Tracks

We, were on a little blue train that winds its way up the mountainside above Montreux. In the distance it looks like a toy electric train with a most elaborate set of roads, chalets, town houses, a castle or two, lake, streams, trees, and bridges. The ride on the train takes it out of the museum piece toy set into a breathtaking reality. You catch a last glimpse of the lake and vineyards above, which turn all shades of yellow, just before you enter a tunnel. The climb has been possible by tunneling through the mountain, and though the train chugs slowly it also slides along the tracks in a very certain manner. On the other side of the tunnel new heights have been reached, and out of the windows you can see jagged cliffs, sharp plunges into the valley, and fresh snow on the peaks. It makes you feel the appreciation of the mountain climber. There is a satisfying involvement in the view of rushing torrents, deep woods, isolated chalets with cows grazing on steep pastures, with no need to be fearful of having lost your way. The secure feeling of being on the tracks and carried along was most vivid on a high bridge over a sharp chasm. A sobering thought penetrated my enjoyment of the scene: “Think of the people involved in laying the tracks, in pioneering the tunnel-making, in cutting into the stone of impossibly sharp mountainsides!” Whether for Swiss mountain trains, or trains going through deserts and jungles, plains or canyons, fiercely hot jungles or bitterly cold northern wilds, tracks have had to be laid at great cost to some people. The cost of laying safe and trustworthy tracks to destinations that are important to the traveler is a cost that is so easy to take for granted. Lives have been lost in the laying of tracks, and people have literally suffered blood, sweat, and tears. We are apt to forget the heavy cost of laying the tracks, and also the terrible wickedness of ripping up sections or deliberately turning aside the traveler into destruction by twisting or removing portions of the tracks.

We may be a step removed in the twentieth century from the thankfulness for those who have lived before us and laid the tracks, and we may never think of what tracks have given us in accessibility, for which pioneers paid a terrible price to discover, but it wouldn’t be a bad thing to consider a few things in the context of the “tracks” we are apt to take for granted. Not only in railroads, but in the area of the thinkable and the unthinkable in morals and law, acceptable behavior and crime, there is an imperative need to repair the tracks, to test the tracks, to recognize that there are a terrible variety of ways to sabotage them and turn safe stracks into lethal traps. Tracks that have been tampered with can bring sudden destruction to more than the hijacker, yet tracks that are carefully inspected and cared for can be trusted because of the trustworthiness of those who laid the tracks, and primarily because of the engineer who planned the whole thing, and the supervisors watching over the job. The tracks have a purpose that is specific and with an end in view, a destination, as well as giving a view of what exists along the way. There is reality that can be felt in the cold steel as well as what is seen from the windows when the train is gliding along that same steel. And, for people with trouble in the area of reality of existence, the mundane tracks give continuity, because so many have gone the same way, have discovered that only an outside interference can change the dependability of the tracks whether sabotage or avalanche.

This is a mere seed of a train of thought, as we think of the cost to the whole Trinity of laying the tracks for us, and as we think of the stream of prophets, priests, and believers who have ploughed, trudged, labored in desert, jungle, wilderness of heat, and cold, to lay tracks as well as to repair tracks that are truly trustworthy and certain. Thinking along these lines, trace a wealth of warning the Lord has given us perhaps even substituting “tracks” with a visual force of cutting through rock and marsh, with tunnels and bridges, as we move along in our own today. “As for God, his way [track] is perfect; the word of the LORD is tried: he is a buckler to all them that trust in him.… God is my strength and power: and he maketh my way [track] perfect” (2 Sam. 22:31, 33). “Lead me, O LORD, in thy righteousness because of mine enemies; make thy way [track] straight before my face” (Ps. 5:8). “Show me thy ways [tracks], O LORD; teach me thy paths. Lead me in thy truth, and teach me: for thou art the God of my salvation; on thee do I wait all the day” (Ps. 25:4,5). Can’t you feel the transfer? He has engineered, and paid the price for the tracks that lead to eternal life, yet we who are benefiting because of the well laid tracks are titanically responsible that all nations might benefit. We are meant to be repairers not saboteurs and the safety of the people following us in generations to come will be attributed to us. It is not a casual warning.

“Oh that my people had hearkened unto me, and Israel had walked in my ways [tracks]” (Ps. 81:13). “There is a way [track] which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death” (Prov. 14:12). Tampered with and twisted tracks plunge trainloads to the torrents below. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isa. 55:8,9). Twisting his tracks into our pattern is to be recognized as we are in the midst of doing it, and his pattern to be restored.

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