There are two types of drunks, or so I’ve heard: crying drunks or angry drunks. As he sat next to me in the passenger seat of my little compact car, I considered how little I knew about him other than his name and his obvious problem. I was only out of university a few months with the ink still drying on my ministry degree and was setting up a new life in the southwest. Would this guy I barely knew fly into a rage and leave my body in the street and steal my car? Or what? It was a situation I put myself in thinking I could help this poor soul.
I had just been hired as a youth minister but the start up was slow and my mornings were kind of delayed – which was JUST FINE with me. No need to go into the office, if I was going to be there in the evening with religious education classes. So I was hanging around in my living room, playing guitar, enjoying life and looked out the window to see this guy wandering up the street. I was renting a room in a house with some other Christian women; this guy lived in one of the similar men’s households up the street. But this particular day he wasn’t walking so well. I went flying out my front door – actually just glad to see a familiar face – and when I asked him how he was, he said, “well I guess you can tell...” And he was right.
All of a sudden thinking on my feet became a new talent I discovered. “Hey, you know how I got a new job with teenagers? I need to take a ride into the city to see one of the rehab places and kind of check them out, do you want to come for a ride with me?” And that is how it began. We talked, mostly about his predicament: his ex-wife had laid down the law that unless he was sober, he had zero visitation rights with his ten-year-old son, and that was killing his spirit. I talked to him about using that as a goal to get sober. It was the most worthy reason anyone could want, and he was on board with the goal, but the thought of getting sober seemed to be beyond him. I suggested a particular place and he replied: “Oh no, I hear that you have to be poured-through the door.” Huh? You had to arrive drunk? It made no sense to me.
As we entered the city, the sight of some street triggered panic in him. He said, “Hey, just let me out here. I really need a drink.” And that is when I wondered how this was going to turn: crying or angry. I had only one card that I could think to play: “You know how God says it’s a sin to lead someone else to sin? I can’t take you to a bar. You wouldn’t want to make me sin would you?” And that kind of tweaked his reasoning powers for a minute. And then he started to be sad. I won’t say he burst out crying - i can’t remember exactly – but when we pulled into the driveway of the rehab, someone was there to meet us in the driveway and my friend walked, almost dejectedly, into the building.
A few weeks later, he was back in the neighborhood and things were different. He was in the pool with …. his ten-year-old son playing water volleyball. It is a type of joy I had never seen before – a reunion born of intense personal struggle on his part. I was so proud of him.
In retrospect, it seems to me that if I had a daughter who did what I did, namely: drove into the city with a man she barely knew, I might be angry that I raised a child with so little good sense for personal safety. But I will tell you this: even though I was driving that little blue Plymouth Champ, Someone Else was clearly in the driver’s seat. I somehow needed to learn to be brave for a greater cause. Comfort and security don’t teach you those kinds of lessons. If we leave people on a road broken and confused, we miss an opportunity. I don’t know if every single opportunity is meant to be seized outright, or if it’s just that the voice of God or His gentle hand takes us where we need to go almost beyond our own reckoning. I think the latter is the case.
I don’t have an exclusive or even frequent outreach ministry to drunk people. A friend once gave me a tour of her place of employment – an inner city outreach – and honestly, I was so freaked by the characters around me that I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. The guy with a ring on his finger made of the tines of a fork kind of threw me over the edge. Don’t' ask me why, I’m not exactly sure. All I can say is that my comfort zone was very clear to me in that moment. Only infrequently do I find myself in places that scare me to the core. Perhaps the aging process has tightened my boundaries a bit more.
I also don’t make it any kind of personal mission to pick up hitchhikers. And yet less than a decade later, on the East coast, there was a new “Driver’s Seat Lesson” for me to be learned. I was between jobs. I was cranky because I couldn’t find a ministry job that paid a living wage. I had a Master’s degree, some great experience and strong job skills and found nothing of interest anywhere on the horizon. I was put-out with my circumstances and in a funk.
My friends called me for dinner. I had become everyone’s #1 Choice of babysitter, especially for cranky kids because my tolerance was great. I was actually looking forward to dining with this young family and having a peaceful evening with adults my age. The caveat was this: It was snowy and bitter, bitter cold outside. I had to drive 15 minutes to get there in like, negative 5 degrees with a nasty windchill. I bundled up and headed out in my slate blue Buick Skyhawk. Down on the edge of the boulevard I turned the corner and saw a figure walking on the side of the road – sidewalks, long since swallowed up in winter precipitation. She wore a red parka and was incredibly skinny. This is the very weather that the founding fathers called “Fit for Neither Man nor Beast.”
I pulled alongside her – the only car visible on the street for a mile – and said, “Can I give you a ride somewhere?” She said, “I’m not going the way you are.” I reassured her, “That’s not important. I will take you where you need to go.” She crawled into my front seat. I’d be surprised if she was even 100 pounds. Her parka may have swallowed up her frame, but it didn’t seem to be insulating her too well. As she spoke to me, a tiny drop of moisture hung from the tip of her nose. Welcome to the Eastern states. You see it so often in December through February that your stomach forgets to hurl after a while.
“Where can I take you?” “Can you take me to Wolf Street?” Sure. We drive on. I asked, “Where on Wolf Street?" “Do you know where ‘Fantasy Nights’ is?” Oh, man alive. “Please don’t tell me you are a dancer …” I replied. Trust me when I say she was not anything like the girls on the advertisements for such places. She admitted: “I tried it once. They threw a chair at me.” That right there will give you pause; the phrase Gentleman’s Club is also part of the whole picture of the Lie. She shared with me her utter inability to secure a decent job. She had no completed high school education. She had no work experience. Not even the drug store would trust her to run a cash register. This woman was the portrait of why EVERYONE should strive to get a good education. She was in her 30’s I think and unless she made a plan, she had absolutely no future.
I suggested she try one of the warehouses in the area that made clothes. She said, “But who would hire me?” I had stopped the car in the neighborhood where she had asked me to take her by this time. I looked at her earnestly and said, “You don’t have to tell everyone everything about your past. But you do have the ability to earnestly ask someone in plain English to give you a new start. I think you may find someone willing to help you.”
As she exited the car, her response took me by surprise: “ I guess I will just have to trust, won’t I?” The very thing that I, with my education, my experience, and my “me-ness” was NOT doing: trusting God. I had been in a perpetual bellyaching mode and yet I had so many things going for me: I had an amazing ability to pick up temp jobs, be comfortable in interview situations, networking skills, not having to worry about getting a ride or finding clean clothes to wear or going to a dentist to fix my appearance. Here I was miffed that I couldn’t find a ministry job when I was failing Faith 101 by not putting it all in God’s hands with a grateful attitude. Shame on me.
Here she was, with her street smarts and bitter life experience that taught her to NOT trust anyone. There is no way she could have been referencing the act of trusting people. She was referring to Himself Upstairs. And I got the message He had sent her to give me. I still find it ironic that I drove her out of my way so that we could have our Lesson together – maybe she wasn’t real, perhaps she was an angel with a story to snap-me-out-of-it. But it was a very important lesson, nonetheless.
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Please do not take anything in any of the above 100% true stories as an endorsement for giving rides to strangers or picking up hitchhikers. These stories are for instructional purposes, only. Learn from MY experiences and stay safe.
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