Day 57 - People on the move

Here! Have you see this?

TIME OUT HEADLINE: Tube nerds have got a new toy

Now, I am a self-confessed transport nerd. I am not alone in this. Anybody who organizes talks or programmes for local community groups will know that the biggest draws are talks on transport networks: roads, trains, trams, bus routes, we love them! The UK has an amazing history of travel. Many of our roads go back to Roman times, or even before. Our landscape is full of coaching inns, and cris-crossed with relics of later ages: canals, old railway lines and the like.

Tube nerds have a peculiar form of the transport disease, in that their network exists largely underground, hidden from sight, a fascinating mass of troglodytes, rattling through a maze of interconnecting, tunnels, and occasionally emerging into the sunshine (or rain) at the surface.

The ‘new toy’, then, can be found here: Live Tube Map - real-time London Underground Trains. As it suggests, it is – it really is! – a live, real time tube map. What it shows is worm-like structures, which are the trains, moving through the tunnels. If you hover over them (which is itself a surreal idea in this context), you can identify tube lines and stations, and the details and destination of each train as it worms its way under London.

As Time Out suggests, this is probably more of a source of fascination than of useful information at present. But do take a minute to look at it, and see if you get hooked. What it gave me was the powerful sense of a community of people on the move. If you use the tube, or a train or local bus service or road, you are pursuing your journey, with your own purpose, getting (or being frustrated in trying to get) from one place to another. But you are also part of a crowd of people, meeting and diverging, inhabiting the same space, then going their separate ways.

Sometimes fellow travellers are the enemy! That driver who cuts across you at the traffic lights; the person holding a loud phone conversation on the train; or someone who refuses to ‘move down inside the car’ so that you can get on a crowded tube (actually, they are more of a challenge than a problem!).

But they are also companions, fellow-sufferers in times of adversity, sharers of a wry smile, or sometimes Good Samaritans, who will reach out to help when things go wrong.

It’s not surprising that the ‘journey’ is one of the great metaphors of life, particularly the life of faith. I have already mentioned one of the parables of Jesus, answering the question, ‘Who is my neighbour?’ with a story of intersecting journeys, and someone who reached out to help a fellow traveller in desperate need. Two others pass by on the other side, one stops to help, and conveys the wounded traveller to an inn, a place of safety and rest.

Maybe you can think of other stories from Scripture, and from the history of Christian life, that involve travelling, both literally, moving from place to place, but also figuratively, as people learn and grow in the company of others.

• Thank God with me now, for those who have been your Good Samaritan, or Inn Keeper at some stage of your life;

• Ask forgiveness for the times you have passed by on the other side, leaving someone bleeding by the roadside;

• And spend a little time praying for those who share your journey. You might like to use the live tube map to visualize that mass of people, seen and unseen, who share these times with us.

• Oh, and next time you are actually on a journey, try praying for the people round you. You will find that God is there too!

Janet Wootton