A sad truth which amuses my boss no end is that, although my job involves an ever-increasing amount of travelling, I am alarmingly prone to the curse of travel sickness. In fact, the first draft of this article is being penned on the Portsmouth to Waterloo train - as I say, my work has a nomadic element.
On a cross-channel ferry my incipient sympathy for people under the age of 16 nearly died an early death when a small child stopped stock still in front of me and piped up un-endearingly, ‘Mummy, why is that lady green?’
On a plane to Australia, convinced that, surely, by the age of 46, I must have outgrown this infantile propensity and need no pills, I made it as far as Singapore only to break all previous records by needing no fewer than seven bags (not simultaneously, you will be relieved to hear, but across several time zones) to throw up into.
I have been laid low for 24 hours by the winding lanes around Cornwall, smitten by the stop-start car park that is the M25, and most ignominiously of all, waylaid by the 30 minute crossing of a millpond-flat Solent on a windless summer’s day on the Isle of Wight ferry. Trust me, if there was a drug-free way of ‘putting behind me these childish things’ as Paul rather wistfully says in 1 Corinthians, I would go a long way to find it (albeit possibly in close proximity to the nearest on-board conveniences).
As I write, the woman next to me is gaily playing Candy Crush Saga on a tiny phone and the man in front is serenely pursuing enemy troops around a mythical townscape on his console! I could be changing the world one email at a time, scribing great works of heartstopping fiction or devising the latest Messy resource. But the train is lurching and lunging like one of those instruments of torture, by which I include every ride at every theme park except possibly the Rabbit Ride in the toddler section of Paulton’s Park. And I think I had better put my notebook away without bending over at all, and quietly close my eyes for the rest of the journey.
God is a rock and a fortress for a travel sick world – dynamically still in an energetic peace which passes all understanding
Later, in a happier place…
The NHS website says: ‘Most experts support the theory that motion sickness is caused by a conflict of information between your senses.’ In other words, your brain thinks you’re sitting still but your eyes are screaming ‘we’re going down the M27 at 70mph!’ which really messes with the liquids sloshing around your ear that help you balance. Is it pushing things too far to ask if one aspect of a ‘sick’ society is the onslaught of conflicting messages sent to our children that leaves them ill and imbalanced in their inner systems? Think about the conflict between the realities of their bodies, guidance from teachers and parents, natural generosity and instinctive trust versus the messages from a skilled and well-financed media and marketing system that shout to them from every handheld device, television and laptop about acceptable body image and aspirations, acceptable levels of wealth, acceptable role models - values that lunge and lurch from trend to trend with every passing year.
We are in a Church that can make a difference. A Church that can stand against the tide of toxicity poisoning our children, that can and must reinforce to children and their families the unchanging, tried and tested kingdom values of unconditional love, of letting go, of putting others first, of aspiring to be the person we are meant to be, not the false image anyone else would force us into. And we can stand for these values at a personal level through our close relationships with children and families and by quietly modelling them in our own lives.
Not for nothing does David describe his God as a rock and a fortress: unchanging, reliable, solid, deeply grounded and best of all, for a travel sick world, dynamically still, at fruitful rest, in an energetic peace which passes all understanding.
