Traffic on the M6

“We’ve had a really good run so far haven’t we love”, I exclaimed very proudly. She just looked at me and smiled knowing that any more conversation might tempt the traffic gods in to teaching us a lesson about counting your chickens or something like that…but it was too late. Less than 5 minutes later, we came to a complete standstill; the good run as I put it had come to an end. My wife looked back at me, this time without the smile.

We could see the cause of the delay; a car had conveniently decided to break down in the middle lane of the motorway…great. “How long will this take?” I asked myself.

But then something rather incredible happened. A very kind and brave driver, who was behind the wheel of a pick-up truck, decided that he’d help out the stranded and angrily looked upon driver. He manoeuvred his vehicle in front of theirs, put it on the truck, drove off, and within a minute or so everyone on the M6 that Sunday night were back up and running.

All of a sudden I was reminded of a lyric in a song called ‘Albertine’. It’s by an artist called Brooke Fraiser. Albertine was a child from a developing country who was visited by Fraiser. So moved by Albertine’s plight and poverty, Fraiser decided, without hesitation, to sponsor her.

The lyric goes like this: ‘Now that I have seen, I am responsible’. Fraiser had the resources to change Albertine’s life – and felt compelled to do something, just like the superman or knight in shining armour had the resources to rescue the unfortunate soul in the middle lane.

As I write this, thousands of Rohingyas are escaping from their homes in Myanmar for threat of violence. Syrians are doing the same, and these are the ones we know about. We can’t single handily help every single refugee and neither can we all deliver a whole community from their distressing and complicated situation, but we can, I am sure, help one. You never know what helping that one person might achieve. It could, in the future, go on to release a load more traffic.