From Charleston WV to New York

This morning I spoke to a breakfast for evangelicals at United Methodism’s Northeast Jurisdiction Conference, in Charleston, WV. It was an impressive and encouraging group. Sadly I had to leave immediately by car for Washington DC where I caught a train for New York to attend a Council on Foreign Relations dinner gathering on religion. I’m now bouncing around on an Amtrak train near Philadelphia. It’s been a tiring day, and it’s especially frustrating to speed through Virginia’s stunning and endlessly enticing Shenandoah Valley with no time to stop.

Travel’s logistics can be a cumbersome nuisance. But last evening I was reading of Winston Churchill’s dramatic 1942 flight to Moscow for his first meeting with Joseph Stalin. It was in an unpressurized bomber with no passenger windows. Dodging the Luftwaffe, Churchill’s flight flew to Cairo and then up over the Caucasus into Russia. It took days but was considered speedy because they skipped over Africa, avoiding the need for disease preventing shots, instead stopping on Gibraltar.

Churchill had many dicey travel adventures during the war, crossing the stormy Atlantic by British warship, evading enemy subs, or by a clipper flight, reaching Washington DC in a mere 27 hours. His urgent flight to Greece over Christmas 1944 to forestall civil war is famous. Of course, his ally FDR, crippled by polio, journeyed to North Africa, Iran, and Yalta, the last trip when he was only weeks from death. Neither statesman complained about the dangers and discomforts of their duty.

For Methodists, Francis Asbury and John Wesley are the uncomplaining travel models. Both journeyed endlessly and evangelistically. Wesley often braved angry mobs. Asbury confronted the frontier’s almost nonexistent roads, routinely fording engorged and sometimes frozen rivers, unprotected from the elements except for occasional hospitable cabins.

Visiting my hundred year old cousin recently, she recalled her first long distance, over night travel as a girl by horse and carriage. The days of primitive travel are not long ago. My air conditioned Acela train is a golden chariot compared to the rickety train that Abraham Lincoln would have taken to Gettysburg or even FDR to Warm Springs. Presidential aide Clark Clifford recalled Harry Truman’s 1948 campaign train as an unending hell.

Too many ungratefully imagine that our world is always worsening. But I would not want to live in any other era than today, which is God blessed in many ways, not least of which is the relative ease and comfort of travel.