Self-Sacrifice on My Morning Commute

A stranger sacrificed his life for me this morning.

All right, not his whole life; a few seconds of it, actually but that's merely a quibble.

What happened was this. As I drove to work in the sullen rain,  a motorist bore down on me from the other direction. We were on a narrow residential street. Parked cars lounged against both curbs on and sagged into the road. The oncoming vehicle was a pickup (well, I do live in Texas), one of those mug-macho-muchacho outfits with a dual rear axel that spraddled the rear fenders across the right-of-way like a Victorian matron in one of those hooped skirts. Clearly the two cars could not skin past one another in that strait and narrow way. Paint and rear-view mirrors would be flesh wounds; steel and glass would sustain the major injury.

Then, the truck pulled over.

Just at the point before the lane of cars lined the road, in a gap created by a driveway, the pilot steered that behemoth to the side so that I could pass. I waved, but in the dark and with the rain the gesture probably went unregistered. As I motored along, I saw the retreating taillights of the pickup as it lumbered back into the fairway.

I was on my way to work, wanted to get there quickly, had things to do. I assume the same was true of the other motorist. Yet that individual, whom I will probably never meet, and wouldn't recognize if I did and thus will never thank in person, put his agenda on hold, stopped the progress of his life, in deference to a total stranger. It wasn't a matter of strength: That quasi-semi could've crushed my SUV like a bug on its windshield. It wasn't a matter of law: If some city reg. covers this situation I missed it in my driver's ed. class. It was courtesy; it was sacrifice.

Too dramatic? Not according to the English novelist, poet, and theologian Charles Williams. Williams developed the companion ideas of co-inherence and substitution. Co-inherence refers to the fact that all lives intertwine in more ways than we recognize, so that each self owes herself a duty to other selves. (C. S. Lewis quotes Williams as once saying, "Love you? I AM you!") Substitution describes the inescapable fact that all lives thrive by the sacrifice of other lives: Grain dies to make my pancakes; a random citizen's schedule died (a tiny bit) to allow me a better chance at doing my job well today, thus continuing to make a living.

And Jesus died for us all.

That's different? Yes - but it is a difference more in degree than in kind. That other driver (and I don't, of course, know the person's religious beliefs) fulfilled Colossians 1.24, "filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions." I needed Jesus behind that wheel; I found him.

Closing note: Halfway through this post a co-worker came into my office. Her on-campus apartment had sprung a leak in the persistent rain. It was taking on water and listing to port and she just underwent knee surgery and does not need to be stooping and moving and mopping. Could I come help muck out the mess? Alexander Solzhenitsyn frequently quotes the cynical motto of the Russian Mafia in the Stalinist prison camps: Agreeing that we all must die eventually, they sneer, "You today, me tomorrow." This phrase holds true in a far more redemptive form, as I have learned this morning: At 7:30 it was someone else's turn. At eight o'clock it was mine.