One More Ride

It was the Tuesday after Memorial Day, and I was not in a particularly good mood. I had spent the long weekend on the boat enjoying Michigan weather, and now I was headed to Dallas on a late flight because my normal travel plan had not worked out.

By the time I landed around ten, I was ready to get to the hotel and shut the day down. I grabbed an Uber. Normally I would have opened the laptop and squeezed one more block of work out of the ride, but for some reason, I did not. I talked to the driver.

She told me her shift had already been ending, but because she was at the airport and my hotel was close to home, she decided to take one more ride. That was unusual for her. A Tuesday night flight was unusual for me.

Then the conversation got heavier.

She shared that she and her husband had a child with special needs and that the season had become exhausting. The strain had worn them down, and hope had become hard to find. I thought about friends of mine who had walked a similar road and shared some of what I had learned from watching their faith, their marriage, their perseverance, and the way they had learned to keep moving forward when life looked nothing like the life they had expected.

The car got quiet. Not awkward quiet. The kind of quiet that means somebody is trying to decide whether they are allowed to believe something different about tomorrow.

Then she said, “This is the first time I’ve had hope in a long time.”

That stopped me.

We kept talking, and a few minutes later she laughed and said, “As long as we’re at it, I have another problem.” She told me about rental property she and her husband owned on a small island “up north.” The place had been badly damaged, and she was overwhelmed by what that might mean financially.

She was sure I had never heard of the island.

“Try me.”

“Harsens Island.”

Now I was the quiet one. I live only a few miles from Harsens Island. I can see it from home. I had spent the weekend boating around it and had ridden my bike there Saturday morning. Her property was near a restaurant where we had eaten the night before, and she and her husband had not been back to the island in years.

I told her something else. Property values on Harsens Island are high. Even if the house had been badly damaged, the land itself still had value. A lot of value. She had been thinking almost entirely about what they had lost, and I tried to help her see what might still be there.

Again, she got quiet.

Then she said it again: “This is the first time I’ve had hope in a long time.”

By then, the ride had become something very different from transportation. We pulled up to the hotel, and she was crying.

Then she looked at me and said something I still think about:

“I don’t know who you are, where you came from, or if you’re even real at this point. I can only believe that somehow God sent you to give me hope when I had none.”

I did not have a clever response. There really wasn’t one.

She had planned to go home. I had planned to work. Instead, there was one more ride.

I have learned to be careful about claiming I understand exactly what God is doing in every circumstance. I do not think every inconvenience is a divine appointment or every coincidence carries some hidden message. But I also do not want to become so efficient, so scheduled, or so consumed with my own plans that I miss the person sitting three feet away from me.

That night, I almost opened my laptop. She almost went home. Instead, two people whose plans had changed ended up in the same car, talking about exactly the things she needed to hear.

Sometimes the calendar changes. Sometimes the flight is wrong. Sometimes the driver takes one more ride.

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