I know that when we talk, I’m usually asking you for something. I ask for forgiveness, I ask you to help me through an emotional time, I ask you to watch over my family. I know it must get tedious hearing about my needs all of the time, so today I’m going to take a moment to just say thank you.
You see, the truth of the matter, and I’ve been honest with you about this in the past, is that I don’t really trust you.
Maybe it’s just a product of my anxious brain, but I don’t trust that your grand plan for me doesn’t involve some huge tragedy that will ultimately make me lose my mind.
So I worry.
I worry that the people I love will get hurt, or sick, and I won’t be able to help them. I worry that my kids will be harmed by someone with bad intentions. I worry that my husband will be killed in a fiery crash on the highway during his daily commute. My worry consumes me some days, and I can’t get the horrible scenarios and the accompanying visions of gore out of my head.
Then I pray.
My prayers are often tear-filled pleas. Please God, let them be safe. Please God, have them answer my text so I know they’re ok. Please, please please, don’t take any of them before you take me. Because I just don’t think I could keep putting one foot in front of the other each day if I had to do it without a single one of them.
Imagine my surprise when the phone rang out of the blue this morning, and I learned how close I’d come to living a shattered life. There was no premonition on my part, no overwhelming sense of doom. Just a phone call asking for a ride home.
I don’t know for sure how close he came to becoming a tragedy this morning. How long it would have been before his brake line melted, or if he would have been able to stop if it had. I don’t know if another driver would have flagged him down soon enough if the guy in the little red car hadn’t. I don’t know if a shift in the wind would have pushed the fire into the passenger compartment hampering his escape. I just don’t know…
I do know that seeing his burnt out car, windshield shattered from the heat, tires and dashboard melted into surrealist representations of their former selves, made me feel like it had been a very close call indeed.
I guess, dear God, I owe you an apology.
I’m not saying I’ll change. I’d love to, but as much as I try to leave my anxiety behind, I’m a slave to it some days. I will concede that today, while I was going about my morning worry free, you had my back. Thank you for that.
I don’t take my life for granted. I’ve lived enough and seen enough to know it can all be taken from me in the blink of an eye. That’s why I don’t care so much about the things we own, or the accumulation of digits in our bank account. I can fight my way through anything as long as I have them, as long as I have ‘him’ by my side. The only thing in this life that really scares me, is loosing them.
So thanks, dear God, for sending that driver to flag down my husband on the highway this morning. Thank you for not letting his brakes fail when he pulled over to see what the problem was. Thank you for blowing the fire in the opposite direction so he had enough time to get out of the car and walk down the road out of harms way.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, for all the tiny details that came into play today, just so that my husband could come home tonight.
In the future I’ll do my best to remember that you’ve got my back.
Hugs,
