Grace in action

Yesterday was an exciting day because I caught a glimpse of grace in action.

I took a cab after work around 2am and I was having a pretty decent conversation with the very nice cab driver who also lived in Bukit Panjang. Along the BKE stretch, he suddenly told me that there was a guy walking along the side of the expressway. I told him to slow down and check if the guy needed a lift anywhere because it was such a dangerous thing to be walking beside an expressway.

The cab driver was very savvy. He said he would lock the doors and asked me to wind down only part of the window to talk to the guy, who turned out to be a teenager. The teenager said he was walking home after work. Both of us were stunned and we asked him where he lived. He said Bukit Panjang. So I told him to hop into the front seat.

He told us that he had walked from Clark Quay and that he had been walking for about an hour and 45 minutes. He said he underestimated the distance it took him to walk from Clark Quay to Bukit Panjang. My goodness.

He was pretty quiet after he got into the cab. So we let him be, and the cab driver and I continued talking. As we neared Bukit Panjang, the cab driver asked the teenager where he stayed and he said: Jelepang Road. So I asked the cab driver to drop the teenager off first. The teenager even offered me some money for the cab ride but I told him that I could afford it.

Then I told him that the biggest lesson for him was that he shouldn't risk his life by doing such a stupid thing because it's late at night and drivers usually drive very fast, especially if they're a little tipsy, and he could easily be hit. The cab driver, on the other hand, started off by telling the teenager that if he ever wanted to walk along the expressway again, he must wear a reflective coat so that drivers can see him, and he then gently told him not to do it again because it was a very dangerous thing.

I felt quite ashamed after that because I thought that the cab driver handled the teenager better than I did, by not scolding him in harsh terms but rather subtly telling him that he shouldn't do it again. To me, the cab driver knew much more about "grace" than I did under that situation. My horrendous first instinct was to scold first and tell the teenager harshly about the negative consequences. :-P

This episode was very humbling for me.