I wanted to share a story from a potentially life and death situation that I found myself in yesterday morning. Jean is currently out of town at a conference in Nashville. So Yours Truly is attempting to hold down the fort, with limited success. (Mama, we miss you!)
I was driving Caleb to school with all of our four little ones in the car. They were laughing and carrying on in the back of the van, which is not unusual when traveling anywhere with our little Crane circus. As we were driving west on 10th street (a two-lane road), a lady pulled her car out from the Clarian West hospital on our right, crossed our lane and turned east. She then curved back toward the hospital parking lot. I thought for an instance that she was simply pulling a U-turn back into the hospital...that is, until she started heading east again, directly in my lane. She was quickly coming at me, so I slammed on my brakes and honked the horn to try to get her attention. Suddenly, she seemed to come out of whatever trance-like state she was in and swerved off the road to our right, just missing our van by mere feet.
Meanwhile, the line of cars caravaning behind us on 10th street reacted to my slamming on the brakes by swerving to the right and the left to keep from rear-ending our vehicle and eachother. We escaped contact from any of the other vehicles and continued on our way, with the poor lady probably still by the side of the road suffering a heart attack from her momentary lapse of concentration.
To quote Hamish's father from Braveheart, "That'll wake you up in the mornin', boys." And indeed it did! But it was what I saw in the back of the van that really got my attention. As I quickly recomposed myself and continued on toward school, I could hear the boys still laughing in the back, oblivious to the situation. So close to a major trauma and yet unfazed because of their innocent ignorance.
As you might imagine that whole sequence of events had me thinking throughout that day. And as I reflected back on the boys' reaction I couldn't help but see an analogy to our relationship with God. How often do we ride through life oblivious to God's sovereign hand at work around us? Virtually every morning in the Crane house we pray that God will "keep us safe as we are traveling to and from our destination." I must confess, there a number of mornings when that brief prayer has a rote quality to it. And yet, you never know when life, and other people's decisions in life, will test that prayer.
I'm so thankful that a potentially-life-threatening crisis was averted without incident. And more than that, I'm so thankful that God continues to watch over us, even (and especially) when we fail to remember that He is ever-present. 
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