Driving with Your Eyes Closed

For the past four days, my family and I have been visiting my relatives in Hot Springs and Pine Bluff, Arkansas. I had thought that I would have time in one evening to eke out a post, but things did not work out that way. In fact, very little of our short trip worked out the way I had planned. Had I to do it over, we would not have headed south this past week. For anyone not keeping track of the weather, there was this small matter of Hurricane Gustav that resulted in overcrowded hotels, nonstop rain for three days, and some tense driving conditions. Not that anyone should feel bad for me and my family -- the evacuees have matters much worse, and Baton Rouge is nowhere near recovering from the storm. It's simply to say that we would have changed our plans if we could. But hotels, rental cars, and airline tickets were all booked and paid for back in July, and family that had not seen my daughter for almost a year was expecting us. So travel we did.

On Wednesday we were driving from Hot Springs to Memphis in a downpour of rain when something frightening happened: the driver's side windshield wiper started to come apart. One of the caps on the wiper has missing, and the two rubber blades were beginning to separate. We pulled off I-40 in Hazen, Ark., and found Parts Plus, an auto parts store owned by the Shelman family. I had planned to replace the wiper and present the receipt to the rental company for reimbursement. The Shelmans would not hear it. One of them stripped the cap off another wiper blade, stood out in the rain, and repaired the wiper blade, explaining that since I had no guarantee that the rental company would reimburse me, it made more sense to repair the blade than replace it. When I asked how much I owed them, they would not accept payment.

We chatted about the weather and nearby barbecue restaurants (Craig's in DeValls Bluff is the best pork sandwich on the planet, and Nick's in Carlisle isn't bad either). And then we headed back out on the road. I thought about how much danger we could have been in if the wiper blade had flown apart while on the interstate while driving through the storms trailing Gustav. I would have been completely blind, and we would have been stranded on the shoulder with a long wait for a tow truck and traffic flying by at high speeds with limited visibility. And I thought about the kindness of the Shelman family and our "good luck" at finding their store.

The reality is that even before the wiper went kaput, we were driving with our eyes closed. Perhaps I am using the phrase a little differently than Don Henley, but it is nevertheless true. All of us are. None of us knows what the next five minutes holds, nevermind the next five years or five decades. And none of us sees what invisible hands direct all that happens, even if we know Whose hands are there. The wiper blade stayed together, and we found the help we needed. We certainly enjoyed divine assistance and protection.

But if the wiper blade had flown apart, and we had been stranded for a time, or worse if in my blindness I had driven off the road or into another vehicle, or another vehicle had plowed into us, those invisible hands would have been no less present. Not only do we not see those hands, not only do we not see the future, we also do not see the purposes and plans that direct that future. And these are thoughts that sober me, but also make me grateful for what those hands have provided so far.