The Ones Who Stay
I read somewhere that people are like passengers on a train: some hop on for a stop or two, some ride with you through entire states, and a very rare few sit next to you until the very last station.
When I was younger, I wanted everyone who boarded my train to stay forever. Friends from high school, coworkers, neighbors who once lent us their snowblower—I wanted them all still sitting there, laughing at the same stories, telling me I hadn’t changed a bit. But that’s not how trains work. That’s not how life works.
Now, at this age, I get it. Some people are reason-passengers—they show up just in time to hold your hand through a storm, then vanish at the next stop. Others are season-passengers—they belong to a particular chapter, a job, a neighborhood, a church pew—and when the chapter closes, they exit. And then there are the lifetime-passengers, the unicorns of the train. They stay through all the breakdowns, detours, and wrecks. Even when the snack car runs out of coffee. Especially then.
I don’t have many lifetime-passengers. Just a small circle: Erin, my kids, a handful of people who refused to let me self-destruct alone. And Bob and Barbara.
Bob is a deacon. Barbara is a light disguised as a woman. Together, they’ve spent decades creating a place where children and young adults with special needs—many fighting battles bigger than we can imagine—are loved, valued, and given a seat at the table. They opened that table to me, too. Years ago, when I was still a school leader, I met their children. Erin and I even adopted one of their support dogs. Our trains crossed. And even when I moved districts, even when years and miles piled up, they kept waving out the window, checking in with coffee, with texts, with kindness.
And then came the accident. The embarrassment. The wreck that almost made me unrecognizable to myself.
Bob didn’t hesitate. He reached out. No judgment. No “I told you so.” Just presence. Just prayer. Just steady, daily check-ins that felt like vertebrae in a spine I no longer trusted to hold me up. Barbara too, with her texts that somehow always arrived right before the despair did.
Everyone needs a Bob and a Barbara on their train. People who prove that sometimes the holiest thing isn’t preaching at you, or fixing you, or dragging you back onto the right track—it’s just sitting with you in the wreckage until you remember you can stand again.
Here’s what I know now: Life is a train that never stops moving. People get on, people get off. Some you’ll miss forever, some you’ll be relieved to see go. But the miracle—the absolute miracle—is not that people stay. It’s that some do. Against all odds, through every derailment, there they are, still sitting beside you, still reminding you that hope is not gone.
Because hope, like Bob and Barbara, is always on board.
“Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor: If either of them falls down, one can help the other up. But pity anyone who falls and has no one to help them up.”
-Ecclesiastes 4:9–10
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