Have A Little Faith
Not exactly creepy, but it was pretty weird.
Back in my early 20’s, I was heading home on from a mate’s place, walking back to my car which was parked a couple of blocks down the street. On the way I came across a couple of teen boys pelting rocks at a church, nothing too insidious. Being a security guard and big, I was able to scare them off pretty easily without having to be deliberately mean or threatening and as soon as they saw me coming up to them they ran for it.
Anyway, I kept on walking and didn’t think it necessary to report it to the local police. I jumped in the car and started the drive home about 20 kilometres. The route is along a country road alongside farms and fields, and it’s the kind of place where hitchhikers are pretty common, and generally picked up. About half way along there’s an old country church that only get used very occasionally; a couple of hundred meters into middle of a big field. At the driveway to the old church, I saw a male hitchhiker, about the same age as me looking for a ride. The lights weren’t on at the church, but when you drive a road every day, you don’t need to see it to know where you are. This guy was just standing there, no pack or anything, quite unremarkable save for the late hour. I pulled it over and asked if he needed a ride. He said that he was really grateful that I’d stopped and jumped in. He said that he was surprised that someone would be willing to give him a ride so late in the evening and that he’d been at a service at the church earlier in the evening.
Having had an interesting encounter myself with a church that night, I proceeded to tell him about where I’d been, and about how I’d shooed off the young blokes earlier. We got talking, and the topic progressed to religion and morality, and the value of connectedness. He was clearly an articulate and charismatic bloke, far more-so than myself. The kind of person you’d meet in a bar and be happy to let them do the talking just because they make you feel completely at ease. And so it was, we drove on as he spoke with a real authenticity and warmth about the value of belonging to something bigger than his own life, but not in an evangelical way. He told me about how it helped him to not take his life when his wife had died suddenly earlier that year after being killed in a motor accident. It was good food for thought, as I’d lost my girlfriend in a bad break up earlier in the year and was hurting pretty hard; to the point that I’d thought about taking my own life on a couple of occasions myself. I didn’t share that with him though, I was happy to just listen to him talk as the kilometres ticked over.
Anyway, we got this back-road intersection and he said that he was fine to walk the rest way, so I pulled the car over to the side of the road. But before he got out he turned to me and said that he had a strong feeling that we shared a lot in common and invited me to come to one of the services at the church in the field one day if I ever felt like it. He looked very intently at me for a moment in silence, and then pulled a card out of his wallet and gave it to me. To be honest, I felt a little bit awkward and uncomfortable, being a closet atheist, so I accepted his card in haste, wished him the best, and turned the car around to head home.
I got a good 10 minutes down the road before I realised that I’d actually gone about 50 kilometres out of my way in order to drop him off that night. That’s more than twice the distance that I’d originally planned to drive to get home. I was kind of dumbfounded that I could be so captivated in listening this bloke talk that I just hadn’t noticed how far or how long I’d been driving for.
Finally pulling up at my house, I jumped out and as I was putting my keys in my pocket, it dawned on me that not only had I gone a long way out of my way, but I didn’t remember ever actually asking him where he was heading - Not once! Somehow, I’d just picked up random bloke in the middle of nowhere, driven him to an equally nondescript middle of nowhere with no memory of how I’d actually figured out to get there. Not that I was lost, I know the local area well, I just for the life of me couldn’t recall asking him or being told Dead set, it was the most intense feeling of déjà vu that I’ve ever encountered.
Thinking that I must be going bonkers, I opened up the car again and found the card he’d given me. I thought I’d give him a call just to put my mind at ease, since I’m not normally an absent-minded person. Looking at the card he gave me, I was shocked to see no name, no number, just four words:
“Have a little faith”
I called up the church I’d gone past near my mate’s place the following morning, trying to find out who the bloke was, but the priest reckoned that there wasn’t any service out there the night before, and when I told him about my encounter he couldn’t place the bloke based upon my physical description of him or the details of his back-story. To this day, I have no idea what his name was, where he came from or where he was going. I never saw him again. But he said some things that really resonated with where I was at the time and made me think hard about my life and, perhaps most importantly, helped me to feel less alone in the darkness.
A nice bloke, but a bloody strange encounter.