Charlie plopped into the Versa a few days ago, clean for roughly a month. He talked about his sobriety like a proud parent talks about their honor roll student at Jackson High School.

As a transportation coordinator for Gibson, I drive. That’s the job. Pick up a participant. Take them home. Watch the road. Pay attention to the woman in a Cadillac Escalade texting and driving. Because it’s my responsibility to keep the participant in the company car, safe.

At least for the duration of the ride.

Charlie tells me about his first sponsor, ‘a black woman,’ from Sikeston. “Shandi was the first. Man, she loved me for who I am, know what I’m sayin’?”

Charlie grew up in the Bootheel of Missouri. Small towns like Malden, Sikeston, East Prairie, and Charleston. From a young age his grandma taught him not all people were the same. Some were better. She told him he was better than ‘those’ people. Never said the word, but others in the family did. “She did somthin’ my family didn’t, you know?”

“What was that?” I asked.

“She kept showing up. She didn’t have to. But she did.” He wiped away a single tear. “Couldn’t figure that one out. She stayed. For me. It was the first time anyone did that.”

The drive was short, thirty minutes back to Gibson and already he’s telling me about someone who is acting like Jesus, not seeing how different we are, but how we all need love. Charlie showed me Jesus from the passenger seat. Paul did it too.

He wrote to the Galatians that there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female. He wrote this two thousand years ago to people who lived inside racial walls, barriers so thick they pictured the worse on the other side. Paul told them the walls, Jesus walked through them. They were already down. We just need to show up.

I get plenty of time to think about things like this on the drive.

Our walls? We all have them, and they are still there. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. But Jesus broke through them. It’s the weirdest thing, and makes faith hard, and at the same time possible!

We live in the world that divides and splits us into denominations and factions, pitting us against one another. God’s kingdom? It does not. And our job, near as I can tell, is to act like the second one is the real one.

How do I help this to happen?

Honestly? Most days, not all that much.

I am polite, quiet, at times. I drive the Nissan. I don’t say the wrong thing, but I also don’t always get it right. Am I loving? Or causing harm? Most of the time I know which side of that line I am on.

The Holy Spirit is inside us, making us what Jesus wants us to be. A source. A spring. Water that goes out and does not come back empty. If I am not that, what am I? A man who believes the right things and does not let it cost him anything?

Shandi kept showing up.

That right there? That’s love. That’s exactly what it looks like. Hands and feet. Love IRL, in real life. In action.

I dropped Charlie off at home after his visit. “Thank ya,” he winked. “‘Preciate ya.”

I smiled and waved. Hoping I would do better, like Shandi does, a week from today.