A Bumpy Ride

In a 1950 film called All About Eve, Bette Davis says, “Fasten your seat belts; it’s going to be a bumpy ride.” That set up the storyline for a big, dramatic scene. But aren’t those words just as indicative of life? We all have what some refer to as the IBs – the inevitable bumps.

So many times we’ve heard people say, “I went through bad times and now I need to get on with my life.” That’s good, but it’s not enough. Our next step beyond doing something for ourselves is to help others get on with the rest of their lives.

For example, one of the things I like about mutual-help groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous is that no one needs to explain what it feels like to be drunk or to be sober and wish you were drunk. No one needs to tell a member of NA what it means to focus the entire day on finding a fix. No one needs to be told the feeling of being useless and filled with self-hatred.

The biggest benefit of such groups is that they recognize that the members know the problems faced by the newly clean or sober. They also know all the excuses so they won’t allow new members to feel sorry for themselves.

I also think of people in churches who go to other countries on short-term missions. Whether they go to Honduras or Fiji, I’ve never met anyone who has come back and said, “That was the worst thing I ever did in my life.” Instead, they’d say, “I feel more blessed than the people I went to bless.”

They believe they truly went on a mission – and it is a mission because it’s a journey with a purpose. They go to build houses, to repair damaged school buildings or to bring medical assistance. What they do isn’t as important as the fact that they go, and they see people in need. They visit people without some of the basics we take for granted. The people they help always have far worse problems than they do.

And they become partners in the process when they move beyond their own pain and offer a healing hand to others.

That’s when many of them begin to understand the purpose behind the IBs of life. As they look on others who have suffered, and often have suffered a long time, their own bumpy ride seems much smoother. One woman said, “My problems seemed so petty when I visited southern Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina. The day before I went there, I complained in a restaurant when I had to wait twenty minutes for my food. In Mississippi I met people who didn’t have a stove on which to cook or a table at which to sit.”

Life has bumps for all of us. One way to learn to put our bumps into perspective is to look around us. As we see others with bigger bumps in their roads than we have, it makes us realize how much we have and how thankful we need to be.