An assigned seat on a train

Took the train back from Chicago to Fairfield on Monday.  The train was late. It boarded late. Then there was a delay of three more hours because the engine didn't have a working bell and there was a ditch light that was not functioning. The long and the short of it is that we got in at 10 p.m. instead of 6 p.m.

But I had a lovely companion beside me, Sydney, a junior at Iowa Wesleyan College in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa. Sydney is a triple major in the sciences – chemistry, biology, and one other science that I don't quite remember. She has a double minor in art and English. Sydney, who just turned twenty-one, is one of the most brilliant far-seeing life-understanding people I have ever met. I'm not speaking of her making the Dean's List but of her very Being. She knows and goes by so many of the good things that God tells us in Heavenletters™.

She says things like: "What would be the good of living just for yourself?" How many twenty-one year olds do you know who think like that? How many sixty-year olds?

Even when Sydney was eleven years old, something moved her to be greater than she knew herself to be. Her older brother had taken her out to lunch. It was a wonderful lunch. Sydney couldn't eat all the food right then and took a doggie bag and looked forward to finishing the wonderful meal later. Her nice brother had also given her a dollar for bubble gum.

Near the restaurant, Sydney saw a homeless woman, and something moved Sydney beyond her individual will, and she gave the doggie bag to the homeless person and also the dollar her brother had given her for bubblegum. This was beyond her volition, you understand. An unseen hand had moved her.

When Sydney sat next to me in our assigned seats on the train, she had just bought a goldfish. She carried it in a plastic see-through container. Don't you just love someone who brings a goldfish along with her on a train?

I'd like to tell you some of Sydney's history. She was a twin. She and her sister were born five months prematurely. Born at four months, Sydney weighed 14 ounces. She was not expected to live. If she lived, it was expected that she would be physically and mentally underdeveloped. Her twin sister weighed more than she did and was expected to live. But after two hours, her sister died, and Sydney lived. Now, twenty-one years later, Sydney is tall and beautiful.

And here is Sydney, brilliant, beautiful, wise, loving, and unselfish. Even as a young child, she wondered: "How is it I lived, and my sister did not? What am I alive for? What is the reason?"

Sydney has already written 160 pages of a book of fiction based on true experience. Sydney's book portrays a unique view. I marvel that she thought of the angle she did. Very exciting.

In a couple of years, when you see a new book out by a young author with the name Sydney Snelling, remember that this is the Sydney who made my long-delayed train ride so enjoyable and worthwhile and time pass so quickly.