HOT PURSUIT

As I reflect back on the holiday season, it proved to be a joyous time with lots of great gifts from friends and family members.

But there’s one gift that stands out among all of them—one that wasn’t on my list and proved to be the best gift ever in my lifetime. It was the gift of life.

Less than a week before Christmas, I was driving around 9:45 p.m. when I came up on a semaphore. Upon approaching the intersection, I stopped as I had the solid red light. Little to no traffic around. I momentarily looked down to mess around with my heater as it was a bit nippy outside, and I was struggling to get warm in the vehicle.

I noticed the light change to green for me when I proceeded into the intersection. In just a split second, I noticed another vehicle barreling towards me from the opposite direction out of the corner of my eye. The speed limit in that area is 55 mph. As the vehicle entered the intersection, it veered to the left and barely missed my front end before ending up in the wrong lane of a divided roadway. Fortunately, there were no other vehicles around the intersection at the time.

How we missed colliding is still a mystery to me. I continued home shaking in my boots and wondering what on earth had just happened. As I look back, the mistake I made was not checking both ways for oncoming traffic before proceeding into the intersection, which, oddly enough, I normally do.

What I do know is that I am lucky to be alive today. There is no doubt in my mind had that vehicle not veered at the last second, it would have rammed me in the driver’s door. And based on my years of experience as a police officer, I know the outcome would not have been good. I most likely would have been killed instantly, especially at the speed the vehicle was going.

I immediately recognized this as being divine intervention or a miracle. I believe God stepped in to change a human situation. For me, it’s really unexplainable at how our two vehicles did not collide.

It gave me pause to think about how life can change so quickly. I’ve been involved in a few fender benders over the years, but nothing as serious as this had the potential of being. By far, this is the closest to death that I have ever been.

As I look back on this near-fatal encounter, my heart is humbled, and my faith is even stronger than before. I am so grateful that my time wasn’t up as I still have lots of life in me yet and things I want to experience and accomplish, both personally and professionally.

I truly believe no one succeeds in life without help from above. Clearly, someone was looking out for me that night before Christmas while traveling through a lonely dark intersection. With this being the Christmas season, it may have been angels hovering over me to make sure I could enjoy another holiday season with my family.

I can only speculate what was going on in the other vehicle. My presumption is distracted driving where they weren’t paying attention to where they were going. I ruled out impaired driving because drunks generally cannot react quick enough to swerve effectively to avoid crashing.

This past holiday season will always be remembered for the gift of life that I received above everything else. It wasn’t something that I was going in hot pursuit of receiving, but I’m definitely beyond thankful, nonetheless.