HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, April 9, 2025 – We’d been emergency evacuated from our train, and I found myself on a station platform surrounded by a press of noise and people in heavy winter clothing. The stench of diesel was nauseating. This wasn’t my stop. I was frantically trying to see if I had all my belongings with me, but the light was so dim, I couldn’t tell my luggage from other people’s luggage, and there were so many passengers thronging past me that I got caught up in their motion and had no choice but to hurry along with them. If I’d stood still, I would have been trampled.

Two men closed in on me to my left. One of them gestured that he wanted to help me with my suitcase, but I could tell that he just wanted to steal it. He leered at me and muttered something in a language I didn’t understand. I held onto my suitcase all the tighter.

As we hurried along, the platform turned into a narrow, paved pathway with high thick bushes on either side. Suddenly, the twilight plunged into darkness. It wasn’t a normal nightfall of gradually dimming light, but more like an eclipse. I could see nothing but a thin beam of light illuminating the path directly in front of me. I must have fallen far behind the other passengers because I couldn’t see them anymore, as if they’d disappeared. I couldn’t even see the bushes. All I could see was a thin strip of paved path.

The next thing I knew, it was morning and I was at another station, but this one was deserted. It was an old-style wood-framed building with gingerbread trim and a long portico supported by thin wooden pillars. The tracks in front of the station were covered in flowering weeds and obviously hadn’t been used for a while. As I stood in the cool of the morning under the portico’s shade, it occurred to me that I no longer had my suitcase with me, the one the man had tried to steal. It was gone. I looked up at the pathway behind the station, but I couldn’t see the suitcase. I thought maybe I should go back and look for it, but then I thought there was no guarantee I’d find it (or had even lost it there). Someone might already have nabbed it or someone might have taken it the next station. And if I did go back looking for it, I’d never catch up with my fellow passengers who were heading (or so I suspected) to the connecting train that we were all supposed to take after being evacuated from the earlier one.

As I stood there chasing ideas back and forth in my head, the trill of a bird cut through my thoughts. It so startled me, I felt like I’d just woken up. What a beautiful day! The air was fresh the way it only is after an early morning shower and everything sparkled with the last of the raindrops. I reckoned it was around 9:30 or 10:00. I had no idea where I was, but I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want to backtrack and frantically search for my suitcase, and I didn’t want to rush forward to try to catch the next train. I just wanted to stand there in the quiet of the coolness and the sparkling of the beauty, hearing the bird sing. This is where I needed to be.

It wasn’t until later that I realized that the road leading to the next train station also led to the view I have from my house in Heaven, and that the missing suitcase was full of moldy old Bibles I hadn’t read in years.

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God wants us to be patient. It’s supposed to be one of our defining features – “the patience of saints” – but not all of us have quite yet earned that stripe. We’re to be patient the way Isaiah was when he walked barefoot and naked for three years, or patient like Ezekiel when he lay for 390 days on his one side, and another 40 days on his other. We’re to be patient like John the Baptist was when for all those years he lived in the desert and ate nothing but locusts and wild honey, or like Jesus, when he was ready to start his ministry at 12 years of age but had to wait another long 18.

We’re to be patient, and it’s not something we can do on our own. It’s a supernatural ability that comes from God, the same way our sainthood does. We can’t make ourselves patient any more than we can make ourselves saints. We can’t even pray for patience. We need to open ourselves to it and wait for it, and wait for it, and wait for it, and then – eventually – like a dream – it will come.

We have to be patient because God’s timing is perfect, and you can’t rush perfection.