Commentary
I don’t like calling the police.
That isn’t because I dislike police officers. It is because I have come to believe that a healthy society should be capable of handling far more of its problems between neighbors, families, and communities without immediately inviting the government into the room.
But a few nights ago, standing on a dead-end dirt road in the middle of nowhere, looking at a piece of iron sticking through the front of a delivery driver’s destroyed car while her teenage daughter sat silently beside her, I found myself asking God a question over and over again:
What am I supposed to do?
It was late, and we needed a few things for the restaurant the following morning, so I placed a grocery delivery order. Eventually, I realized it hadn’t arrived.
When I went outside, I started finding pieces of heavy iron pipe scattered along the road in front of my house. These were substantial pieces of metal that had been welded together as part of fencing and cattle guards.
By the time I reached my neighbor Chuck’s cattle guard, I understood what she had “hit.”
Her car appeared to have struck it with tremendous force. A massive piece of iron had penetrated the front of the vehicle. Somehow she had continued up our road, dragging pieces of metal underneath the car and tearing up the driveway before eventually turning around.
A tow truck was already there.
Her teenage daughter was with her. The girl wouldn’t make eye contact with me.
Her mother couldn’t stop making eye contact.
It felt almost exaggerated, as though she were determined to convince me—or perhaps herself—that everything was fine. She jumped up to shake my hand and repeatedly reassured me that she was OK.
She was clearly not OK.
Her speech was slurred. She was confused and struggled to follow what was happening around her. Her neck was already red and bruised from the seat belt. Whatever had happened had been violent enough to destroy the front of her car.
And yet, despite all the adrenaline that must have been pumping through her body after a collision like that, she appeared to me to be sloppy drunk.
I kept thinking: Do I call the police?
Then I prayed.
God, what am I supposed to do?
I don’t want government managing every human failure. I don’t believe every terrible decision requires a police officer, a government agency, an investigation, and another human being entering a system that may follow her for years. I have largely made a habit of not calling the police unless there is a life-threatening situation I cannot handle myself.
But I also don’t believe anyone has the right to drive drunk and endanger everybody else on the road, especially with a child in the car.
Suddenly, two things I believe deeply were standing in opposition to one another.
The tow-truck driver asked me where he could turn around, and the woman became frantic. Where was he going? Was he leaving her?
I assured her he wasn’t. He simply needed somewhere to turn around.
Nothing about the evening made sense to me. Why hadn’t she simply stopped at my house, where she and her daughter would have been safe? She could have given me my groceries and called the tow truck from there. Why continue driving, dragging all that iron underneath the vehicle, destroying more of the driveway, only to turn around and leave again?
Eventually, she helped me put the groceries in my vehicle.
I drove home still asking God the same question.
What was I supposed to do?
Then I unloaded the groceries.
Her wallet was in my car.
And suddenly, I felt like I had my answer.
She was going to have to come back.
The transactional relationship between us should have been over. I had ordered groceries. She had delivered them. We were strangers who should never have had a reason to see one another again.
But now her wallet was sitting in my car.
I didn’t feel that my job was to call Child Protective Services. I didn’t feel that my job was to call the delivery company. I didn’t feel that my job was to punish her.
But mother to mother, I knew I could not hand that wallet back the next day and pretend the night before hadn’t happened.
When she returned, her daughter wasn’t with her. A man had driven her.
I don’t know what their relationship was, and I don’t want to guess. But she lived at least an hour and 15 minutes away. Whoever he was, he was someone willing to spend a considerable portion of his day driving her all the way out to the ranch and back just so she could retrieve her wallet. He was clearly someone willing to show up for her.
I deliberately put her wallet somewhere that required us to walk away from the other people around us to retrieve it. I didn’t want to humiliate her. I didn’t want an audience.
But I wasn’t going to say nothing.
I told her something I have come to believe:
“God whispers before He screams.”
Then I told her what I had seen.
I told her that children cannot be expected to feel safe when their mother is drunk. I know something about loving people who struggle with alcohol. I have had two husbands who, at different times, struggled with alcohol, and I know how unsafe it can feel when someone you love cannot control themselves.
That is an adult relationship. Imagine when the person who cannot control herself is your mother—the person who is supposed to represent safety in the world.
I told her she was incredibly lucky. Of everything that could have been lost the night before, her car was nothing.
She could have lost her life. She could have lost her daughter’s life. She could have hit someone else and changed another family’s life forever.
Instead, she lost a car.
Cars can be replaced.
I told her that I thought God whispers before He screams, and I wondered whether she might receive what had happened as a whisper—although it was a pretty loud one. A destroyed car, a bruised neck and an engine impaled by iron, but everyone still alive.
Whatever pain she was trying to drink away would still be waiting for her when she became sober. Alcohol might postpone facing it. It might numb it temporarily. But it couldn’t heal it. Whatever hurt she was carrying, eventually she would have to turn toward it.
But I also wasn’t going to participate in pretending nothing had happened.
The man who had driven her all that way was close enough to hear much of what I said. As I spoke, his eyes filled with tears.
When I finished, he hugged me.
“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you for saying all of that.”
I asked whether the children were his.
“No,” he said.
Then he said something I haven’t stopped thinking about.
“They’re another man’s children, and they deserve to be OK.”
That sentence somehow contained the entire lesson.
They weren’t his children.
The woman wasn’t my friend.
None of these people were my responsibility in any official sense.
And yet there we were.
Maybe community begins when another person’s well-being becomes, in some small way, our responsibility simply because they have been placed in our path.
What do we owe a stranger when we witness them destroying themselves?
Modern life gives us plenty of ways to avoid answering that question. I could have decided it wasn’t my business. Or I could have handed the entire problem to an institution: call the police, call the company, call an agency, file a report.
Maybe either of those choices would have been justified. I don’t pretend to have a universal answer for what another person should do in the same situation.
I only knew what I felt called to do in this one.
If I believe communities should be capable of solving more problems without government intervention, there is a responsibility attached to that belief. Less government cannot simply mean leaving one another alone.
It has to mean taking greater responsibility for one another.
And that can be much harder.
There is no anonymous phone call. There is no badge. There is no authority. There is no ability to punish someone into changing.
There are just two human beings standing face-to-face having a conversation neither one particularly wants to have.
Mother to mother.
Neighbor to neighbor.
Person to person.
I don’t know whether anything I said will change her life. I don’t know what she did after leaving my ranch or what she thought about our conversation.
And perhaps that isn’t mine to know.
I only know that saying nothing would have felt like participating in the lie that everything was fine.
There was still one more person I needed to call: my neighbor Chuck.
Chuck and I have had a tumultuous relationship over the years. With him, I am never entirely sure which things will make him furious and which things he will greet with complete indifference.
So I called to tell him that a delivery driver I believed was intoxicated had crashed into his cattle guard and scattered pieces of it down the road.
I braced myself.
“Oh, that’s OK,” he said. “The county handles it.”
Maybe that was the perfect ending to the whole strange episode.
A cattle guard can be repaired. A driveway can be repaired. An engine can be replaced.
There are things we lose, however, that cannot be put back together.
I still don’t know exactly where the line is between respecting another person’s liberty and intervening when that person’s choices threaten someone else. But I understand something about my own belief in less government more clearly now.
If I want government to do less, I cannot use that philosophy as an excuse for me to do less.
It demands more of me.
The transaction between this woman and me should have ended when the groceries changed hands.
The human obligation didn’t.
Sometimes that means walking a stranger away from everyone else, looking her in the eyes and saying something you desperately don’t want to say.
And sometimes, after asking God over and over what you are supposed to do, the answer isn’t a booming voice.
Sometimes He leaves a wallet in your car.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
