Here’s the text for the 22 September 2025 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Scott Mills on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

Earlier this month in London, there was a near-total Tube strike for an entire week. One of the results of that was that everybody who owns a bike in greater London decided – understandably – to cycle to work, even if they hadn’t ridden their bike in years and had to dig it out from behind the stacks of boxes in the very-back-corner of the garage.

Picture it: It’s 7:15 in the morning, and the generously-sized bike lanes into central London are already rammed with commuters.

We are a heaving movement of humans, metal, and lycra that feels wild to be part of – and also slightly precarious. People who’ve never commuted on their bikes, people who look like they’ve never been on a bike: there they all are, God bless them, huffing-and-puffing and trying to get to work with nearly-flat tyres, rattling-rusty-chains. People pedaling in stiletto heels, three-piece-suits. It’s a Great Migration, radically diverse.

But there’s one thing that all these folks have in common. They’ve all discovered or remembered their bike-bells. They haven’t ridden a bike in ten-or-twenty years, but oh their thumbs are still strong. And they know how to use those bells. They ring at every pedestrian who steps within a meter of the cycle path, jangle at falling leaves or slight curves in the road, clang at any infraction they perceive in their fellow cyclists. Don’t you love a new convert?

To me, it feels like a few herds of buffalo have joined the antelopes, alongside a parade of elephants, giraffes, and the occasional flamingo — and we’ve all been crushed together onto the goat path. For several miles. It’s cumbersome, hilarious, and even joyous: and as I surrender to this unwieldy commuting congregation, I realise I’m being converted, too.

One Christian author says: the spiritual journey is “always personal but never private”. It’s more “us” than me. I feel that so keenly in this pack – we’re held together as we amble along the narrow path, and then there’s the turn onto London Bridge and for a blessèd 300 meters, we race and expand into width and length, height and depth: love surpassing understanding, before we come back together in freedom with all the people on the other side of the river.

And all of it is the journey. Not so much towards God, because, whether buffalo or flamingo, I believe we’re already in God: in whom we live and move and have our being.