Plain Safe

Mutley Plain, the road on which our church premises are located, is a busy vehicular artery into Plymouth city centre. There are lovely shops on both sides of the road, which means there are lots of pedestrians who want to cross it. While there are little green men at the crossing points to help people they can sometimes take a while to appear and people take their chances. Plus there are some crossing points that don’t have any green men and they have traffic coming from lots of different directions so you constantly have to have your head on a swivel to cross safely.

While, thankfully, there haven’t been any fatal accidents on the Plain, it is an area in which there are a higher number of accidents than others in the city (and county) so an experiment has been launched under the banner ‘Plain Safe‘ to try to improve things. That campaign was officially launched yesterday (more of that later).

Over the past few weeks some of the paving slabs near crossing points have been painted to help focus people’s attention on crossing safely. There are also some signs on the railings that run down the middle of the Plain that point people in the direction of the crossing points (so they don’t just run across the road and hurdle the railings). And there are some banners on the lampposts that carry the safety message. Posters have also been created to go in shops and premises to raise awareness.

I hope it makes a positive difference.

As someone who’s part of the community I was asked to take part in a consultation at the beginning of the process and have been involved along the way (including rather embarrassingly having my photo taken to go on the lamppost banners and some of the posters). Yesterday I was asked to offer some comments for the press at the official launch.

It didn’t make the national or even local news, or the local newspapers, but I was glad to be there at the launch to say how important this is. If one person is prevented from being injured then it’s worth it.

I refrained from telling you the stats about accidents at the start of this bloggage because stats hide people. The numbers can be inspirational, motivational, shocking or surprising, and have a use, but they don’t tell a personal story. Every single person on this planet is unique, special, important. That’s why the Plain Safe campaign is important if it only saves one person from injury.

It’s why churches do what we do to be free samples of Jesus for individuals. Yes, we want lots of individuals to hear and experience Jesus for themselves, but not so that the stats look good, it’s for the individuals – each one of them. God created you, loves you and thinks you’re astonishingly amazingly special: there’s only one of you.

Churches often say that Jesus’ life, death and resurrection are for the whole world, and they are. But they’re also for every single individual person, including you.

Be blessed, be a blessing.