Tonight I was reminded of something I hadn't thought about in a long time. Years ago now I was running at night when I failed to see a stick lying across the sidewalk. I got my feet tangled up in it and went down hard -- really hard. For a minute I just sat there and cried, because it hurt too much for me to put words in a row inside my brain. I fell on a brightly lit section of sidewalk next to a busy street, and I watched the cars zooming by me as I wailed. I was more than a mile from home and I had no idea -- none -- what I was going to do.
After a minute, I got myself together enough to pray. I said, "Oh, Jesus, I offer up this suffering in union with your sacrifice on the cross. Also, I am kind of stuck here." And instantly, I'm talking the second I finished that sentence in my head, a gentle voice behind me said, "Excuse me, do you need some help?"
A young guy named Brad had parked and walked over to me. He offered to let me use his phone to call my husband, or to take me home. This is the reason I never posted the story (it's still in my drafts): I felt really weird telling you all that I got in a stranger's car while injured and vulnerable. But he was so peaceful and gentle that I knew it would be all right. (Or I mostly knew it would be all right. To tell the whole truth, I did try to memorize his license plate as I was hobbling over to the car, but I wasn't in any shape to memorize license plates.) He took me right home, where I iced my poor sad ankle for the next, like, 4 days.
Sometimes you pray and it seems like nothing happens. Sometimes you pray and the answer makes you say, "HAHA, God, VERY funny." But sometimes you pray and kerblam-- God set the answer in motion before you could even form the words, so it would be waiting for you the moment you made the plea.
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