Robert Hall writes from Dallas, Texas. He is a recovering CEO, executive coach, author, and speaker on relationships.
Here is what we seek: a compassion that can stand in awe at what the poor have to carry rather than in judgment at how they carry it.
Gregory Boyle, Founder, Homeboy Industries
6:00 am. Our daughter thinks our 7-year-old grandson has strep throat – again. She has a big presentation on, so I get to take him to see the doctor.
We get the earliest available appointment, 8:30; yes, it is strep; our prescription info is sent to the pharmacy. Anxious to get home, we get in the car. I push the start button – silence. I push it again – silence. My battery is dead.
I call my wife. Yes, she can come right over. So I dig the jumper cables out of the back of my all-but-new Chevy Tahoe and start to hook them up. My grandson, who is curious about anything mechanical, gets out of the car and asks if he can see under the hood and how the cables work.
Suddenly a beat-up old Mazda swerves into the parking space beside me, kinda like Kramer skidding into Seinfield’s apartment. Out pops this attractive young lady: “need a jump?” she asks. “I was driving along and saw you in the parking lot and thought, I know what it is like to be stranded with a dead battery and a kid. So, I made a U-turn and came back to offer you a jump.”
I was speechless. I thought to myself how many cars drove down that street that morning while I was popping the hood and hooking up the jumper cables? I have no idea if she was a citizen or illegal, progressive or conservative, religious or not. She certainly didn’t look rich – but the battery from her old junker and her heart were very much alive and my nearly new battery was dead.
Cars aren’t the only thing with dead or dying batteries these days, in the midst of an emotional and mental health pandemic. The deaths of despair have been widely chronicled. 43% of young adults report an increase in loneliness since the Covid pandemic. About half of lonely young adults say that no one in the past few weeks has “taken more than just a few minutes” to ask how they are doing in a way that made them feel like the person “genuinely cared.” And 73% of Americans under 30 believe people “just look out for themselves” most of the time.
How many of us, as we move about, have our eyes wide-open for someone who needs a jump – at work, home, in the community, at church?
Our circumstances, especially the difficult ones, are often our greatest teachers – it is where we learn what we cannot or will not learn any other way. And often our most trying circumstances involve those with whom we have significant differences and conflict.
Father Gregory Boyle, founder of the largest gang-intervention, rehabilitation, and reentry program in the world, quotes Saint Gregory: “We are saved by the people we despise.” He adds, “The folks who create the dis-ease within us, cause us to recoil and flee, to become defensive, the very people we disparage for disagreeing with us … turns out, these are our teachers and our salvation.”
What if this is true? What if the batteries and jumper cables we most need to become healed and whole are carried by those we despise, those who most wound us?
So why not grab a set of jumper cables and move about outside yourself – look for people with dead batteries who need a jump – they are there. Our relational jumper-cables often provide just the emotional lift to get someone else going again, and in the process, to recharge our own batteries. And, sometimes, the jumper-cables we most need will only be available from those with whom we most struggle.
A fuller version of this article can be found here.
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