Osler's Razor

Yesterday, I drove to Michigan, to my parents' house.  My family is stretched out along I-94-- Minneapolis, Chicago, Ann Arbor, Detroit-- so that highway is the string that connects us.

As I headed East, it was raining, and then the temperature started to drop below freezing.  Getting gas, I felt the ice clumps falling from the sky sting my hands.  It's the worst thing for driving, of course, and I knew that.

Back on the road, I felt the little bit of slippage that goes with freezing rain.  You are turning, and for a split-second your tires aren't tires at all but spheres on casters, going whichever way your momentum is headed.  For that moment, you aren't in control.  One of two things happens:  Either the tires catch and you make the turn, or they don't and you slide off into something-- another car, a guard rail, the snow, a truck.  For that terrifying moment, when you sense that slide begin, you don't know which fate you have.

In that sliver of time you are helpless, utterly helpless.  In the creche, there is that image of a helplessness, a baby, looking up.  In that moment, I thought of that.

Then, the wheels caught.  I made the turn.  That was grace, I know; it might have been the other, the truck or the car or sliding into a rail.  I did not earn my outcome, but I got it in that second, and thousands of other times that day, too.  In a world immersed in tragedy, there are also oceans of grace.