The Things We Can't See

The Hobo:           What exactly is your persuasion on the big man, since you brought him up?

The Hero Boy:    Well, I … I want to believe. But…

The Hobo:           But you don’t want to be bamboozled. You don’t want to be led down the primrose path. You don’t want to be conned or duped, have the wool pulled over your eyes, hoodwinked. You don’t want to be taken for a ride, railroaded. Seeing is believing. Am I right?

The Polar Express (2004)

All right, it’s not the Polar Express, but I still think all steam trains are a little bit magical somehow.

“Eagle Owl?”

That’s the special pseudonym by which the Brownies belonging to the unit in which I am an Assistant Leader know me.¹ It’s not a particularly common one, but they’d already had a Brown Owl, a Snowy, a Tawny, a Barn – and it would have been positively ridiculous to dub all six-foot-one of me ‘Little Owl’, so I didn’t have a lot of options left.

“Eagle Owl?”

This was the Brownies’ Christmas party, which took place a couple of weeks ago now. It was designed to be a really chill end to the term: a couple of crafts, a game of Pass the Parcel, and then settling down in front of a Christmas film with popcorn and hot chocolate.²

“Eagle Owl?”

The trouble was, much as the waiters on the Polar Express are apparently able to produce individual mugs of hot chocolate for an entire train full of children nigh on simultaneously – with a catchy song and dance routine to boot – such a thing is, unfortunately, not possible when you’re working out of one small kitchen that’s not even a little bit magical.

“Eagle Owl?!”

And that meant that some of the Brownies had received their hot chocolate before certain others of the Brownies.

“Eagle Owl, I haven’t had my hot chocolate yet.”

This was a conversation I was required to have several times. Wait, I said. Brown Owl is making enough hot chocolates for everyone; she just can’t make them all at once. You shall get yours soon, I said. It shall have marshmallows in it if you asked for marshmallows. You don’t need to worry about it. And, I added in the privacy of my own thoughts, it would be simply marvellous if you would stop needlessly talking over the film.

I was enjoying The Polar Express. It struck, I felt, an unusual tone for a child-friendly Christmas film – darker and stranger and more enigmatic than your typical saccharine stuff. Granted, it had its fair share of slightly nauseating veneration of the ‘Christmas spirit’ – that bizarre sanctity so often afforded the season and all its associated trappings – but that was no less than could be expected. The best thing about it was the titular enchanted steam train itself. I think there’s something about trains that means they naturally lend themselves to magic and adventure anyway – it would probably take a lot of thought and another blog post to pin down exactly what – but this was a specially good one, appearing out of nowhere in the middle of the night with its light slicing through the snowfall, and going on to encounter rails like rollercoasters, a vast frozen lake, and stunning views of the aurora borealis. It helped that the animation was pretty phenomenal.

For such a breathtakingly surreal bit of cinema, however, the moral of the story, at least as far as I was able to read it, seemed incongruously mundane. The lesson learned by our nameless protagonist – listed in the credits simply as the Hero Boy – was encapsulated by the word the Conductor ultimately punched into his train ticket: believe. In the context, that meant believe in Father Christmas – which might not sound like a very sensible thing to do under normal circumstances, but under the premise that he had been picked up by a magical steam train, taken to the North Pole, and personally introduced to the jolly red-coated gentleman himself, it was surely the only sensible thing for him to do. One ought to believe in things which one has been shown very strong grounds to believe in: the film’s message really does seem to be as straightforward as that.

“Eagle Owl?”

Though maybe there was more nuance and profundity being given to that message during all the bits I was missing because I had to deal with Brownies who were worried about their beverages.

“Eagle Owl, I asked for milk and I haven’t got it yet and everyone else has her hot chocolate and I haven’t got my milk.”

By this point, I’ll admit, I had allowed myself to become a tad exasperated with the girls’ understandable impatience. Of that I repent. Still, it did have its uses in germinating in my mind the idea for this blog post.

Did you tell Brown Owl that you wanted milk? I asked the Brownie in question. Well then, she knows you want milk and she will get it for you. She’s probably getting it for you right now, if everyone else has had her hot chocolate. Have faith in Brown Owl, were the exact words with which I concluded.

 

Personally, I can’t see why anyone would opt for milk over hot chocolate, but you know, to each her own, and more for the rest of us.

The Hero Boy’s initial doubts that Father Christmas would bring him presents, I could understand: before his arctic train ride turned the tables, he’d never met the guy, and the only solid evidence he had regarding his existence was stacked up firmly on the ‘against’ side; we saw this in the opening scene, when he looked through a stack of magazine articles about department store Santas going on strike and so forth. The Brownies’ doubts that Brown Owl would bring them hot drinks, on the other hand, baffled me: it was mere minutes since she’d asked them what they wanted, drinks had been appearing at frequent intervals since, and more to the point, they all, based on months or in some cases years of weekly unit meetings, knew her to be a kind and reliable individual committed to their happiness and wellbeing. Why was it so difficult to believe that she would do what she’d said she would?

But of course, my confusion turned to conviction within seconds of my brain linking up the analogy between my exhortation that the Brownies should have faith in Brown Owl, and the Bible’s exhortation that I should have faith in God.

There’s a bit of The Polar Express subsequent to that which formed my opening quotation, where the Conductor picks up on some of what the Hobo said then. “Years ago, on my first Christmas Eve run,” he narrates, “I was up on the roof making my rounds when I slipped on the ice myself. I reached out for a hand iron, but it broke off. I slid and fell – and yet I did not fall off this train.”

“Someone saved you?” infers another of the train’s passengers, this one known imaginatively as the Hero Girl.

“Or something,” replies the Conductor.

“An angel,” she suggests.

“Maybe,” shrugs the Conductor.

“Wait, wait,” interjects the Hero Boy. “What did he look like? Did you see him?”

“No, sir,” admits the Conductor. “But sometimes seeing is believing, and sometimes the most real things in the world are the things we can’t see.”³

It’s a hashtag-inspirational statement of the sort that tends to end up emblazoned on pointless items in gift shops, but once again, I suggest we draw a rather mundane moral. The Conductor didn’t see who or what it was that saved him from falling off the train, but he believed that it existed on the very good grounds that something saved him from falling off the train – and hence we learn that one doesn’t have to actually see something in order to have very good grounds to believe in it. One doesn’t have to actually see Brown Owl preparing one’s hot chocolate or milk in order to have very good grounds to believe that one is going to get it. One doesn’t have to actually see the precise outworkings of God’s promises in order to have very good grounds to believe that he is going to keep them.

“He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” wrote Paul in the extraordinary eighth chapter of his letter to the community of believers living in Rome.⁴ Jesus’ sacrifice is the ultimate proof of God’s character – unimpeachable justice, unbelievable mercy, unstoppable love – and so we might not be able to see, on any given day, that our unseen Father in heaven is conforming us to the perfect human likeness of his Son, or that he is building up the global family of believers among every people-group and language, or that he has appointed a time when the Lord will return to judge the nations in truth and equity – but we can look back at our salvation and know that that is who God is, and if he has done that for us, how will he not do for us everything else he’s said he will?⁵ If I soon became exasperated with the Brownies’ doubtful impatience, I can hardly defend my own, especially since God is in fact demonstrably more kind and reliable and committed to the wellbeing of his people than even Brown Owl. Nonetheless, I am, marvellously, forgiven my lack of faith – through, of course, that very same sacrifice that throws into light exactly how unwarranted it is. Seriously, take a moment right now to just consider: if God, who, though unseen, is all-powerful over everything that exists, chose of his own free will to give up his one and only beloved Son for the sake of saving you, O Dearly Cherished Reader, how will he not bring about every other thing he’s promised you? Indeed, how will he withhold from you anything – anything – that would be for your ultimate good?

And could there be any greater comfort in which to rest than that?

Given that God is unseen, we have to walk by faith rather than sight – but that being so, we could hardly have better grounds to believe in him as he says he is than what he did for us at the cross. Sometimes, as it turns out, the most real things in the world really are the things we can’t see.

Footnotes 

¹ If you’ve got in your head that I must be helping to lead a gang of chocolate-flavoured tray cakes, allow the Girlguiding website to correct you: https://www.girlguiding.org.uk/what-we-do/guiding-by-age-group/brownies/. 

² My favourite place to get hot chocolate has, I think, got to be the Glorious Art House: https://www.facebook.com/TheGloriousArtHouse/. 

³ I think I’ve assigned all the dialogue to the right speakers; this very handy transcript, http://www.veryabc.cn/movie/uploads/script/ThePolarExpress.txt, doesn’t include that information, and though I could find one or two clips of the relevant scene, such as this rather nice one, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3i3XvyDosQ, they all stopped halfway through the dialogue I wanted to quote. My apologies for any inaccuracy on my part. 

⁴ I know, I know, I quote Romans 8 all the time, but only because it’s SO GOOD. Go on, treat yourself to another peruse of it: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+8&version=ESVUK. 

⁵ On these three points in particular, see, for example, Romans 8:29, Matthew 16:18 and 24:14, ad Acts 17:31, just off the top of my head (well, with a little help from Bible Gateway). But I kind of hate proof-texting like that for such massive themes of scripture.