The **@&%$! Samaritan

A "Good Samaritan" helped me the other day, and if I were to put it in parable form it would go something like this:

A man journeying to Layton fell among thieves, was beaten and left for dead. A Bishop came along and passed him on the other side of the road. A policeman also passed by him and didn't help.

Then, a man from Samaria came and decided to help. He thought he knew a shortcut to an inn and began to carry the man on his back, but as he traveled hither decided not to bother and left the man in the middle of the desert to be eaten by vultures.

I am not smart enough to make this kind of stuff up, but I am gullible enough have it happen to me.

About three weeks ago, I wanted to leave work early to take my daughters to basketball practice on a Tuesday, as I wasn't sure how Miriam, Gideon and Susan's schedules would work out.

The 3:02 PM bus to the train station wasn't waiting at the bus stop. I learned that it had come quite a bit early and then left. This wasn't the first time this happened to me. I have no idea why UTA can't convince their drivers to leave when they are supposed to leave.

Anyway, a fellow who worked in my building needed to leave early and called a coworker, who came and picked him up. It had room for two more people, and he (let's call him "Sam" for Samaritan) called out the window asking if any of us would like a ride. I jumped at the chance, as did an approximately 75-yr-old senior sister missionary from New Zealand who wanted to meet her husband at the temple downtown.

The coworker used her phone for navigation, which took her past the turn off for the train station. She started to pull off the run to see about turning around, but Sam said that there was a place to get to the train station ahead and told her to follow her phone. I thought he meant to go through the neighborhood to the road to the South of the train station, where one could drive under the tracks.

Instead, her phone's destination was directly opposite the train tracks, at a small pasture of about half an acre between two homes. Sam told us to hurry across the tracks or we would miss the train. He was taking the train to Utah County and had a few more minutes to spare, but we didn't have time to backtrack and make it.

I wasn't too worried about it ... that had happened before, and I would just read while waiting at the platform. I pointed out that there was a fence between us and the tracks (a tall one) as well as a fence between the cargo railway and the passenger railway, but Sam insisted that he had seen people crossing somewhere near these two homes and we needed to hurry. 

This didn't make sense to me, but, not wanting to be unwilling or call him a liar, I said I would check it out.

I walked up to the fence. Both homes had high cement walls to block the sound, and the pasture had a seven-foot chain link fence. There was no gap between them.

I then noticed the 75-year-old sister missionary was following me. She was told to follow me, and then they drove off.

I was stunned. There was no way to scale the chain link fence, especially with a grandma in a dress with me. And, sure enough, the fence between the cargo rails and the passenger rails was intact, too. I have no idea why he couldn't wait 45 more seconds for me to come back.

So, the two of us made the long trek East a couple of blocks, then North a couple of blocks, then West a couple of blocks and under the train tracks, and then South a couple of blocks to the train station. I should have checked my phone, as Google maps would have had us take a much shorter, 1.4 mile walk heading south, as you can see below--the blue dots are Google's recommendations, and the red is what we actually did:

We got to the station about 45 minutes later.

Thanks, Sam!