And God said to Moses, “Come up to me on the mountain, and be there.

                                                Exodus, 24:12

Several years ago, somewhere in Eastern Pennsylvania, I learned a lesson from a trucker that changed my life.  I was several hours into a monotonous, interstate drive, when I rounded a bend and suddenly saw a pickup truck leaning on its side against a rock abutment. Evidently, it had spun around, and somehow tipped sideways next to the road.

Needless to say, the sight jerked me out of my reverie.   But the scene looked quiet and abandoned, so I figured that the driver had long since left and that everything was under control.  Phew!

Drawing closer to the pickup, however, I saw that there was a person inside! Immediately, I pulled over, and a nearby semi-truck did the same.  As we both got out, I saw that the driver of the semi was well over six feet tall.  He had unkempt hair, a bushy beard, and must have weighed about 300 pounds.  His threadbare, black T-shirt didn’t quite make it all the way over his belly to the waistband of his faded jeans.  I guessed that his name was “Jake,” something like that.

“Ah called this one in on mah CB,” Jake said.  I nodded, and we both continued toward the pickup.  Looking in through the windshield, we saw a wide-eyed woman in her late forties belted into the driver’s seat.  She looked scared, but unhurt.

“Are you injured?” we shouted through the windshield.  Almost imperceptibly, the woman shook her head no, her eyes still unblinking and wide.  “Can you get out of the truck?” we shouted.  Again, she responded with a frightened, silent, no.

Jake and I exchanged glances.  There we were, standing comfortably alongside an interstate highway, a mere inches from a terrified woman who was trapped inside her automobile.  The rescue squad would arrive soon, but in the meantime, we each felt that we had to do something to help.

Neither of us, however, knew what that something was.  The pickup seemed to be on the verge of rolling over onto its roof and, with the professionals on their way, we didn’t want to risk trying to move the truck or the woman inside it.

But we had to help somehow, so my thoughts began to race.  “What could I do here?  I know,” I thought, “I’ll direct traffic! Somebody always directs traffic at accident scenes.  It’s very helpful.”  Immediately, however, I realized how foolish would be – frankly, there wasn’t any traffic to direct just then.

The woman still stared at us with her frightened eyes. “Maybe I could sweep up the loose gravel around here.  Yes, that’s it! I can secure the scene…and cleanse it, too.”  No, that wouldn’t work, either – I was a young bachelor, and I didn’t really know how to “cleanse” much of anything.

My mind was just starting to assemble a list of tactless jokes to distract the woman, when Jake began his own response.

It was kind of puzzling, at first – right in front of the pickup, Jake hitched up his pants and got down on his knees.  What was he doing?

Then, Jake lay down on the ground and began sliding himself toward the truck. Seeing that scruffy mass of humanity scooting itself along the road was quite a sight, indeed, and I began worrying that Jake might get some gravel down his pants. 

Finally, in a gesture I will never forget, Jake stuck his huge arm into a gap beneath the truck, reached through the broken driver’s-side window, and into the cab.  He then gently took the woman’s hand, and held it.  The woman immediately relaxed, as if someone had just turned off the current of fear running through her body. There Jake remained – silently – until the emergency vehicles arrived. 

There are times when life’s mysterious path brings us to people who are suffering.  Looking into their eyes, we see pain or sadness or fear, and we desperately want to help.  Alas, often we are powerless to help them – even the most saintly among us cannot cure cancer, revive the dead, or mend a lost love.

So we look away, unable to bear gazing into those pained eyes for very long; unable to acknowledge our own inability to rescue or soothe.

But Jake taught me that at these moments there is something that we can do – something enormously powerful and enormously simple, as well.  We can just be there.  Like Jake, we can reach through all of the mess and bedlam of someone’s trauma, and simply hold hands with them until more help arrives.  Is anything more powerful, more quintessentially human, than the simple gift of our presence to a person who needs us?

In the Bible, God’s instruction to Moses taught that sanctity demands not only showing up, but also being fully present.  On the Interstate, Jake’s kindness showed me the overwhelming beauty and simplicity of doing just that.