“I heard a huge crash,” my nephew Jeremy told me. “The house shook. Then I heard the sound of glass breaking. That seemed to go on forever. Then I watched the attic hatch flap jump up and come back down again. Sideways! I had no idea what had happened. A tree falling, maybe?”
God rarely allows us to see our days from his perspective. Only he knows how often we’ve escaped things that could have shattered us. The disasters we side-stepped because we slept through an alarm, chose not to pass the slow vehicle ahead, missed a flight, or stayed home instead of going out. But every so often, with shudders, we catch as Jeremy did, a glimpse of the awful “could’a beens…”
I love my infrequent visits to the cozy corner townhouse Jeremy shares with his wife and their two preschool daughters – my sister’s grandchildren. The skylight-illuminated kitchen flows into the dining room, which extends to the living room, two small bedrooms and a washroom. The compact upper floor has only has a master bedroom with an en suite.
After dinner one night, Sylvia put the girls to bed in their main floor bedroom. Then she returned to the kitchen to clear the table and load the dishwasher. When one of the girls called, rather than saying (as I may have), “wait till I’m done here,” Sylvia straightened and walked the few steps to the girls’ room.
Still at the table, Jeremy opened his laptop to work on his taxes. Suddenly he realized he needed to make a trip upstairs. That’s where he was when everything happened – the crash, the levitating attic hatch, the prolonged sound of breaking glass.
Racing downstairs, he found his family unharmed. Together, they stared in shock at what had, mere seconds earlier, been the tidy front half of their home. Entire kitchen cupboards had shifted. Shattered dishes littered the floor. The dishwasher, where Sylvia had so recently stood, had flipped several times, landing on its back near Jeremy’s chair. And in front of the fireplace lay a puddle of blue liquid.
Jeremy’s a mechanic. He knows anti-freeze when he sees it. This batch had spewed from the gray car that had just slammed through their kitchen wall – directly behind the dishwasher. “The headlights were IN OUR HOUSE,” he told me, rather indignantly. Yet, miraculously, the crash harmed no one, not even the young driver.
My nephew’s family didn’t deserve to have their house bashed in. Nevertheless, as Jesus said, difficulties happen to everyone. So do good things like narrow misses and close calls. If I know Jeremy and Sylvia, they’re teaching their precious girls that.
But they’re also teaching them that our loving Father God often protects us from harm. That we can trust him. And that it’s always right to whisper a prayer of thanks.
With Jeremy and Sylvia, I too, say, “Thanks, Lord, for your sheltering hand over my family – in the moments we know about, and the many we don’t.
