The order nobody can explain

One · What happened

Six trains stopped and one was told to go

On Wednesday morning a computer failure brought down the control system on the high-speed line, Transport Minister Óscar Puente said. ABC News reported that he counted six trains halted when it happened. NBC News described the control center authorizing a Renfe train to resume its run while an Iryo train stood stopped ahead of it. Puente called the order “inexplicable” and the decision a break with protocol. ABC Australia added that he said the engineers were not to blame. Authorities said the Renfe train likely hit the Iryo train from behind, with two coaches ending up down an embankment, according to ABC News. By the count of the regional government of Castilla-La Mancha, at least sixty-eight people were dead.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said, “Today all of Spain is grieving,” and declared three days of national mourning. Sánchez went on, ABC Australia reported, to call it “unacceptable for a country like Spain to suffer two high-speed rail accidents in the same year.” The first accident was in January near Adamuz, where NBC News counted forty-six dead. Sánchez said, according to NBC, that his government would act “if there has been negligence.” Hundreds of people protested outside the Transport Ministry in Madrid, ABC Australia reported, demanding the government’s resignation, and police used tear gas on some of them. Who answers for the crash is a fight Spain is having this week. With the investigators unfinished, a reader in Ohio or Texas has no evidence to bring to it.

“The car leaned to one side like it was about to tip over,” said Ignacio Relaño, a passenger on the Renfe train, as ABC Australia printed it. David Gómez, a construction worker, told the Madrid newspaper El País that he cut through fences to reach the wreck, ABC Australia reported. People from nearby gave first aid until the emergency services arrived, NBC News reported. ABC Australia reported that the sports pavilion in Urda served as a triage hub for the injured and that a military emergency brigade was deployed. The two trains carried more than five hundred people between them, NBC News said.

Two · What it is doing

The verdict that arrives before the finding

Emiliano García-Page, who heads the regional government, said, “We are going to get to the bottom of this,” as ABC News reported. The families in Toledo are owed that promise. Being told that a cause exists makes a reader want it for himself. He does not want to wait for the independent accident commission that García-Page said must rule on whether January’s crash and this one are connected. A reader who distrusted the government before Wednesday can hear a minister pointing at a desk in a control center. Someone who trusted it hears a plain report of one person’s failure. Both readings are in place while the commission has yet to publish a word.

A traveler in Ohio with a ticket for next month reads Puente’s sentence about the control center. The sentence describes the arrangement every passenger on both trains had been depending on. He reads Sánchez calling two high-speed accidents in one year “unacceptable” and starts to wonder who, at a desk he will never see, decides whether his train goes. Unseen decisions have carried him every time he has bought a ticket. A crash is the day the arrangement shows.

A reader nowhere near the wreck can be drawn into the passenger accounts. “I saw dead people,” Eduarda, an Iryo passenger, told Cadena SER, as NBC News carried it. Account after account can be read to the end. The reading does nothing for the people in Toledo and takes a night’s sleep from the reader. Under the reading there can lie a gladness at being somewhere else. A man can grieve for sixty-eight strangers and be relieved in the same breath that none of them was his wife.

Three · Where the ground is

What belongs to the searchers and what belongs to God

“The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever” (Deuteronomy 29:29). Moses said it to all Israel in the land of Moab, at the renewal of the covenant. In that verse the secret things are God’s own purposes, the ones he has not told. Nothing in the verse tells anyone to stop asking. A collection of Solomon’s proverbs, copied by the men of Hezekiah, says, “It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out” (Proverbs 25:2). How the collision happened, from the failed computer to the order that followed, can be searched out. The people doing the searching in Spain are doing honorable work. A reader’s own verdict adds nothing to their work and cannot reach the thing that belongs to God, his reason for letting this fall on these carriages that morning.

The disciples’ question

The disciples saw a man blind from birth and asked Jesus, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:2). They wanted the culprit first, with the man himself standing in front of them. Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him” (John 9:3). Jesus spoke about that man, on that road. The sentence gives no formula for reading a purpose off Urda or any other wreck. The exchange shows Jesus declining a question that wants the guilty named before anyone has asked what mercy the man himself needs. Within a few verses the man has washed in the pool of Siloam and come back able to see.

The one appointment

The letter to the Hebrews says of every person, “it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment” (Hebrews 9:27). The next verse says what Christ has done for those on the far side of that appointment, “so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him” (Hebrews 9:28). Nobody reading about Urda knows which of the sixty-eight were waiting for him. The date of a reader’s own appointment is no more visible to him than the order was to the passengers. Christ has been raised from the dead. A believer’s place with him does not depend on a signal being right. Someone who has never trusted Christ with that appointment can ask a pastor to read the passage with him this week.

Four · Today

Five things, and none of them are “stay informed”

Each task fits inside an hour, and the last one belongs to the church.

1. 01

   Seal your verdict in an envelope.

   Write down the sentence you have been saying about whose fault it was, the controller’s or the minister’s, with today’s date on it. Seal it in an envelope and write on the front the day the independent accident commission’s report is published, or the first of January if no report has come by then. Open it that day and lay it beside the findings. A guess kept in a drawer can be wrong at no cost to anyone.

2. 02

   Pray for the families in Toledo and for David Gómez.

   Ask God to comfort the relatives of the sixty-eight and to be near the injured in the hospitals of Toledo. Ask him to give the man who cut through the fences some rest. Paul wrote to Corinth about death and gave thanks in the same breath, “But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 15:57). Pray it for the families who are Christ’s. Pray that he would make himself known to the families who are not.

3. 03

   Leave your next itinerary with somebody at home.

   Before your next trip by train or plane, write the departure time, the carrier, the car or seat number and the address where you will sleep on a sheet of paper. Hand the sheet to a person who would notice if you did not call. The sheet takes ten minutes to make and is the one precaution a traveler fully controls. After that, book the trip and get on the train.

4. 04

   Name the explanation you are still waiting on.

   List the one thing in your own life that nobody has been able to account for, a test result or the child who stopped calling. Read Deuteronomy 29:29 over the list, then write beside each item the single next thing a searcher could do, such as phoning a billing office or putting a question to the doctor. Do that one thing today. What stays unanswered after that goes to God by name.

5. 05

   Ask a widow or widower in your church about the first month.

   Call a member of your congregation who lost a spouse or a child suddenly. Ask what the first month held and which people helped most when nothing could be fixed or explained. Keep any reason for what happened to yourself while you listen. If you cannot think of such a person, the church office can name one.