Doves On Distant Oaks

Under God's Protection

It was a very wet, wintry night. I was driving my family home after a Sunday visit with my in-laws, about 20 miles away. My wife was drifting in and out of sleep in the passenger seat and both kids were fast asleep in the back seat. Part of the drive involved a 10-mile stretch on a winding, country road. Just before I turned onto it, a slow-moving vehicle pulled in front of me and I had to follow it. All I could envision was 10 miles of slow driving, when all I wanted to do was get home and crawl into bed.

After a few miles, I had had enough of it. I was extremely aggravated and kept trying to find a stretch of road to pass, but was stymied by short stretches of road and oncoming traffic. Finally, a clear path emerged between two curves. I knew I had enough room given the speed we were traveling. I was about to slip out to pass, but suddenly held back. I was uncertain why and was just about to berate myself when all of a sudden a car came roaring around the curve on our side of the road, twice the regulated speed limit, getting back into its own lane just as it passed the slow car ahead of us.

I turned to my wife and said, "If I had been passing that car we would have just had a head-on collision."

How often has something like that happened to you? Perhaps its not the same circumstances, but something is causing you to get aggravated. Maybe you've been held up by one too many stoplights. Maybe its just a simple thing like getting a later start than usual because one problem after another arises to slow you down, passing an accident that occurred just a few minutes ago. Or vice versa, maybe things go so smoothly that you get going faster than usual, happen to look in the rear view mirror, and see an accident has occurred right behind you. And that's just the things related to driving in traffic. What about all those little everyday things to which we don't give a second thought.

Here's the thing—those are just what we happen to notice. How many other times has something caused you to be at the exact spot you are and have no idea something bad has happened if you were a few minutes faster or a few minutes slower.

There are those who would call it coincidence. Others call it luck. Neither of those words are in the vocabulary of the true child of God because they know there is no such thing as coincidence or luck. It is, quite simply put, the hand of God. Now that hand may work through angels, or the Holy Spirit, or any number of other unforeseeable ways. But, as the psalmist says, the Lord watches over our comings and our goings.

That fact doesn't make me fool-hardy, but it does make me thankful for His presence in my life not every day, nor every hour, but every single moment.

The Lord watches over you—the Lord is your shade at your right hand; the sun will not harm you by day, nor the moon by night. The Lord will keep you from all harm—he will watch over your life; the Lord will watch over your coming and going both now and forevermore.

– Psalm 121:5-8

Keywords: God, Protection

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