Every day, I drive past hundreds of people I’ll never know.
Someone is driving home after the best day of their life. Someone else is wondering if they can make rent. One person just got told they have cancer. Another is listening to a song they haven’t heard since high school and smiling for the first time in weeks.
We pass each other without ever realizing how much humanity is packed into a single red light.
Last Tuesday I was stopped at a light next to a woman in a silver minivan. Both hands on the wheel. Lips moving. She was rehearsing something. A speech. An apology. A resignation letter. I’ll never know. The light turned green and she drove off toward whatever conversation she was dreading, and I drove home and forgot about her until I sat down to write this.
That’s the part that gets me. Not that I’ll never know her story. That I almost didn’t notice she had one.
A red light is a strange kind of intimacy. For ninety seconds you sit closer to a stranger than you’ll sit to most people all week. Close enough to see her knuckles. Close enough to watch a grown man in a pickup wipe his eyes with the heel of his hand. Then the light changes and we all pretend it never happened, because that’s the deal. You don’t look. You definitely don’t wave.
We’ve built a whole world on not looking.
We spend hours arguing with strangers on the internet while overlooking the strangers standing three feet away in the grocery store. And I think I know why. The stranger online has been flattened into something manageable. A username. A take. A political party wearing a profile picture. You can hate a take. It’s efficient.
The stranger in the checkout line is harder. She has a face and a tired kid and a coupon that won’t scan, and if you actually look at her, some inconvenient part of you starts doing math. Wondering what her Tuesday was like. Whether anyone asked. You can’t flatten a person at that range. So we don’t look there either. We look at our phones, where the flat people live.
Here’s where I’m supposed to say something about God.
I’ve sat through a lot of sermons about loving my neighbor. I don’t remember a single one mentioning that my neighbor drives a Camry with a busted taillight and takes the merge onto I-30 like it’s a personal insult. Neighbor always sounded theoretical in church. A category. But I don’t think it was ever meant to be a category. I think it was always supposed to be whoever is three feet away from you right now.
Which brings me to the thing I actually believe. Or want to.
Maybe the greatest act of faith isn’t just believing in God. Maybe it’s also believing that every person you meet is carrying a story you can’t see. Believing it the way you believe in gravity. Not as a nice thought for the drive home, but as a fact that changes how you drive. Because you can’t prove the woman in the minivan was rehearsing an apology. You can’t prove the man in the pickup was crying about something that mattered. You take it on faith. And the moment you do, it gets a lot harder to lean on the horn.
That’s a faith you can practice at an intersection. No building required. No arguments about doctrine. Just the daily, unglamorous discipline of assuming the soul in the next car is as complicated as yours.
I’d like to tell you I’ve mastered it. I haven’t. I flattened at least four people on the drive home tonight, and one of them had his blinker on the whole time.
But I hope I remember that tomorrow.
D.A.Kindiger