Pardon me if I’m a bit shaken up; we totaled our van only a few hours ago. The good news, of course, is that no one was hurt. In fact, no one was in the van. We were towing it behind our truck when we hit an icy patch in the mountains of Pennsylvania. Suddenly, the van was fishtailing, causing our truck to fishtail. Ultimately, after hitting the guard rail several times, the van broke free, apparently flipped over, and wound up with the back end on top of the guard rail. When we finally stopped spinning, my husband glanced at me and the kids to be sure we were okay, then announced, “We’ve lost the van.”
“I don’t care about the van,” I said, and calmed my kids (5, 4, and almost-2) down.
What a blessing.
Okay, I’m not quite to the point where I can consider the accident a blessing. But in the hours since, I’ve found a number of other blessings, the first being that my children – including the one I am five months pregnant with – are all okay. My four year old claimed he wasn’t even scared. Boys. Next on the list was the fact that no one else was injured or even involved; there was no oncoming traffic, and the car behind us managed to safely stop rather than hitting us. I probably have gone through close to a hundred blessings, from the really big ones all the way down to the fact that I’m glad my scriptures, journal, and laptop were in the truck with us instead of in the back where they would have been broken, or at least snowed on (several windows were busted out, and I’m not sure we would’ve had the clarity to grab these treasures before the tow truck hauled the van away).
One of my favorite song since I joined the church has always been “Count Your Blessings.” When I was in college and relying on public transportation (just before the MP3 player came out), I spent one hour-long trip to the temple listing as many blessings as I could think of. I reached the temple before I ran out of blessings.
The Lord blesses us in many ways, even through adversity, as we learned in last week’s Relief Society and Elders Quorum lesson. He loves us, and in many instances, gives us trials to make us stronger. Other times, we create our own trials, and learn to rely on the Lord to get us through them.
The good news is, I didn’t really like the van anyway. It was a $1000 van, so we weren’t out a lot monetarily. We have even decided that we don’t need a second car until April, when the baby will arrive and the truck runs out of seats. I’m hoping to spend the next few months looking around for a great deal on a van I want.
This time, I’m going for a working CD player and those cool fold-down seats. So maybe I’ll wind up with the van of my dreams at a great price. Probably not, but wouldn’t that be a neat blessing to wind up with after all of this?
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