One day several years ago, I planned to leave work early to take my dogs to a dog park near my home. However, circumstances prevented me from leaving early. When I finally made it home, I let my dogs out to go potty. Usually I’ll clean up the kitchen while the dogs were outside, but on this day I decided to ignore the mess and head straight to the dog park.

As usual, I harnessed my male dog in the car and then had my female load up. As I watched her, I thought she looked kind of odd so I pulled her out of the car and put her back in the yard where she threw up water. This normally would have made me forgo the dog park but this time I just told myself that she had drunk too fast and that she was fine.

I went to put her back in the car and for the first time ever my male dog had wiggled out of his harness. By then I was beginning to wonder if maybe I wasn’t supposed to go to the park that day for some reason. I do believe in signs and normally would have hung up the leashes and NOT gone, but for whatever reason, THIS day I went. I put my male back into his harness, loaded up the female, and drove off.

About a mile from my house, I was sitting at a red light. I happened to glance up into my rear view mirror and saw a large F150 truck with a HUGE bar reinforced grill barreling towards me. Traffic had stopped for a few minutes so the truck should have stopped with no problem. Only it didn’t. I was boxed in with a ditch to my right and oncoming traffic to my left. Nowhere to go. I yelled at my two dogs to sit and braced myself for the impact.

At the moment of impact, I honestly thought my neck was breaking and I prayed to God to protect me. I saw a color flash in the back seat and knew my female dog had been flung into the seat in front of her. Then a jacked up jeep hit the truck causing the truck to hit me a second time. I pushed on the brake pedal as hard as I could but I was still moving forward and I hit the car in front of me.

When my car came to a stop, folks rushed to me and kept telling me not to move. The elderly gentleman in the car in front said he saw my head the steering wheel but I knew that it hadn’t. He kept telling me to be still. He said he and his wife were fine, that they had seen the accident in time to take his foot off the brake so I merely pushed them. There was very minimal damage to their car.

I was afraid to look into the back seat for fear my dogs were injured. I asked how my dogs were. The folks checked on them and, I don’t know how, but they were both FINE! Other than my left arm being numb, which I knew had to be from pinched nerves in my neck, I was OK too.

My husband came and got us, we took the dogs home and went to the ER. The Highway Patrol man who met us in the ER said he didn’t know how I kept my car from damaging the elderly couple’s car in front of me. He said I did a good job at protecting them. I got worried when I noticed the elderly couple at the ER also but when the gentleman saw me and came to check on me, he said they were both fine. They were there just as a precaution because his wife was not well.

All that evening I kept beating myself up. With all the signs, I knew I wasn’t supposed to go to the dog park that day. Why did I ignore them? It was really haunting me because I usually try to pay attention. Any one of the signs I had gotten would have made me not go, yet out of character, I ignored all of them.

After much self-blame and worry, I finally fell into a dead sleep… and was awoken to a very calming voice in my head. “You were EXACTLY where you were supposed to be. That elderly couple’s vehicle would NOT have endured the crash.” INSTANT peace! I knew God had put me in the path of the F150 and Jeep to keep them from hitting the couple’s very old, small car. I was in a BMW 5 series which did EXACTLY what it was designed to do… it absorbed the impact and protected us. Besides a residual nerve issue, I was fine and my pups were fine. If I had not been where I was there was no doubt in my mind that accident scene would have been entirely different. I never questioned it again.

I truly believe God puts us where we’re supposed to be. Sometimes we see the reason, sometimes we just gotta have faith.

Deb