Not Forgotten

Nighean bhan has been asking to put fish in her tank for a few weeks now, and yesterday was finally the day to do it. We got into the Trusty White Protege and headed out.

To get to the next turnoff is merely the act of getting on and off by staying in the exit lane. I've missed that exit many times - and, New Home being New Home, if I miss it I have to go down another mile to turn around and get back. Therefore I was paying complete attention to what I was doing and where I needed to be.

As we came off the freeway (exiting at freeway speeds, of course) I looked up ahead. To my consternation, I saw a red Volkswagen turning out from a nearby store and into the road. As was watching out of my right vision, it seemed that they were not just turning and getting into the middle of three lanes but seemed intent on moving into the far left lane.

My lane.

It's at moments like these that I'm grateful I grew up at a time where Driver's Education was still real and in a small town where you learn to do things that you might not learn to do in a city. I hit the brakes hard and, as the VW continued to turn in and then (realizing I was there) moved back out (seemingly at sub-light speed), made a soft left and went up and over the small curb and into a median of native grasses and wild flowers.

I came to a stop and just sat there for a moment, nerves jangling. The traffic was not too bad (being Sunday and all), so I was able to get the car moving and over to a lane where the VW had pulled in.

A very nice young lady and her boyfriend got out as we checked on each other, then made conversation as I crawled around the bottom of the car to look. Tires looked low but good - they were probably low anyway - and there was no leaking that I could see. We exchanged information, then they drove away and we, trailing bits of grass and flower petals, headed on to buy a fish.

After we got back home, fish in hand (a blue betta, name undetermined at this time), I sat there shaken for a while. It's been a long time that I have had so near a miss moving so fast. I went back and forth about cause - should I have stayed on the surface road, should they have stayed in the center lane - but that's all in the past now and probably irrelevant. All were safe, the cars are okay. Carry on.

What it did make think about was the very real presence of God in my life.

I often feel - well, not forgotten, but maybe mostly out of mind - by God. The things that I have always thought were important (mostly to me, to be fair) never really seem to work out the way I hope for. The life I would like, doing the things I would like, seems to constantly evade my grasp like tadpoles in a spring pond. It's a fairly selfish view as I sit and think about it - judging the attention of God as if he were a genie and wish fulfillment was the Key Performance Indicator - but I suspect I'm far from the only one.

And then something like this happens, something that could have ended very badly instead (and hopefully) somewhat amusingly - I can imagine what the drivers whizzing by thought of my Trusty White Protege in a cloud of pollen and petals. One could make the argument that it was almost as a hand had gone between the two cars and guided mine up onto the median, making sure to give it a short lift on the way over the curb.

And there are so many other little things: the fact that the tires were not completely full and so did not burst; the fact that there were no handy sharp object in the grass to puncture my tires, the fact that no harm seems to have befallen the car; that I did not take The Ravishing Mrs. TB's car (which, being lower, surely would not have survived unscathed); the fact that it was Sunday and that incident any other day of the week would not have ended as well.

And the big one, of course: that no-one was injured.

It was an excellent - and for me, a very timely - reminder that just because we don't see God working on what we think is important doesn't mean that He has stopped working and caring for us. And, more importantly, that He has not - and will not - ever forget us.

Even in the simple act of getting into a car for a fish.