CHICAGO, IL (December 26, 2002) – (Editor’s note: This story, originally published in the Freeport (Illinois) Journal-Standard newspaper last May, is offered as a post-Christmas story of God’s gift of grace in the form of a toy. The tale involves two Covenanters – Mark Westlind, professor of World Mission at North Park Theological Seminary in Chicago, and Dale Reed, a parishioner at Grace Covenant Church in Chicago and the son of longtime missionaries Jerry and Nancy Reed.
By Olga Gize Carlile
This is the story about the little engine that could and would re-couple with the rest of the train . . .
Our train story starts 33 years ago when Mark Westlind – then about 8 years of age – went with his missionary parents to the Evangelical Covenant Church in Tulcan, Ecuador, a small town on the border between Ecuador and Colombia.
Due to health reasons, the Westlinds – mom and pop and the kids – had to return suddenly to the United States and travel being what it was back then, they could take little more than what they could carry.
Young Mark had a Marklin HO gauge model train set. He pleaded with his dad to allow him to take a couple of train cars. He was told this would not be possible. “Only the engine,” his parents informed him.
In the intervening years, he often thought of that train set and went on to actually work as an engineer in the Southwestern part of the United States for a time.
The Reed family – Jerry and Nancy and children – arrived sometime after the Westlinds had left and discovered items which had been left behind. Dale Reed, than a kid of 4 or 5 years of age, ended up receiving pieces of that train set as birthday presents over the years with other pieces and cars added to the set over time. He learned a lot about circuits and electricity in playing with that set.
Some years he would set it up around the Christmas tree. Following graduate school, he directed an inner-city technology program and used the train set as the basis for designing computer circuits to control a train-switching yard. Later on, the train set languished in his closet.
Years later, when Dale’s brother, Rob, was being ordained as a missionary in the Evangelical Covenant Church, his dad introduced him to Mark Westlind. In the conversation that followed, Mark told about his family’s hurried departure from Ecuador and mentioned that Marklin HO gauge model train engine and what it meant to him.
Dale, who had acquired the pieces of that train set over the years, asked Mark, “Do you want it?” Mark was surprised: “Are you serious?” he asked. Dale invited him to stop by. Mark was deeply touched to get back the train set that he thought he would never see again, a train set that had meant so much to him growing up.
“I count myself fortunate to have been able to give it to him, for though the train set was a nice toy for me, to him it was a treasure,” Dale reflected. “To be used to bless others is itself a blessing. To me the story showed how God can give us the deep desires of our heart, even separated by time and space.”
And so the parts were coupled together again after all those years and became a train set once more. And the little engine that could, did.
Copyright © 2011 The Evangelical Covenant Church.