A Light To Lighten The Cloud Atlas Series

Have you thought about who the next person will be who you will invite to church? We have different ways we like to do it, don’t we? What’s the way you are most comfortable doing it? Say you are inviting someone to church for next week, how do you like to go about it? Will you sit there this afternoon giving them a proper phone call? Or will you feel more comfortable if you send them a text or email? Or are you someone who would prefer to wait until tomorrow when you see them face to face at the shops or the school gate. And then you say “You know the church I go to - I think you’d really enjoy it. I do. Why don’t you come and join me there on Sunday? It’s at 8.00/9.30/4.15.

That’s the sort of thing you do. I hadn’t realised quite how much of that you do until that meeting in Chris Abbess’s dining room. I was expecting that meeting to be as boring as all the rest, another coffee drunk, another biscuit not eaten, another foot-deep pile of papers discussed - until those figures leapt out at me. And it was anything but boring to realise just how good you have been at sharing the light to the nations with your neighbours in Barkingside.

Which brings me back to Diana Nairn sitting in her tube carriage. “Have you seen the light? Have you been washed in the blood”. Everyone’s desperately trying not to make eye contact. The preacher leaves the carriage. the door slams behind him. And the man next to Diana turns to her and says. And says - “what a nutter!”

“Well actually” says Diana (feeling highly embarrassed, but trying to be a good Christian) “Well actually I would never put it like that, but I do actually agree with everything he has just said.”

“You don’t?”

“I do...”

“Really?”

And they get into an incredible conversation about what it means to be a Christian. And this time everyone else in the carriage isn’t staring down at their feet. They are listening intently to hear what Diana has to say.

It wasn’t the tube journey Diana expected to have, but isn’t it amazing how God gives us opportunities we don’t expect to talk about our faith?

Twenty years later I still remember sitting in a packed St Aldate's church hearing Diana give that sermon about her tube journey.

What about Chuck’s journey on the New York Subway? You remember, he’s on his way home, planning to dump the fluorescent tube by the side of the road somewhere.

Te gets into the subway train, he’s holding the light vertically like this. And it is so crowded that people can’t see what is going on. Somebody, thinking it is the pole you hold onto - you know, to stop yourself falling over - puts their hand round it.. Then, again without looking, somebody else does. By the time Chuck gets to his own station, 5 or 6 different people are all holding onto the fluorescent tube, all thinking that it is the pole for holding onto. So quick thinking Chuck just detaches his hands and walks out of the train leaving them all holding it. It’s one way to share the light.....