Nearly a year ago I posted the article below on another site. I hope you find a bit of encouragement from this incident that occurred over 32 years ago and is still relevant to my needs today:
It was a hot, humid, sweltering June day when we returned home from shopping and saw our neighbor’s yard full of stuff for sale. We went over and browsed a bit. My 5 year-old son brought me a beaten, scratched and dirty plastic toy football helmet. “Can I have it, mommy?” he begged.
“No, it’s dirty, put it back.” He pleaded his case; he wanted to use it while he rode his little wheel trike. He thought it was a racing helmet. “It’s a football helmet. You don’t play football.” My mind swirled with the visions of combining that dirty helmet, his curly brown hair and New England’s humidity. Nasty! “Put it back.”
I didn’t see anything at the yard-sale that appealed to me so I left the children with my husband who was perusing the tool items. I went back across the street to prepare lunch. Fifteen minutes later my five-year-old son popped through the door wearing that dirty, scratched, beaten helmet. My husband and I faced off in one of those “didn’t-you-hear-what-I-told-him?” moments. He shrugged his shoulders, and said in his male-produced logic, “It was only 10-cents.”
Three days later that little helmet was cracked from the front to the back, almost split in two. Chad was wearing it when he drove under the back wheels of a passing schoolbus. When the wheels grabbed the helmet instead of his head, Chad popped out from under the bus and was thrown 30-feet from our driveway. While the injuries he suffered were severe, the little helmet that I saw no need to buy, and I had no desire to strap on his head a few minutes earlier, protected his head from being crushed. It literally saved his life.
“…for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him.” Matthew 6:8
A multitude of things happened as a result of that accident and the little helmet that protected my young son. The incident produced a dominoe-effect of lives being changed and souls being saved. But one of the most important things I learned from it was, God knows what I need for the buswrecks in my life tomorrow. I don’t. And He answers those needs before I even ask. selahV
[© SelahV Today, Hariette Petersen, Nov. 2007]
