Jesus Loves the Hell Out of You
or Reason #26 to avoid driving in Portland
I’m in the right lane, trying to avoid squishing a cyclist. She is threading her way up Fourth Avenue on the sliver of roadway between my car and the row of parked cars on her right, and I am thinking: This cannot be legal. Not even in Portland.
This woman is creating her own lane. She is supposed to “take the lane,” not make her own imaginary lane. That’s what I was taught when I bike-commuted to work. For two months, eight years ago.
Still, I am not without empathy. Even as I hear myself mutter “death wish” and “at least she’s wearing a helmet,” I recognize that the cyclist is doing her carbon-free part to save our world from its impending fiery doom. And I am driving to work.
I’m thinking pretty hard about whether the cyclist’s imaginary-lane technique is legal, and how long it would take to find the answer online once I get to the office. Because if it isn’t legal, then I can definitely toggle out of this tiring global warming guilt and zoom right over to an energizing self-righteous anger at millennials who flout traffic laws.
This is when I notice the amazing series of window decals on the truck directly in front of me.
Big, navy-blue Dodge 4X4. A license-plate holder that identifies the driver as coming from a small Oregon town 40 minutes south of my bike-crazy city. Truck canopy, dark tinted windows. Three palm-sized decals across the bottom of the window. The best one has pride of place in the middle of the row, so I notice it first:
“Do you follow Jesus this close?”
Oh damn. I am laughing now, in that “okay you got me” sort of way, still while trying to avoid ramming the cyclist who is now perilously close to my right front bumper. Because no, I do not follow Jesus as close as I am following the Dodge. And for both parts of that, I feel a little bad. Similar to the aforementioned global warming feelings.
Still laughing, I squint over my steering wheel to read the Dodge’s other two decals: “Real men love Jesus” and “Jesus loves the hell out of you.” Not bad, but not in the same league as “Do you follow Jesus this close?,” which manages, in just six words, to connect everyday tailgating to big-picture spiritual decay. With a wink.
I, like the Dodge driver but without his intensity, am also a big fan of Jesus. So I’m not about to make fun of people who love him. There are enough people making fun of Jesus people.
This happens for some good reasons (jaw-dropping hypocrisy, un-Christian hatefulness, cruel intrusion into other people’s lives and uteruses, etc.) and some bad ones (perceived intellectual superiority, smugly inaccurate assumptions about religious people’s motivations, general ignorance about the diversity of religion and religious practice, etc.) But some of the best people are Jesus people (hi Mom!). Also, some of the worst (hello, Mr. Vice President).
Anyhow, at this moment in the right lane on Fourth Avenue, I’m feeling pretty good about my Jesus-loving Dodge compadre, with his love of punny phrases and inclination toward living a moral life. As I warm to him and his fondness for purpose-driven window decals, he begins to slowly turn out of the right lane, into a parking garage. But instead of entering the garage, he pulls the Dodge up short. He is stopped halfway in the lane I nervously share with the cyclist, halfway into the garage.
I stop. The cyclist, to her credit, stops, to wait as the driver completes his garage entrance, which he appears to be just about to do. After a few seconds, she starts to roll around him, on his left — finally taking her rightful place smack in the middle of the right lane. For a corny moment, this makes me awfully proud of her, and somehow for all women, on bikes or in cars or on feet. It’s 2019. Let’s all take the lane, ladies!
Then the Dodge, interrupting my silent feminist reverie, decides not to enter the garage at all. Instead, he makes a dramatic swing back into traffic. Suddenly he is almost on top of the cyclist’s skinny back tire, so close that I’m afraid he will drive right over her. He brakes hard; she glides away. Heart racing like a rabbit, I’m sure. Fresh sweat pooling inside her blouse.
God, I’m happy she wasn’t hurt. I’m really happy I wasn’t the one to nearly hurt her. I wish she’d take the lane next time, from the very start, although that might not have changed anything about this morning. I’m still going to look up whether her imaginary-lane technique is legal. But even an outlaw doesn’t deserve a scare like that, especially at 8:47 in the morning.
I wish the Dodge driver would get better at watching for cyclists. For a man so faithful and precise that he applied his Jesus decals at evenly-spaced intervals across the window of his truck, this seems doable.
But none of these things was I wishing in the seconds after the driver almost creamed the cyclist. My mind was too busy exploding at the wonder of it, and the irony.
At what “following this close” can get us. At our daily, sometimes near-fatal failures to live up to the standards we set — for other people, for ourselves. At how good it feels to laugh.
