Driving Young Men

Few things are as dangerous as a young man driving a car. Perhaps only more dangerous is a young man with a gun. Reckless. Kind of like a young woman with a credit card. Car-nage. Teenage testosterone combined with a lack of foresight and experience.

The recent snows, one  storm after another like popcorn popping incessantly from the sky (where is the plug for that odious snow machine?) provided ample opportunity to help out my neighbors with shoveling their snow. I know how Sisyphus felt...endless shovel fulls like rolling a snowball up a hill until it got so big, it runs you over on the way down. Just to melt. All fury, signifying nothing. A frozen tautology of existential angst. "I shovel therefore I am."

I took the sweat equity approach. If they were putting in an effort, I came alongside and helped them out. If they didn't do what they could do, the snow sat unruffled. Too often our charity just hardens indolence in people. Unless they pick up a shovel, I am not going to assist. Mistaken Christian benevolence has created a spirit of societal entitlement, where everyone is a victim. Help yourself.

I heard a good strategy for ministry one time, an analogy to raking leaves. Get in the middle of the leaves and start raking. Too often we think ministry is over yonder, when in fact it is right in front of our face. We step around the rake so it don't smack us in the forehead.

The other day there was a young man trying to drive his car up the hill outside of my townhouse. It was clear to me that he was not going to succeed in his endeavor until the plow came through. I watched bemused for a bit and then had pity on the kid. A friend of mine owns a transmission shop and posted a bit back on Facebook that accelerating and spinning the wheels with no traction is a great way to fry a transmission. So, I sauntered up to the young dude driver and told him to take his foot off the accelerator. That he was going to trash his transmission.

To his credit he didn't get up in my grill "Shut up old man, yo. Get out of my face." I would have abandoned him to his fate, his car stuck in the middle of the road, keeping the plow from getting through. The neighbors may have beaten his ass. Tempers were getting testy. The snows brings out of the heart both the good and the illin'.

I then instructed the young man to put his car in reverse, back his car past my driveway, and then pull into my cleared driveway. I told him that the plow would probably be coming by soon and would clear the road. And when it did, I'd give him a call on his cell and then he could drive away. He agreed. I really admired his tenacity in trying to get his car up the road, it just was fruitless but he saw no other option. With age comes wisdom sometimes. I have been in his seat before where sheer effort, admirable as it is, was not going to solve the problem. He needed to take his car out of gear, get to the side out of the way, and wait for the conditions to change.

My buddy across the street, a streetwise guy from Lancaster City who did a hard-core stint in the Army, told me afterwards on Friday that he watched the whole thing go down. He said he was watching the young buck with his horns stuck in the thicket trying to push through rather than pulling out. That is my deer metaphor but essentially that was the essence of his take on the situation.

He said he spent a great deal of time thinking about what I did, more reflection than my assistance actually merited. For some reason, my intervention spoke to him in a deep way. It was no big deal on my end. I have just been in the kid's place before and I needed some help from someone to get myself out of a mess.

Too often we judge people without grasping that they really never have been taught, no one has taken the time to show them how to handle something difficult. Model a way to solve a problem. Teach people to do for themselves. Don't do it for them, don't ignore them. Do it to teach it.