On Mondays I have to drive my daughter to the school for her drum lesson, then turn right around and bring Kiddo#3 back to the bus stop for when the school opens half an hour later. I sometimes make the bus by seconds, but there’s no better way to work Monday mornings. Unfortunately.
The school parking lot empties onto the main road, which during rush hour isn’t impassible but is crowded in both directions, and frequently I have to wait, which means we might miss the bus. This particular Monday, an SUV flashed his lights and let me in.
(Laugh at me: in the interests of cultivating “spontaneous prayer,” I’ve trained myself to ask God to bless people who let me in to traffic. Spontaneous =/= planned, no? So I’ve planned my spontaneity. I hope God’s laughing too.)
So I quickly asked God to bless that other driver while I merged onto the road, and then 25 feet later I pulled into the left turn lane, meaning the guy who’d let me in was not in any way inconvenienced by letting me enter; he now could get right back on the bumper of the slow-moving car in front of him.
I’d just stopped at the edge of the intersection, waiting for an opening, when horns blared, and I saw the SUV driver lurch to a stop: someone from the oncoming traffic had tried to make a left right in front of him, and he’d only barely missed a collision. In fact, I wasn’t sure that the left-turn-jumper hadn’t actually come UP our lane in order to bypass the people waiting for a left turn, because I hadn’t seen him at the head of the line a moment ago!
So here’s the upshot:
1) SUV slows to let me in
2) Oncoming driver does something stupidly dangerous
3) SUV driver is not where he would have been because he let me in, and therefore he’s not hit
Now traffic patterns are fluid, and any one of a hundred factors could have been at play. But when I see or experience something like that, I always wonder if God hasn’t used our own good impulses to enable us to escape a bad situation.
May God bless and protect that nice driver. And maybe He already has.
Amen.
It just goes to show how the choices you make (no matter how small) could make an impact not just on the lives of the people we know, but on the people we don’t know.
The thing we have to learn to accept sometimes is that we don’t always have control over consequences of our choices. You just have to pray that when you feel you’re doing the right thing, God will help.
And I also think God is an opportunist, and if God finds a way to use our own actions to result in helping us, He’ll do it. 🙂