Your worldly goods […] are but a trial and a temptation,
whereas with God there is a tremendous reward.
—The Qur’an - 64:15
When I first climbed into the Uber, and the man with a Middle Eastern accent dove straight into road rage stories, I was a tad alarmed. Apparently, his fiancée doesn’t like it when he throws his coffee out the window at jaywalkers and then proceeds to yell at them to the point where they aim a gun at his face. She really doesn’t like it when he eggs them on further by saying, “Go ahead. Shoot me. Shoot me!”
Allegedly. You know how these Uber drivers can be, embellishing stories to the point of sounding braggadocious.
“Oh, stop it,” I said. “You weren’t that brave.”
But he’s from New York, where that’s just another Monday.
The knots in my stomach unfurled when somehow he segued this into a tear-jerker about his first wife dying of Covid there, then getting laid off from his job all in the same week.
“But that’s life,” he said, brushing it off like a fender bender he’d buffed out over the weekend. That’s when it all made sense, where this road rage came from.
Pre-pandemic, he found himself working for the king of Saudi Arabia in his home country. The money was as good as you could imagine, but the moment he witnessed his king murder another employee just for refusing to perform a job, he decided it was time to rethink his career.
“I feel much safer in America,” he told me, sharing how he fled the country because quitting wasn’t really an option. Unfortunately, this displeased the king, who then dissolved the equivalent of $2 million that my driver had saved up in his account. And as it turns out, lawyers can’t do much in the face of royal injustice.
“It’s alright,” he said. “Money can’t save you. I was better off starting over here anyway.”
Better to be a broke freeman than a rich prisoner, is the lesson I derived from that little tale.
And so my ride ended with me strolling into the airport toward vacation because no king has the power to wipe my financial slate clean. But I suppose that God can do this anytime is the big reminder of this little School of Life episode.