"Cynthia's down! Cynthia's Down!"The cry came from my tandem partner, Barb, and it meant exactly what it sounded like. Our fellow cyclist, Cynthia, had crashed while going 20+ mph on a stretch of I-76. She lay on the side of the road with her cracked helmet, holding a throbbing wrist, complaining about a pain in her thigh that would later be identified as a fractured pelvis.
Later, after Cynthia had been carted away the ambulance and as we continued to ride somberly toward our final destination, another cyclist commented that it was amazing to see how God was, once again, at work on their tour. "It wasn't just coincidence," he said. "It was providence. It was a 'God thing.'"
I'll admit, I've never really liked the phrase, "God thing." And any time people start talking about the providence of God in a messy situation, I start to get nervous. After all, if they're going to credit God for what went right in a bad situation, are they going to give him credit for what went wrong, too? Isn't there something wrong with that picture?
I don't have the answers to all those questions. But as I continued to reflect on what happened--and what didn't happen--with Cynthia's accident, I had to admit that my riding partner was right. Some how, some way, God was at work.
First of all, there was Sarah. At the moment Cynthia went down, she was being passed by a car with two folks who were heading back to Massachusetts after a few weeks of vacationing out west. They immediately pulled over and one of them one of them (Sarah) just "happened" to be an EMT. Not bad timing, if I don't say so myself!
And then there was what could have happened--but didn't. Cynthia could have fallen into traffic--but she didn't. And she could have taken out the two cyclists who were riding behind her--but she didn't. Things could have been so much worse than a fractured pelvis and a prematurely ended bike tour. But they weren't.
Perhaps--in a world that is broken and fractured by sin and its consequences, in a world that is far from imperfect--that's how God's providence works. No, he doesn't remove all obstacles (or crash inducing litter!) from our paths. He doesn't make us invincible. But God--in his providence*--does make it so that things aren't as bad as they could be. And though God doesn't give us a Teflon coating that causes all the garbage of life to slide right off , He does--in his providence--give us the grace to make it through.
*In our tradition, this has often been attributed to the function of "Common Grace" and what John Calvin (I believe) referred to as "the universal work of the Holy Spirit.
