Today was taken up with a trip down to Indianapolis. On the way back, we saw two overturned semis—one by itself, one at the center of a multi-vehicle accident (in the lanes going the other direction) that had drawn upwards of a dozen emergency vehicles, all with lights going. One of my daughters asked, after we passed the big one, why it had happened; I said I didn’t know, but the comment was made that probably someone hadn’t been paying attention. There was a little red car, undamaged, stopped a short distance ahead of the accident, which made us wonder if perhaps that car had cut someone off or made a sudden move of some other sort, setting off a chain of events that made the semi swerve and overbalance, among other things—the sort of careless move that people make and get away with all the time, but this time at just the wrong moment to cause a tragedy.
We take so much for granted, most days. We take for granted that we can drive wherever we need to go and get there and back safely—and if we don’t, people call us worrywarts. We take for granted that we can do whatever it occurs to us to do and it will all be okay, and that if we’re a little careless, no harm will be done. We may pray for God’s protection as we travel or do other things—I had asked for prayer Wednesday for traveling mercies for us—but we do so lightly, more in the spirit of “just in case” than with any sense that it’s actually important. We take for granted that the routine and the mundane really is, of its essence, the routine and the mundane.
And it isn’t, as the folks involved in that accident were reminded, and as we were reminded, passing by in the other direction. It isn’t at all. There is always the possibility for the unexpected and the uncontrolled to intrude—and if, at any given point, that possibility may be quite low, it does build up after a while. There’s always more out of our control than we like to admit, and more variables (many more) than we can possibly track, and far more ways that things can go wrong than there are ways they can go right. We expect routine good fortune, take it for granted, and consider ourselves ill-used when we don’t get it, when we really ought to realize that even that much is a great gift, an act of God’s grace. It is, truly, no small thing to pray for traveling mercies—and no small blessing when our request is granted. Every such answer to prayer is a victory over the chaos in our world; and every such victory should be taken seriously as reason for gratitude.