Time and Place

The dark clouds and pouring rain seemingly came out of nowhere.  I sat in my car at a stoplight, warm and dry.  The man right outside my car door was waiting for the crosswalk signal to change, a bike leaning on his body, hands jammed into his pants pockets. 

His head remained held high despite the driving rain. My gaze lingered on him through my watery car window and I shifted uncomfortably in my seat as I thought of the bike rack hanging from the back of my car.

It would be so easy to help this man.  It would be easy to roll down the window and offer to load his bike on the rack and drive him where he needed to go; it couldn’t be far.

My heart and mind were torn.  Doing so could risk my safety as well as the safety of the unborn child I was carrying.  The need to help was much greater than any risk to me I was sure, but I still couldn’t do it.

The crosswalk signal changed and the man slugged his way in front of my car as well as countless other cars as he crossed the largest eight lane intersection of the city.  No doubt other drivers looked on with pity, but I wondered if their hearts somehow broke like mine at not helping.

The imagine of the man in the rain stayed with me all afternoon and into the evening until I realized what bothered me so deeply.  It wasn’t the fact that I was raised with a responsibility to help others and couldn’t act on it.  It was that I had lived in several places—a small town growing up, a friendly college campus, a military base- where helping others in large or small ways way never brought my safety into question. For several years I had lived in a much larger city where the needs of many were all around but everyone largely kept to themselves. This need, however, felt intimate and personal somehow.

Was I upset at not being able to offer assistance? Yes, but my larger sense of helplessness that day was the reminder that not everything and everyone in the world was good or could be trusted.  Was the man in the driving rain walking with a bicycle a true threat to me?  Probably not, but because of the ways of the world I didn’t have the chance to find out.