Not Your Time

Before we get into the meat of the matter, I want to throw out a few ideas, philosophies if you will, which are relevant to the discussion. The first is: Nothing happens by accident. The second: We are all here for a reason. The third: There is a Higher Power. The fourth: We are meant to interact with each other, working toward a positive outcome. If you agree with these, then we have some common ground. If you do not, please take the following into consideration from your viewpoint and arrive at your own conclusions. One other thing: This is not being told to illicit sympathy, empathy, blame or anger.

A baby was born; she was beautiful and apparently perfect – ten fingers, ten toes, all the appropriate gear inside and out. When she was about three months old, she began gasping for air and turning blue. The diagnosis was that she had extreme sinus allergies. This occurred in a small town, back in the 50’s. There were few remedies that were allergy specific, so she was treated with adult strength and dosages of meds that were developed to relieve sinus congestion due to colds or flu. That was all there was. Her mother, fearing for the baby’s life at all times, since she was incapable of breathing unless her head was turned to one side or the other to keep a nasal passage open enough to allow the intake of air, held the baby while she slept – even throughout the night. The mother sat upright in a chair every night holding her child to make sure she could breathe until the child was about three years old, and her nasal passages had grown larger and she had learned to mouth breathe. It is possible that the mother did not need to wait ‘til the child was that old for it to be safe to let her sleep on her own in a bed. However, the fear of losing the child made it impossible for the mother to “experiment” at an earlier age. The basic premise is this: the child was near death many times during her first at least two years of life.

The child grew to be a beautiful little girl. She was quite often too sick to go to school. Her mother dutifully went to school to pick up and drop off her schoolwork (she was both home taught and provided the public school experience). Since the child was an excellent student with no disciplinary issues and since the mother took such an active part in her education, the school system was willing to overlook the excessive absences. When she was about seven or eight years old, she contracted chicken pox just past mid-December. Throughout the week before Christmas until a few days after, the girl spent most of her time passing out from the pain in her throat and head, especially when she tried to swallow anything. She has no real memory of any of this herself. However, her mother clearly remembers the entire experience and wondering on several occasions if her child was going to live through the end of the year. Since the child had chicken pox, no doctor or hospital would allow her to appear in person. Her pediatrician made house calls, but there wasn’t much that could be done. Again, adult medications to attempt to relieve the pain and congestion were prescribed. It was nearly impossible for the child to take the medicine since her throat was swollen nearly shut and every time she tried to swallow, she passed out; so, for all intents and purposes, none of the medication was ever ingested. In a perfect world, she’d have been admitted to a hospital. OK – in a humane world, she’d have been hospitalized where she could have had intravenous saline and necessary drugs. The child was dehydrated along with the other issues, but it appears that this was overlooked. (NOTE: We cannot blame the mother. She was not trained in medicine. What we consider to be common knowledge now was not necessarily common knowledge in the late fifties.) Well, the chicken pox went away, as they usually will. The child survived – no one is really sure how.

She was small for her age – probably due to the effects of her body fighting off illness so often. One would think that her mother and father would have been radically over-protective under the circumstances, but they were rational people who led a balanced life. When on vacation at a lake resort, she slipped out of an inner tube and spent longer than was healthy under water. Her mother dove several times looking for her in the murky water. Again, she should not have survived, but a few minutes later she was on the beach building sandcastles.

The years went by, the child grew, the allergies lessened in intensity to some degree just due to natural physiology. She graduated high school with honors and went to college.

She flew back home for Christmas after her first quarter in school. Her parents picked her up at the airport in a community about 75 miles from their home. The fog was of the pea soup variety and they drove in and out of it as they made their way through the hilly countryside. While heading downhill into the next fog pocket, both her mother and she yelled to her father to pull off the road. Neither of them knew why. He, having been well trained by his wife to listen to every word she said and to respond immediately, pulled from the middle lane of the three-lane highway and onto the berm of the road. They had entered the fog pocket by this point and could see what had previously been curtained by the fog bank -- the gasoline tanker that was overturned across all three lanes of the highway as well as with the 18-wheeler that had been behind them in the middle lane. It hit the side of the tanker head on. Had they not pulled off the road, they’d have hit the tanker first and then been rear ended by the Kenworth, sandwiched (or pancaked due to the “flattening” effect) in between with infinitesimal chances for survival.

The college she attended was in an area surrounded by ski resorts, so she took skiing as one of her mandatory electives. On the way down a winding, snowy, but well packed, mountain road, the car she was driving hit a ridge of hard-packed snow and became air-borne. The next bend in the road was a right-hand curve. Straight ahead was a cliff. All she could do was look ahead at the treetops. Who knows, maybe a gust of wind hit the car head-on, but it stopped moving forward, dropped to the snow-covered surface, and she was able to steer the car around the right-hand curve with minimal difficulty – especially considering how badly her hands were shaking. On another occasion, on another mountain road outside the same community, she and a friend were returning home from a late autumn nature hike that was cut short due to rain and a sudden drop in temperature. Her friend had turned her ankle running back to the car to get out of the rain, so she was driving her friend’s car. They came around a curve and hit an unexpected patch of black ice. The car spun out of control. It made three complete circles and came to a stop on the gravel of a scenic view overlook, missing going over the edge of a cliff by about 10 feet. You might think at this point that she was a lousy driver. In reality, she is a very good driver based on her performance over 35 years of never having been in an actual accident. By the way, she left the small town in the early 70’s and has lived and driven in a large cities ever since.

While driving from her home to her parent’s for Christmas, she was sleeping in the passenger seat of the car while her husband drove on the lonely, two-lane highway that wound through southern Utah. For no reason of which she is aware, she reached over, grabbed the steering wheel and jerked the car to the right. As she began to reach full consciousness, she saw the truck that was coming toward them just a moment before pass them on the left. Her husband had fallen asleep at the wheel. Her stepson had awakened in the back seat just in time to see that his new step-mom had saved their lives.

While living in an area of the country that experiences torrential downpours, she was driving a van down a two lane road. Running across the road surface was what is termed a “wash”. It is a natural ditch that fills with rain quickly and becomes a rushing river. Since she was dealing with an emergency situation at the time, against her better judgment, she drove through the wash and found that the road surface had already been washed away. The van stopped moving forward and began to move with the water in the wash – sideways. The wheels of the vehicle could find no purchase. She took her foot off the gas, having been used to the rules of driving in snow – slow down and gain traction. As she mentioned to her daughter that they might be in for a bumpy ride, the van was pushed from behind and began to move forward, straight into the head-on, gale force winds. As they came up onto the road surface on the other side of the wash, she looked in the rear-view mirrors. There was nothing there. She looked around and behind the vehicle – nothing there. Both she and her daughter were convinced that another vehicle, larger than theirs, had come up behind them and done them the favor of pushing them out. There was nothing else on the road anywhere. The wind was coming at them from the front, battering the rain against the windshield. It would have been more than unlikely, near impossible, that a gust of wind had pushed them from behind, yet the vehicle moved forward, into the wind, against the sideways force of the flowing water, and moved them back to relative safety – her right foot was still on the floor of the van, not on the gas pedal.

It would seem that in none of these cases was it her time to go. She believes that she has purpose. She believes that she is here and has been allowed to stay here because there are things for her yet to learn and to teach. That is what she does. She believes that each of us touches the lives of others, and this should be done with purpose of intent for the greater good of all. She believes that we leave our legacy with each word we say and with each action we take.

These are just a few of the experiences that this one person has had. Many others have had experiences of either a similar or even more profound nature. They are documented in magazines, newspapers and books, on TV shows and websites, and in movies. I offer this as additional proof of the theory that there is a divine plan, that we are here for reasons, which it is our responsibility to determine them and to follow through.

“Every day create your history.

Every path you take you’re leaving your legacy.

Every soldier dies in his glory.

Every legend tells a conquest in liberty.” ~Michael Jackson – “History” – HiStory Album~



NOTE: This story has been told with full knowledge of the individual described. No names have been used on purpose in order to help depersonalize the situations. Again, this was not told to illicit an emotional response. It was told in an effort to support the theory that there is a reason why each of us is alive, that there is purpose to our lives.