About Video
Uploaded on 14 September, 2015
Like Suffolk’s Orwell Bridge, the Brotonne Bridge over the Seine to the west of Paris was an advance in box girder engineering in its time. Rev Mark Reid looks at how we bridge the largest gap of all. Here’s what he says about the video:
I first came across the Brotonne Bridge when I needed a route to avoid Rouen. The Seine west of Rouen is wide and up until 1976, there was no crossing for through traffic from the channel ports southwards until the Tancarville suspension bridge near Le Harvre. The sheer size of the river meant that a large bridge was needed and cheaper concrete bridge techniques allowed architects and engineers to design a cable stayed bridge that mixed the advantages of a suspension bridge with the cheapness of a conventional bridge in having a tall bridge with a significant span.
This was an early example of a concrete cable-stayed bridge and they are now very common, including a massive one further downstream on the Seine. But Brotonne was one of the first, although it never became integrated into the autoroute network like its larger neighbour, the Normandie Bridge. It’s now a huge bridge on a quiet network of departmental roads – quite out of scale with the local road network. If you are into big bridge engineering, it’s well worth a look.
For me the message is that big bridges like this allow us to cross between two places easily. In Jesus, God has provided His crossing place so that we can know Him and find life and hope. What’s impressive is that God cares about each person and He was prepared to go to great lengths to make a way to cross over to Him.
But big bridges like Brotonne aren’t just about admiring the engineering; they are functional. They are to be crossed. That’s what they are for. Do you want to know all about God? Do you want to understand how it is that a God who is great and powerful and huge would be interested in you? These are big questions I know. But all God asks of us is to make a first step – a step of faith – and trust Him and follow Jesus. When that happens, in my experience, is that all the other things make sense and answers start to appear.
Category: Rev Mark Reid.
