Orphan Train

Come all you broken hearted, come and lay your burden down
Come kings and queens, come royalty surrender up your crown
Come empty-handed come with nothing of your own to claim
Come naked, poor, come like a child to ride the orphan train

Chorus: Come ride, ride on the orphan train
Put your ear to the track, you can hear your name
Come ride, ride on the orphan train, it'll take you all the way home

The way is narrow, it is steep that brings you to the door
But love awaits there to embrace your heart forevermore

Come you abandoned, you forsaken
Friendless and alone, come refugees left homesick for
Some place you've never known
Here princes, paupers, criminals and saints are all the same
No more or less than God's beloved child aboard this train

It’ll take you all the way home
It’s gonna take you all the way home
Lee Ann Womack

It's hard for me to talk about feeling like a refugee, when there are so many people suffering right now, here and all over the world that really have lost everything.

I'm ashamed in a way of this pain I am feeling, when there is suffering in this world that there are not even words to describe. I have never had to hold my child in my arms while I watch them die of starvation or disease. We are not being ravaged by war and our poverty is wealth in comparison to the poverty of the poorest. We are all healthy. We have health care and clean water. We have a place to lay our heads at night. We have so much to be grateful for and such a responsibility to share what we have been given and yet...

Even with the knowledge of all this, my heart feels as though it has lost everything. The storm has come and washed it all away. I can't find a place to lie my head. Desolation-so lost I don't where to turn. I'm waiting for that train, sitting on the tracks, empty handed, waiting to go home, to some place I belong.

Will I ever stop this crying? It wells up in me , uninvited, the tears come, seeping out of me as though there's no room left for one single more. I can't sleep. I can't eat. I try to keep the boys from the worst of it. I try to be happy for them and try to keep their lives as normal as possible. I wonder if they see the floods raging and the fires burning through me when I look into their eyes? I pray not.

I don't know how to stop feeling this sadness or grief or mourning or whatever it is. It seems independent of thought, untouched by lectures or shaming or common sense or any effort at containing it. It seems to have a life of its own and it pounds in my chest, day and night, knocking to be let out.

I don't know how to pray-the old ways of knowing God seem useless to me now. I am silenced at the cross.

I' m just going to wait here by the tracks. I have nowhere left to go.