Avoiding danger – lessons from the past

Something was coming toward our car. I held tightly to the steering wheel, trying to see what it was as the wipers cleared enough of a spot on the windshield for me to see through. Suddenly, “Bam!” I kept the car on track, praying silently as we drove on the motorway in the dark.

“What was that?” asked CutiePyeGirl from the back seat.

“I think it was a bucket or something,” I replied.

“Why did you hit it?”

“I… I had to. Can I tell you later?” I asked, wanting to concentrate, focusing all my energy on the road and wanting to get us safely to our destination. When after what felt like hours, but was actually only about twenty minutes, we arrived and I turned the car off, I breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank you, Lord,” I thought.

I don’t like driving in the best of circumstances, but give me a British motorway with crazy drivers, in the dark, with rain and wind and the defogger blasting away, and I’m definitely out of my comfort zone. But as I thought about holding firm to the wheel last night, after the fact, I remembered in a flash being a new driver on a sunny day in Minnesota. I was driving with my dad and we had just passed our church on the busy Victoria Street. Seeing a mother duck and her ducklings starting to cross the road, I swerved.

Alarmed, my dad grabbed the wheel and kept our car going straight. “Kill the ducks rather than hitting another car,” he said. We didn’t hit the cute creatures, but his advice was sound, and I’ve always remembered it. Perhaps his words so lodged in my subconscious that I remembered them last night, keeping going straight and not swerving into the next lane.

Ever think about how little incidents of the past might have prepared you for something later in life, like staying on the straight and narrow path?