Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Thought for the Day

As delivered today at BBC Radio Bristol, a day when the six month anniversary of an eloping to Syria was being remembered and also the engineering work on utilising the hot springs under Bath to heat the Abbey was being discussed:

Have you ever felt a compulsion to travel? An inner voice you could not ignore?

My Bible is full of people who heard a voice which they identified as God-inspired to go places. Amos from Judah to Israel. Philip to the Gaza desert road; Paul and Luke to Macedonia. There are other examples.

It may depend how you respond to foreign news? Are they the pages of the newspaper you skip? When BBC Radio Bristol talks about Syria how do you feel?

It is perfectly possible to be interested in the rest of the world without wanting to leave home. But clearly some people have the travel bug and some don't.

My younger son and his girlfriend have it. They see their working lives as a way of funding their journeys. India, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Vietnam and Japan - all done. Yesterday they returned from Morocco.

These days almost all news from around the world is with us in an instant. Terrorism relies on that. It makes me a nervous father when they are away.

So, on hearing stories of ISIS, of Ebola, of famine or strife, some feel a compulsion to go and help or join in; others to stay and pray; still others turn to the sports pages.

On a day when we discuss the application of progress to the work of some heating engineers who travelled over from Rome to Bath a couple of millennia ago, maybe we should stop and think.

Our world is very much more joined-up than it used to be. Which gives us the opportunity of caring about what happens to people we may never meet. Do you?

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