Facing The Altar

I commute to work on CalTrain, and CalTrain has an imperfect ticket verification system. You buy a card, and it must be validated before getting on the train. To validate the card, you punch it like an old-school timecard in a machine at the station. It takes a bite out of your card and punches the date. Once on the train, the conductors are supposed to walk through the cars verifying each passenger’s card. The imperfections occur when the punch machines fail, or when they obfuscate the stamp, or when the conductors don’t verify tickets.

Today I was riding in the shuttle with a coworker, and we were talking about how to save money on the commute. He confessed to me that he only punches his card half the time on the way home because they rarely check the tickets in the afternoon. I had not thought of that before, but upon reflection on my previous trips I came to agree.

At that moment I was tempted to not punch my card, to save the couple dollars, and throw caution to the wind. But through God’s good graces and Mary’s intercession, reason and honesty prevailed and my coworker followed me to the puncher and punched his card after mine. We boarded the train and after a few stops were surprised to see a conductor enter the car and ask for tickets. One of the first people he asked was a girl who started making excuses about why her card wasn’t punched. I see this behavior at least twice a day, and usually it sounds to me like lying. In this case the conductor was making some fairly sound arguments about how her excuses weren’t adding up. She resorted to her youthful beauty and battered her eyes and asked in her sweetest voice if he would please just validate the ticket for her. But the conductor was having none of it. My coworker and I laughed because we felt like justice would finally prevail and the backbone-less conductors might actually write a ticket, something I have not seen since taking the train to work.

Instead he wrote “WARNING” all over her punch card to indicate that she had been thoroughly warned and placed the responsibility for enforcement firmly on someone else’s shoulders. It got me to thinking about how we sometimes make excuses for behaviors that are sinful or lead us into temptation, and do we want to be the person at the gates of heaven making excuses and presenting a punch card with “WARNING” on it?

When i was considering not punching my card just a few minutes earlier, I didn’t think that it might actually lead me to more sins, such as lying about a broken punch machine.

As I pulled out my card to prepare for the conductor I looked at the tidy corners, the dates I had ridden, the clear history of alternating trips, and how all the dates and times showed a clear pattern of my ridership. My coworker pulled out his crumpled card, full of conductor validations, and stamps that showed only morning validations.

I thought about how sin always sounds so good at first, but if I could see visual evidence on my soul like I saw on the punch card, perhaps I could make the right decision faster.