The videos I store in my head seem to be cataloged into three categories:
1. Life-changing moments
2. Non-life-changing moments that still made an impact for some reason
3. Things that pop up from time to time which I've forgotten about until God has some reason to remind me of them
On my anniversary, I'm playing the memory of standing on that playground in October 2007, shivering with friends and family from the damp coolness as my fiance slides a ring onto my finger.
As I'm hanging ornaments, I'm remembering that weird commercial for a Santa hotline my brothers and I laughed at during our preteen years, singing the jingle ad nauseum for our parents and creating obscure parodies for our own enjoyment.
Today, I had a Category 3 visit. Every time this memory leaps onto my mental landscape, I'm amazed it hasn't taken up permanent residence in Category 1. But I'm grateful it hasn't because it's maintained its potency each time the Spirit has brought it back. Here's the story.
When I was dating a guy I probably shouldn't have ever dated, I was invited to be in a wedding. I had never been in a wedding, and I didn't know what I was getting into, and I'm going to skip that story because I think it has passed its point of being useful for any kind of edification. The end of it was that I was no longer going to the wedding, and I suddenly had my Memorial Day weekend free.
That Sunday, I was at church, responding to a gentle but persistent nudging at my heart. "I surrender," I told God. "Take my life, and do what You want with it."
The next day, I was en route with my paramour and some friends to an amusement park. We had to take a few expressways to get there, and, not being the driver, I had brought along a book to read in the backseat for the two-hour trip.
I looked up just as the driver jerked the car to the right, causing us to fly off the road and into the downhill embankment. We careened through wet ditches and weeds, until the SUV came to a full stop with its nose pointing upward toward the highway and its rear wheels locked in mud.
"What happened?" we all exclaimed in unison. The driver pointed back at the road, at a car parked in the right lane of traffic. No one was in it, but as we scanned toward the waist-high weeds we had just blown past, we saw a figure emerging and tugging at his pants zipper.
Yes. This individual had parked his car in the road to pee. And we should have all been dead.
By God's grace and that alone, our driver had made a knee-jerk maneuver as soon as the car in front of him swiped to the left because of the parked car. Had our driver gone left, we would have been in an accident. Instead, we went right, and the area where we landed was safe enough to "drive" on. We were in a 4x4 vehicle that had not flipped over despite its trajectory, and no one was injured.
A few days later, my beau and I broke up. It wasn't until quite some time after that I put it together that my cry to God on Sunday had brought on this about-face, making us all reevaluate the trajectory of our own lives. I had not been injured in the accident or the relationship, but my loving Daddy had something bigger and better for me, and He needed me to let go of what was holding me back.
Definitely a Category 1 memory.
And after I'm done praising Him for this, I'll go back to forgetting it until He wants to remind me again of His power, His plans, and His faithfulness.
