CREEDE HINSHAW: We all face life-altering choices

A friend told me a fascinating story about her adult son, a limousine driver in Los Angeles. This young adult has on occasion chauffeured some famous customers around town, people whose names we would recognize. I suspect he has quite a few stories because limousine drivers spend time with people at key moments in life.

This man was at an L.A. service station, off duty, driving his own car, when he heard a plaintive, compelling cry coming from around the corner of the gas station. Somebody was weeping loud enough to be heard. Tentatively walking around the corner of the convenience store, he discovered a distraught and apparently abandoned woman in a motorized wheelchair crying all alone, a young adult about 30 years old.

Was this a set-up? Was the woman a decoy, sitting in the shadows, working in tandem with somebody else waiting to overpower a would-be Good Samaritan?

Having walked around that corner, it was hard for the young man to turn his back on the woman. Taking a chance, drawing closer, he discovered that she had sat helplessly so long that she had soiled herself and was in a humiliating situation.

Why was she stranded? Had the battery on her wheelchair been drained of power? Had somebody abandoned her? Was she such a troublemaker that she had been left behind for good cause? Why couldn’t she get home? Did she have no cellphone? Had the customers or employees inside the station ignored her cry? Should he speak to her?

Good questions, all of them. I don’t know the answer to these questions, nor did I ask the mother, although I was curious. One instinctively knows in such a situation that things might get complicated. Peoples’ tragedies are not easily sorted out. But here was the immediate situation: A desperate woman needed help, and a man stood in front of her who had the capacity to offer it.

He found a friend, or maybe he recruited a passerby. Somehow, he got the helpless woman out of her wheelchair and into his personal vehicle, loaded that heavy, bulky motorized wheelchair into his car and drove her 15 miles to the convalescent home where she lived.

Full of emotion, he then called his mother in Georgia to share his story. (One of the great privileges of parenthood is getting to listen to the stories of your children … no matter the age of parent or child.) I am sure this mother was quite proud of her son, because when she saw me she couldn’t wait to tell me the story.

I have no further details to this fascinating encounter and am resisting the temptation to embellish. But here are three conclusions of which I’m certain:

1. Every one of us has been that stranded woman.

2. Every one of has had the opportunity to be that limousine driver.

3. Jesus was the passenger in Los Angeles that day.

Email Creede Hinshaw at [email protected].