The Caboose Doesn’t Drive

The Walk That Rewrote a Sentence

The first time I walked to the grocery store completely alone, I broke down in tears in the parking lot. Almost fifteen years had passed since I’d gotten myself anywhere without someone else beside me.

We moved to a 55+ community in 2023, and there’s a back path near my house that reaches nearly everywhere I need to go: the pharmacy, the bank, the physical therapist, the grocery store, more places than I can count, all six to eight minutes on foot. For a long time after I turned in my license in 2011, the sentence in my head was I have to ask for a ride to get anywhere now. That day in the parking lot rewrote it. I GET to walk everywhere now.

That shift, from have to to get to, is one I’ve made more than once.

Faith Over Feelings

Learning to put faith over feelings is tough, especially when the thing you’re facing isn’t going to change. A friend sent me a devotional built on an illustration Bill Bright made famous: three train cars. The engine is fact, the truth of who God is, and it doesn’t move based on feelings. The coal car is faith, the choice to trust the engine before feelings agree. The caboose is feelings, still on board, still real, but not in charge of where the train goes.

For a long time I let the caboose drive. Frustration showed up when I couldn’t get somewhere on my own. So did the old ache of feeling less than, the sting of watching a friend step in to do something I used to do without help. None of those feelings were wrong to have. They just weren’t allowed to steer.

Faith in What Doesn’t Move

That’s faith over feelings: God delights in me and rejoices over me, not because of what I can still do on my own, but because of whose I am. Nothing about that asks me to earn it first. Hebrews 13:8 says Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and that’s the engine that doesn’t move no matter what the caboose is doing.

Fiction Got Here First

Fiction had already been circling this same fight. In Written on My Heart, Gabe, spends most of a novel believing the world’s verdict on him is the only one that counts. He tells a woman he loves: “I’ve been there . . . when the world told me I wasn’t enough because of the blood in my veins.”

His mother tells him something different. “Your blood is not a curse, Gabe. It’s a gift. It shaped you.”

Pete Manning, the man who raised him, adds his own piece. “God uses everything, our past, our pain, our heritage, for His purposes. He wastes nothing.”

For the first time in a long while, something in Gabe settles. His blood didn’t change. The town’s memory of him didn’t either. What changed was Gabe finally believing what his mother and Pete had been telling him all along: his blood was a gift, not a curse, and God doesn’t waste any of it, not even the parts Gabe was most ashamed of.

Which Car Gets to Drive

My blindness is not going away. Gabe’s past isn’t either. What changes is which car gets to drive. I have to live with what won’t change. I get to decide it doesn’t get the last word.

I have to live with what won’t change. I get to decide it doesn’t get the last word.

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What about you? Name the thing in your life that isn’t changing, the diagnosis, the loss, the relationship that never got fixed, and ask yourself honestly which car has been driving it. Your feelings are real, and they’re welcome on board. They were just never meant to steer.

If you read the post on being a burden, this is the same fight in a different car.

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