Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Not Your Ordinary Traffic Jam


Okay, things got too crazy tonight to be "coincidence." Though I know that everything that happens is through Hashem's hashgacha pratis, sometimes that fact is easy to overlook when seemingly ordinary things are happening. But when many events seem to come together in some sort of strange confluence of occurances, Hashem's hand becomes more obvious.

As I may or may not have mentioned in a previous post, I attend law school in the evenings. I was on my way from work to law school tonight when I got a flat tire. It hasn't been so long since the last one which I wrote about here. My schedule is very tight so as soon as I got the flat, I knew I'd be late for school. But given the time it takes AAA to come, I changed the tire myself. 20-30 minutes later, I'd changed the tire and was ready to go to school, albeit late. That was delay/problem/Yad Hashem #1.

However, when I went to start the car, delay #2 kicked in. The car wouldn't start. Which is wierd because the car is an '05 and has been working fine until now, and "it" picks exactly that moment when I just had a flat tire and need to get to law school to fail to start. Fine, I call AAA and they come in pretty good time. They jump my battery (which B"H was the only problem, nothing major like the starter or something).

Then I get off at my exit when here comes delay #3. There's a concert at my exit, near the law school and I sit on the exit ramp for over an hour because of the traffic. I finally get to the law school in time to catch the last 45 minutes out of the 3 hours of class I had.

Now just one of these things wouldn't have made me think twice (which is my deficiency since everything is hashgacha, not just the big unexplainable "coincidences"). But 3 crazy things that almost never happen to me occuring on the same night must mean something. I figure there is some reason why Hashem didn't want me to be at the law school for my first 2 hours and 15 minutes. Perhaps there was some physical or spiritual danger that I averted because I was prevented from being where I planned to be at that time. I don't know what the reason is but I'm grateful and thankful to Hashem for making me late!

-Dixie Yid

2 comments:

yitz said...

Awwww, from the pic I thought you were caught in a traffic jam with sheep & was gonna tie that in to this week's Parsha!
But obviously this delay means something, we await your wisdom as to what it was/is.

DixieYid (يهودي جنوبي) said...

As to what the delay means, I don't know! And I may never know. We all love those stories where something bad happens to someone and then by the end of the story we find out that this bad thing saved the person from 9/11/plane crash/car accident/ robbery, etc. But in real life, we don't usually know the bigger meaning of Hashem's plan. I'm just comforted by the knowlege that there must have been a reason, though I may not find out what that reason is till 120.

-Dixie Yid

PS great idea to tie in the picture to the parsha! Wish I'd thought of it.