A Very Different Ride

On Monday morning this week, I started my normal drive to work. For the last 5 months, the trees have been bare, the drive – dark. And then, on this day, the drive changed. I saw flowers, berries, leaves. It was an almost overnight transformation. My drive is a long, 30 minute drive down a country road. The road is lined with nothing but trees. And Monday, for the first time in 5 months, it was .....pretty. It lifted my mood incredibly for a Monday morning. The flowering trees were amazing. How amazing nature is.

This ride made me think. How quickly life can change for all of us. In a blink of an eye, things change. Our kids literally go from tiny, screaming newborns to 6 year old Kindergarten students. I blink and Finley and Cainan are 3 years old. Another blink and Mat and I have been married for 11 ½ years.


On Friday of last week, things changed drastically for a teacher at my school. She went from being a happy pregnant lady to a medical emergency where her baby's life was in danger. She took a very different ride home from work that day. No one could have forseen what was going to happen that day when she drove to work down a bare tree road.

I think – was it lucky? Fate? God? What put her basically in the right place at the right time on Friday to save her baby and herself? What made it so that she wasn't on a field trip (like the day before), or on the road driving, or home alone? This thought has troubled me all weekend as I play the scenario over and over in my head. What if? What if SOMETHING or SOMEONE didn't step in and make her situation so?

So many people are not so fortunate. The end is not what they expected. The ride very different from what it was supposed to be. Why? The question is haunting. We wake up every day expecting things to go just so. And then, in a blink – they don't.

It is what we do after the ride changes that shapes who we are and how we live. We can chose to accept the new path we were given, or not. It isn't always easy to accept the change. We are creatures of habit. I am in awe of people who accept change as a natural part of living.

My path, today, is clear. Wife, mother, nurse. I thank God that on Friday, he gave me what I needed to be the nurse my teacher needed to get her and her baby to safety. In this case, I have to say – no fate. No luck. Just faith.