THE LAST RIVER MILE

I power-walk five miles three times a week. Normally I do this in the morning. I’m at the age when I must be careful with my routes: picking sidewalks or paved paths when I can, staying off of narrow roads, and avoiding high vehicle-traffic times. When I walk a roadway that has no sidewalk, I follow the practice of walking as far to the left as possible, facing on-coming traffic, and illuminating myself if it’s still dark. (I almost always walk in daylight now.)

Yesterday morning I was in my last mile on a wide roadway with no sidewalk. It doesn’t get much traffic on Friday mornings, but I did see an SUV coming toward me. Getting as far to the left as I could, it seemed like the car was hugging that side of the road pretty tightly, and moving fast. I’m a little stubborn when obeying pedestrian rules, so in a case like this I usually hold my ground until the last second. About twenty yards away from me the driver jerked the SUV to his left, as if he hadn’t seen me until just then. Passing me, his face was angry as he mouthed some sort of rage headed my way. He violently waved his hand to his right, indicating that I should have been farther to my left on the road or something. In response, I wheeled as his car went by, pointing at him, and waving my arm to indicate that he should have pulled to his left sooner, should have paid more attention to me, or whatever. (Just for the record, I did this without words or shouting, and without single-finger gestures. It is amazing, though, how much swearing one can do in silence.)

In the nanosecond after I saw his reaction to me, I told myself a story. It’s actually a series of pre-packaged stories, ready to go in such a situation. It’s a story about how this guy is an old curmudgeon (as if I’m not), who hates all these walkers, runners, and bicyclists who are all into health and all that. He’s someone who is out to get all these “liberals” and people who aren’t supportive of President Trump. (How would he know that about me?!?) Or he’s just one of those arrogant persons who thinks he owns the road and the whole world revolves around him. (Like I’ve never been that person…)

What a monumental, presumptuous, haughty thing to do. Where do I get the nerve to declare his story? Maybe he already was having a bad morning. Maybe he was having trouble seeing in the sun’s glare, and coming upon me suddenly really scared him. I’ve certainly reacted in anger sometimes when I’ve been scared. Maybe there’s some on-going pain or sadness in his life, and these incidents just make it worse. Or perhaps he was just late, and it was important for him to get to wherever he was going. Maybe it was an emergency. None of this is to excuse his actions or mine. The point is that I did not know his story, and I had no right to force on him a story I created.

Someone once taught me this convicting truth: The next person each of us encounter will be brought closer to Jesus or pushed farther away from Jesus because of us. I did not do a good job yesterday morning.

The stories we tell ourselves about people other than ourselves can get us in trouble. What would it be like if, instead of constantly creating these stories about others, we put the time and effort into finding out their stories from them?

I’ll see you around the next bend in the river.