The Ruin on the Rail Line

For decades, the rusted elevated tracks of the High Line cut through Manhattan's West Side like an iron scar. Built in the 1930s to carry freight trains above the streets, the railway had been abandoned since 1980. Weeds split the gravel. Wildflowers grew where boxcars once rolled. City officials called it blight and pushed for years to tear it down.

Then two strangers — Joshua David and Robert Hammond — showed up at the same community meeting in 1999. They looked at what everyone else saw as wreckage and imagined a garden in the sky. For years they fought demolition orders, gathered supporters, and raised funds while critics dismissed the whole idea as absurd.

Today the High Line is one of the most beloved public spaces in America — a mile-and-a-half elevated park drawing millions of visitors each year. The neighborhoods below, once neglected, now flourish. The ruin the city wanted to demolish became the cornerstone of an entire community's renewal.

Psalm 118 sings this same breathtaking reversal. The stone the builders rejected — the suffering servant, the discarded hope, the story everyone assumed was finished — becomes the very foundation of what the Almighty is building. The psalmist nearly died, yet lived to tell. What the world marked for demolition, God marked for glory. And the only fitting response is the one the psalm gives us: "This is the day the LORD has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it."