Categories: uncategorized
Date: 10 January 2006 13:32:01
Yesterday I was in London for one of my monthly Trustee meetings. As always I stayed for some dinner, sneaking out at 9pm to get across London for my train home.
We were actually early into Coventry (which is not unusual on that train) and so the announcement was made that we had to wait 15 minutes for our departure time. I had switched the album on my mp3 player to Graham Kendrick and was enjoying some chilled out moments thinking about the lyrics.
No sooner had the announcement been made that we'd be leaving at 11.12pm, another anouncement was made that no trains were leaving Coventry due to a fatality at Lea Hall (one of the small stations inbetween the airport and Birmingham itself). It's in these situations you have a flood of mixed emotions - was it an accident or a 'jumper'? could it be someone I know? general relief that it's highly unlikely to be.. That Graham Kendrick song that always brings tears to my eyes played on my mp3 player (I'm not copying and pasting the lyrics as the website says you need permission to reproduce them).
It got me thinking a bit about how we become immunised to a greater or lesser extent by the state of the world, the fact that for whatever reason people die every day and we just go on. Which we have to of course, otherwise we wouldn't live our lives but I feel being completely disaffected removes us from the real things in life. It can be difficult to find meaning in the big things that we do every day, the mundane and the things that stress us out. Projects and deadlines, things that seem so big and important. Promoting Engineering to the wider community, ecouraging kids to study it so that the UK retains the abillity to sustain the economy through the wealth creation of actually designing and producing things. But from the other perspective, all these things are finite and it is the eternal that we should concern ourselves with. It's difficult to balance and reconcile these views. Should we just give it all up and live the rest of our days in contemplative meditation? What purpose would that serve? It seems to me that it is the way in which we approach the big and mundane things with the eternal in mind that must be the balance for average people like me. I am not really sure how to achieve this on an ongoing basis and apply it to my own life. I think that we do have to find time to be affected by the world around us though, by things that are horrific but which happen every day, as well as the beauty which surrounds us perpetually but which goes unnoticed.. We cannot just accept bad in the world as it is, we need to believe that something better is possible and that God does work through people and is present in alll sitations. Otherwise there's no hope at all.
May God be with all those who are affected by the death the person killed at Lea Hall last night.