On a train platform sharing the gift that evolves into fulfillment

It's nighttime in Bern, Switzerland, and we're riding the escalator up and out of the train station. It's just Lauren, one of my soul sisters in the world, and me.

She lives here as of recently, and I'm visiting from Athens, holding a lot of questions in my head and heart, and also living. We stumble upon answers in the living.

And then we walk right into it: a man with a guitar under the awning of the train station. He's playing "Chasing Cars" by Snow Patrol, and the space and people are transformed. Invisible lines are drawn between each of us, like one of those connect-the-numbers puzzles. The music is the lines, and even though I can't see what the picture is, we make one. I am left marveling at how just one man with a gift who shares it gives all of himself, can make a space holy.

Lauren, earlier that day: "The world tells us to get to our end goal quickly, but God's not in a rush. God gives us our desires, knows about them and wants to use them, put them all together."

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: " ... the rest is denial and longing."

Jesus, Mark 1:15: "This is the time of fulfillment."

And I am still thinking about what Jesus turned around and asked in that Gospel reading from John 1:38 a few Sundays ago. "What are you looking for?"

Lauren squats down on the sidewalk and pulls her brown leather sketchbook out of her bag. She starts sketching the guitarist, rough lines that transform into his mouth, the curls of his hair, his eyes. Broken sketches, tiny details penciled randomly around the page, showing what she finds holy, interesting, worthy.

His mouth, next to the microphone. The shape of his right arm coming around the body of the guitar, to strum. The woman's foot in her boot, standing behind and off to the side of the guitarist, crossed at the ankles, toe pointing up to the sky. An artist is one who takes time with the same things other people pass by.

The man our age standing next to us, alone, watches her sketches. They exchange smiles when three men come and stand right in front of her. Another young man comes over and asks what she's doing and if she's drawing the singer because she loves him. "I don't love him," she says. "But I do think it's beautiful."

There are children chasing each other, spinning in circles and laughing. The littlest boy, the one who spins around because his older sisters do, first stands mesmerized, arms at his sides, right in front of the guitarist, still, watching. Listening.

Lauren is ripping the page out of her sketchbook. "Should I keep it? No," she says. She walks up and lays it in the open guitar case where other people have put coins, her offering. On the tram, as we're riding away, I look behind me out the window and see the guitarist holding the sketchpaper, looking down at it. He folds it, and then we turn the corner. When the time is right, the sun comes up and sheds light on everything.