Help
by Stephan Joubert
Last week I met my friend Neels Jackson at a restaurant for a cup of coffee. As we sat there, chatting away, I noticed a pickup truck losing its load some distance down the road. It was a mattress that was tied down on the back of the pickup. Thankfully the motorist behind the truck could brake in time to avoid an accident. The pickup had to drive about 500 meters down the road before there was a traffic light where he could make a u-turn. Meanwhile, a taxi driver who didn’t see what was happened, approached in another lane and saw the mattress lying in the middle of the road. He pulled over immediately and boldly walked into the traffic. Soon it was clear that his plan was to get the impatient Pretoria traffic flowing again. He moved the mattress to the sidewalk and stood there with it, waiting. Eventually, the driver of the truck arrived back at the scene. Without missing a beat, the taxi driver picked the heavy mattress on his shoulders and put it back on the pickup. The young white guy who was driving the pickup must have been quite baffled by all this.
We’ve become so accustomed to taxi drivers being life-threatening hazards on our roads. But then this taxi driver stopped in a busy street to help someone he didn’t know from a bar of soap. About the same time last week I saw another taxi driver changing the tire on a helpless lady’s car on the busy R21 between Pretoria and Kempton Park... Just imagine what will happen if we all threw off our prejudices and become color and status blind! Maybe we need to stop asking, “What’s in it for me?” This is surely the wrong question if Jesus is our Lord.