Highway 41 Revisited

There's a scene in the "notes, corrections, clarifications, apologies, addenda" section of Dave Eggers' book "Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" where he's driving up Highway 41 to the northern suburbs in Chicago on his way home from college to help his parents, who are dying of cancer. He writes:

"When my parents were sick, I began, during my senior year in college, to drive back and forth from school to home, usually from Thursday (I had only one, completely skippable, class on Friday) to Sunday night, when I'd head back down state. The drive between Champaign and Chicago is impossibly uneventful, completely tedious, and I was doing it, for the most part, in a 1981 Rabbit without a radio or windshield wipers. But I did it with a certian smugness, with a sense of mission, because I was leaving the frivolity of college and my many housemates and their endless games of 9-ball....I was leaving that environment for a place where, I felt, I was needed urgently, where I could lift sandbags, put my finger in the dike, whatever. We all know that there are very few times when we feel like we are proving we are using this flesh-life-thing, and those times are a) during sex; b) adventure; c) adventure in the service of duty. And coming with that certain smugness was of course a certain guilt about smugness drawn from duty. We feel glad that we have a very tangible reason to exist, that we are driving on a terrible flat highway for three hours Thursday night because at home our sister will say Finally! and our small brother will jump and monkey-hug and say Hey stupid! and our parents will greet us with their exhaustion and frail arms."

This is my favorite scene in the book. Something tragic happens, and it is so tragic, and we hate that someone hurts and we want it to go away. Yet the adrenaline starts pumping and there's something to do and maybe we can make a difference. It seems I've been driving up Highway 41 a lot during the past year as two friends died of breast cancer, another friend's father died. Now a baby lying in a hospital PICU with a severe heart defect.

I want to HELP. Help with a capital "H". It makes me feel alive and like I have purpose, a mission. But I'm wondering, too, when it becomes selfish. Do I want to help because it makes ME feel good? Or do I want to help because my friends need the help?

Or maybe we feel more alive because, as C.S. Lewis writes, "God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world." We hear him more clearly when we suddenly see how delicate life is, how fragile and temporary. When we're reminded, once again, there must be something more -- something beyond our mundane days. During these times our differences and imagined slights and arguments against one another fall away and we just love one another. We drive up Highway 41 and bring meals and leave phone messages and post comments on their blog and sit beside them and listen and love them and hopefully our intentions are pure. We're never quite sure. But we get a little taste of loving someone like Christ loves us, and it's our salvation.