"Is it clear from the east?" my husband invariably asks me every day as he checks traffic from the west. We are about to pull out onto Highway 60 from doing our farm chores. There is almost always a steady stream of eighteen-wheelers, trucks and automobile traffic speeding down the busy road.
Yesterday, from the barn yard, we heard sirens screaming and caught glimpses through the trees of emergency vehicles flying past going east. "It must be an accident," I said, sending a prayer heavenward for whomever might be involved. We finished up and headed back to town for our grocery shopping.
Coming out of Walmart later, I felt the vibration of my phone in my purse and knew it was about to ring. I carried a small purse today and, despite the incessant, endless ringing, I couldn't access the phone that was lodged under my wallet. I called the number back once I got in the car and recognized the voice of my church friend.
"Has anyone called you?" she asked, to which I replied, "Just the call I missed just now." "That was me," she said, "I'm calling with a prayer request." Then she told me that the son of a friend had just been killed in an automobile accident!
"No way!" I exclaimed when I heard who it was. "Isn't that the father of the boy who drowned last summer?" She said it was. I couldn't believe it. Our friend wasn't even over the tragedy of losing her grandson, whom she had raised! Last Sunday she was tearfully asking for prayer, saying it was the one year anniversary of his death.
"Yes," she said. "She is taking it very hard. She needs lots of prayer." Of course, we prayed for her and her husband. I remembered her grieving so hard when our pastor's wife died a few months ago, saying Clara was the one who got her through the loss of her grandson. Now this! How much could one person take!
"It happened on Highway 60. His car was hit by an eighteen-wheeler," my friend spoke over the phone. Turns out it was just a mile from where we were.
"You just never know, " I said to my husband. "One minute you're here, and the next, you're gone!" When I told my son about it later, he said the same thing.
Ironically, there were two Facebook posts on my screen today of narrowly averted accidents. In one, my granddaughter was describing coming unexpectedly upon an accident on the freeway, then, after carefully manipulating her way past it, a car on the off-ramp stopped unexpectedly in front of her, causing her to swerve around it, while another car was able to swerve around her! She was thanking God for her family's safety and lamenting the fact that she had ignored a feeling ( the Holy Spirit?) not to take that route in the first place!
The other post was from a former neighbor in Mississippi who was driving with her granddaughter in a torrential rain, when a truck coming around the curve on the country road lost control and came within an inch of hitting them head on! She, too, was praising God for His hand of protection that moved the truck away from them. "I could have reached out and touched it!" she wrote.
It pays to be ready. The next life is just a breath or a heartbeat away. It's so near you can almost reach out and touch it!
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