Oh, my, how the time does fly! Sunday evening I reminded myself to get this post ready for Monday. Monday at work, I said, “Don’t forget to post this afternoon.” Here we are on Wednesday….
The title of this post is “Help at the Right Time” because multiple times in my life I’ve received help exactly when I needed it, and in what I’d consider a display of synchronicity. Today’s post is about one of those occasions.
This happened as I drove to work on the first day of a new job at a hospital in Chicago:
I was heading down the highway, trying to get to work before 7 am when a little voice inside suddenly said I should get off the road. I ignored that inner voice since I was in a hurry, but it just kept getting louder and more insistent, until I finally I got off at the next exit, and started taking the back roads. Yet again, something inside said, “Don’t turn there, go this way!” and I veered off my usual route. I have no explanation for this other than it was an incredibly strong feeling, and I’ve had enough unusual experiences with that “inner voice” to know I should trust it.
However, the road I ended up taking was a little scary. It was before daylight and in a rough neighborhood. I was already a little nervous, and then my car started acting funny. I had passed the train station about a block or two before and wondered if I should turn around and go back there.
However, there were no streets where I could turn around. The car started dying just as I entered a dark area where I saw a gang coming down the street carrying baseball bats and pipes. I started thinking, “Great, the car’s going to die and so am I.” At that point, I saw a taxi and begged my car to keep going long enough to follow the cab. It choked, sputtered and finally started again – just long enough to follow the taxi down the street to a gas station, where my car died completely.
I asked the taxi driver if he could take a fare, but he seemed reluctant and was quite grouchy about it. It was getting late, and I was nearly in tears, because if I didn’t make it to New Employee Orientation that day, I’d have to wait two more weeks to start, which meant another month before I got paid, and I just couldn’t afford that.
At that point, another man walked up, helped me push the car out of the way (it was blocking traffic into the station) and asked where I was going. I told him, and he said he ran a shuttle service for people going to doctors’ appointments and he was going right by that hospital. He said he’d take me for free.
That same voice inside said, “Go with him, not the taxi.”
Crazy, surely – even as I got in his van I wondered what the heck I was doing, but he was true to his word. He got me to work on time and for free, which was a good thing since once I got in the van, I remembered that I had no cash and I had given my daughter my credit card the day before, so I wouldn’t have been able to pay for a cab anyway. Given how rude that cab driver was when we thought I had money, he surely would have been nasty if I had taken a long ride without being able to pay!
I thought about it later, and if I hadn’t gotten off the highway, if I hadn’t changed my route, if I hadn’t decided to try to follow that cab, I would have been seriously out of luck. As it was, I felt someone was looking out for me.
I hope they stick around. 🙂
How is life treating you these days?
Keri Armstrong 
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