Two bus tales.

Tale 1: The woman getting on the bus asked the driver if the bus went to her hotel.  He didn’t know, but she thought he should and told him so.

I told her it did stop where she needed it to and and she took the opportunity to complain about the driver again.  I told her drivers can’t know all the routes as the bus company has a policy of moving them around.

Later, she was chatting with her companions and about to miss her stop so I popped down the bus to tell her.  She thanked me and again said the driver ought to know his route.  I explained again why this was impossible.  As she got off the bus, she again told the driver he ought to know his route and demanded his number to complain.

Tale 2: Bus driver Linda Wilson-Allen has built a community she cares for on the route she drives – lifting people’s bags onto the bus, even inviting someone at one of her stops she thought new in town to have a meal with her family.*

All of this made me wonder about the rules, or values, we live by, or think we do.  A practical and helpful thing to try is to take a few moments to write out our personal values, imagining how we can turn up every day looking for opportunities to creatively live these out through our skills and effort, even on the bus:

‘At this point in history, on the level where each of us lives and breathes in our day-to-day lives, we must learn to engage a new dimensions of the human imagination.  We must learn to [live] from the future.’**

(*Told by John Ortberg in All the Places to Go.)
(**From Alex McManus’s Makers of Fire; I have altered one word: lead to live.)