The Wrong Train

The right time

The heart of man plans his way, but the LORD establishes his steps.

— Proverbs 16:9, ESV

In Tom McCarthy’s The Station Agent, Peter Dinklage plays Finbar McBride, a man who inherits an abandoned train depot in rural New Jersey. He moves there to be alone. He wants silence and trains and nothing else. What he gets is Joe, a Cuban hot dog vendor who won’t stop talking, and Olivia, an artist whose grief has made her a danger behind the wheel. Nobody planned the friendship. They just kept showing up at the same small place until it became one.

I used to take the Texas Eagle from Dallas to Austin during my consulting years. Not because it was efficient. The train lines in Texas give freight the right of way, so a three-hour trip could stretch to eight. I chose it because I needed something to slow down around me. I had my laptop and could work remotely, but the lunch car was where I actually wanted to be. You sit with strangers at shared tables. You don’t choose them. You share coffee and a window and whatever the miles give you. I met people in that lunch car I’m still in touch with.

But the story I keep returning to happened at Charles de Gaulle.

My layover was eighteen hours. I took the Metro into central Paris to get something to eat, and met an Australian on the platform with the same idea. We ate together. Then we got on the wrong Metro back.

We rode it to the last stop. It wasn’t the airport. Standing on that platform with us was a French teacher who’d fallen asleep and missed her stop, two Libyan international students returning from Oxford, and a very drunk Frenchman. We weren’t a group. But we were together. Six strangers under fluorescent light, realizing we’d all arrived at the same accident.

The drunk man told us he knew where we were. He said he’d call his wife. This was before cell phones. It was late. Everything was closed.

We followed him.

For two hours we walked through a neighborhood at the edge of rural France. I don’t remember the name of the town. I remember the sound of our footsteps on the road. I remember the Libyan students laughing at something the French teacher said. I remember the Australian walking beside me, both of us quietly convinced this was a mistake and neither of us willing to say it. I remember the drunk man walking ahead with absolute certainty, like he’d done this before.

Two hours is a long time to follow a stranger in the dark. The novelty wore thin. Then we spotted a car bouncing in a field off the road. The drunk man told us to wait. He walked to the car. Two minutes later it sped off. He came back and said they’d call his wife, and she’d come get us.

We didn’t believe him. We’d already started planning our own way out.

Thirty minutes later a station wagon appeared.

His wife got out. She gave him a big kiss. Then she turned to every one of us and greeted us like family. She spent the next hour driving each of us where we needed to go. Turned out it was his official ‘wild night’ out of the week, and his wife was fully prepared to pick him up whenever and wherever he needed it.

Emmanuel Levinas wrote in Totality and Infinity in 1961 that “the face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me.” Every real encounter with another person exceeds whatever you’d prepared for. The drunk Frenchman exceeded it. His wife, pulling up in that station wagon at midnight, exceeded it further.

On the road to Emmaus, two disciples walked alongside someone they didn’t recognize. He asked questions. He listened. He stayed with them. And when he broke bread, their eyes opened and they saw it was Christ who’d been beside them the whole time (Luke 24:15-31). Christ told his followers: whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me (Matthew 25:40). He didn’t say the most impressive. He said the least. The overlooked. The drunk man at the last stop.

I’ve spent most of my life optimizing routes. Booking the direct flight. Reducing friction. And the moments that changed me most were the ones I didn’t plan. The lunch car on a delayed train. The wrong Metro in Paris. A neighborhood I can’t name, walked at midnight with people I had no reason to trust.

You don’t find these moments by planning better. You find them by choosing the slow train. By following the drunk man into the dark when every sensible impulse says don’t. Serendipity sometimes feels alot of unoptimized time.

Christ doesn’t always show up where you planned to meet him. Sometimes he’s at the last stop on the wrong line, under bad lighting, telling you to trust him.

The station wagon appeared.
She kissed him first.
Then she drove us all where we needed to go.