Two heavy snowfalls, with smaller storms between, brought us over a metre of snow, more than we are accustomed to, and more than which systems could cope. One major casualty was public transport. Trains, subway, streetcars, the transport that travels on rails, were especially vulnerable, not just because people did dim things like park their cars on street car tracks, but because the equipment, especially unnoticed equipment like switches, was in poor repair and not up to the increased stress that the cold and snow brought. It was a sobering lesson for a place that built a good transit system years ago, but for the last decades has done more bragging about it than caring for it - let alone expanding it. The problem was often poor infrastructure.
Infrastructure is like the root system of a tree.
It's invisible, but if it's unhealthy it will cause the tree to fall. And if it is not cared for, it becomes an invisible cancer that rots the tree. In the church, I often think that our infrastructure, our roots, are found in our past. The whole of our tradition, most fundamentally the Scriptures, is the place from which we draw nourishment, the mechanism which makes the system function. If we neglect that past, or if we do not understand it, we run the risk of not functioning as we are intended to do.