THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK

Imagine, if you can, a working day of almost 20 hours, spent largely in the dark, close to other people but not communicating with them, essentially alone but occasionally helped by friendly hands at difficult moments, and trying to find the most suitable and quickest passages and exits out of a kind of impenetrable maze.

Who would be doing that?  A disabled person trying to get out of a coal mine?  

For the answer we must turn to Mr. Robert Robinson of Sandhurst, Berkshire, who has just set a record for … travelling to all the stations on the London Underground (all 282 of them) in the shortest recorded time: 19 hours, 59 minutes, 37 seconds, from Temple at 5.02am to leafy Amersham in the Chilterns at 1am the next morning.

The most remarkable things about this achievement are (1) that he found all the stations actually open (2) that there was only one delay in the whole day and (3) that he had to include the new Jubilee Line – the one which serves the famous Dome – despite the fact that, despite its magnificent architecture, it is almost invariably out of order.

His friends were there to ferry him from one terminus to an adjacent one to save him from having to double back.  And he had to save vital seconds by arriving directly opposite the exit at each point.

He said he could have done it 20 minutes quicker, but “we always seem to get stuck on the Northern line; it’s the Barnet branch that causes the most problems”.  I know it well.

And what was the point of this exercise?  Well, it was sponsored for charity. But apart from that, none, apart from doing it because it was there to be done.

Really it seems a little parable for life: much of the time we rush along, fretting that we won’t succeed, trying to calculate how to fit in things as best we can and then being stymied by some problem, usually the predictable and traditional one. Our friends help us, but much of the time we are essentially alone … and in the dark, where we lose our bearings and feel we are at other people’s mercy.

So it was that Nicodemus came in the darkness of the night to Jesus (Gospel today) and heard those words: “God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish, but might have everlasting life”.   Now, as then, here is the antidote to rushing alone, lonely and perplexed, in a seemingly endless tunnel.