I received an email today from a friend of mine back in Pennsylvania. In the course of catching me up on recent events, he told me of how he nearly had an accident on the nasty winter roads there. His car had done a complete 360 on the ice. Fortunately, he was uninjured.
And his comment about this was, "Believe what you will, but there must have been a guardian angel looking out for me." My reply, as should come as no surprise to him or any of my readers, was, "Then why'd you do the spinout in the first place?"
I wrote of this syndrome at length last month in my column, "Mysterious Ways." Granted, my friend's experience didn't end in tragedy, as did the stories told in the previous article. It ended with no harm to him whatsoever, other than a serious fright, I imagine. My friend will probably not "find God" as a result of this event. He'll just be thankful that he wasn't hurt.
We humans tend to do that. Whenever a potentially tragic event ends up without the tragedy, we're relieved. So relieved, in fact, that we wonder why there was no tragedy. There's so much tragedy in our lives that sometimes happy endings seem to be the exception rather than the rule, when in fact it is just the opposite.
But we are so incredibly grateful that such certain tragedy was avoided, and so scared by the thought of that tragedy, that we can't rationally think of how it didn't happen. We call them miracles. We thank God. We feel watched over by angels.
We do anything other than admit that accidents are accidents, and whether they end one way or the other is merely circumstance. There are no angels preventing them, just as there are no demons that cause them.
