Dr. Tom Troeger recalls the time when he had to be away from his fiancee for over a month to take comprehensive exams in his senior year in college. Being madly in love and having to be away from his fiancee made him very sad and depressed. He was on a bus traveling from Ithaca, New York to New Haven, Connecticut. The bus stopped at the Binghamton Greyhound bus station. The station left a lot to be desired. Troeger sat down at a little dinette on one of those circular pedestal stools with the stuffing coming out. The counter was U-shaped and he found himself sitting directly across from an old woman.

The old woman saw him and said, "Boy, honey, you sure look depressed." Troeger replied, "I am depressed," and started crying. The woman tried to reach across to pat his cheek. He pulled back because the woman had dirt under her fingernails. "What's wrong honey?" she asked. He told her about his fiancee back home and how much he would miss her. He showed the woman a picture of her. The woman said, "O, I never saw such a beautiful woman."

The woman told him she had been married to a traveling salesman who had since passed away. I used to weep, she said, every time my husband had to go away. How happy we were, though, each time he returned. "Marriage was wonderful," she told him. "You're going to have a wonderful marriage. Everything will be just fine." She suggested he might feel better if he ate something. She ordered the last donut from underneath the scratchy plastic cover. The woman broke the donut and said, "Here, eat this." Just then an announcement came on and the woman said, "That's my bus. I've got to go." She got up and left. "Just then my eyes were opened," Troeger concludes, "and I recognized that Christ was there in that bus station."

Ron Newhouse

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