, they're there, some of us – especially those of us in the pews – are just better at hiding them than others. We all know what it's like to be on the top of the barrel. And we all know how hard rock bottom really is.
We all hurt.
And because of this the subway seems hopeless. To most it would seem that that's all life really is. Hopeless. Stuck in the rut of humanity, living on this side of eternity, with sin, pain, and disease at ever turn, life seems all but hopeful. But I am reminded of Golgotha. A place of death. A place of real hopelessness. And I'm reminded of the Savior, "Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross". And that if he was willing to go there for me, he is willing to accompany me here and now. This is my hope.
The beauty of the gospel is not that life will be absent of limps, but that Jesus pursues us despite them, and carries us to the Father. And so being a faithful witness of Christ is not found in hiding our limps, but in looking at those we meet in the subway and saying, "Me too.
I'm on a subway. And its strange. Across from people I've never spoken too, and yet the look in their eyes tell me all I need to know. They hurt, just like me, like us. And it's here on this subway that I've never felt so alone or more accompanied, all at the same time.
-Zach