When bad things happen in our lives, and they will happen, we tend to focus on how these events adversely affect us and we often miss the bigger picture where we can see how, even in these trying times, the Lord’s hand is over our lives.

Our optometric practice is located on one of the busiest thoroughfares of the county. Last Wednesday afternoon, at the busiest time of the day, with the office full of patients and staff, one of these “bad things” happened. An elderly woman, driving home from shopping, experienced a diabetic black-out. Her car veered off the road, wend in and out of a large ditch, crossed a side Street, missed a large sign post, crossed our parking lot, struck a large support pillar and ending up crashing into the front door of our office. The impact of the crash pushed the front door and wall three inches into the waiting room.

If we were to focus on the negative aspect of this accident, there would be plenty on which to dwell: significant damage to the front of our office, disruption to our office routine during the repair process, inconvenience of having to use a side door for our entrance and the emotional trauma of seeing a car run into the front of the office.

But the more I pondered what had happened, the more I saw how truly miraculous the whole thing was. Iirst and foremost, no one was injured. Even with a waiting room full of people, no one was going in or out of the door at the moment of the accident. Had someone been using that door, they could have been seriously injured if not killed. The first patient I saw after the accident told me she had missed the turn in to our parking lot and so she had to go on to the next business and turn around in that parking lot. She was waiting for the traffic to clear so she could turn left into our parking lot when she witnessed the accident. She realized that had she not missed the turn in when she did, she very likely would have been entering the office at the moment of the accident and could have been seriously injured. So how do I see the Lord’s hand in the bigger picture? The elderly lady veered to the right, taking her off the road instead of to the left, which would have resulted in a head-on collision. Her car barely missed the solid steel pole that supported the business sign, thus avoiding serious injury to herself. Her car, instead, struck a relatively “soft” support pillar made mostly of plaster. That pillar slowed her car just enough so that it did not come into the waiting full of people. There was no fire from the crash. Thanks to air bags, the elderly lady, though shaken, was not injured.

Bad thing happening? Yes. But the front door will be replaced, the wall and pillar will be repaired, the hedge can be re-grown. In the bigger picture, we are grateful for the protecting hand of God in our lives that day.