The Leaving New York Chronicles continue.

I don’t know about all this “life flashing before your eyes” stuff.  When I was very nearly hit by a car twice in the span of the last four days, all I saw was a fender headed straight for my face.  And then, the reaction: colorful language and yelling; heart stopping then racing; and my old familiar friends, anger and outrage.  Their close cousins, animosity and judgment, are always floating just beneath the surface of my life, gifts passed down through the generations as a first-response mechanism.  So I’ve grown accustomed to the presence of these negative companions, and adept at attempts to fend them off or transform them into something useful, like a donation to Idol Gives Back or the repair of little teeth long neglected by (wait for it…here comes the judgment) unfit parents.  But there’s little precedent for how to respond to a driver’s idiocy when I’m left standing in its wake on a New York street.  Until now, I guess.  I’m setting my own precedent.

What it looks like, after the yelling part: “Seriously, God?  SERIOUSLY?! Nothing of the sort for the past five years and now twice in the week I leave?!”

I had just been praying, talking to him about evil.  About how part of growing up (a process I began here just five years ago) is becoming aware of not just its presence but its insidiousness.  The ways it dresses itself up in appealing fashions, how it refuses to walk around in a red suit and carry a pitchfork.  How it even uses people we know, good but broken, to advance its purposes.  Including ourselves.  How it can show up at a wedding just as often as a funeral.  How, because of whose team I am on, I am a target of it.  How it is just everywhere.

Then I had followed up with the acknowledgment that is also a reminder I pray to hold onto: You are bigger than it, and in more places.

Then I was almost creamed by a cab.

I weighed the possibilities, as we humans love to do when under the illusion that we have all the facts.  I thought about how this could be an affirmation that, just in case I was wondering, the BF and I are in fact doing the right thing by leaving the city.  Or maybe, as I read in an email forward when I got to work, these near hits were God trying to get my attention.  But though I do believe God will go to great lengths to get us alone (ninety-nine sheep and such), I don’t believe he’s so insecure as to send a cab hurtling toward me just to get me to say hello.  I was already talking to him, and anyway, that sounds more like something I would do.

So I considered another possibility: that maybe I won’t know this side of heaven why these things happen.  And that maybe the point here, besides that and the acknowledgment that we lived in a truly screwed up world, is not that I was almost twice hit by a car this week but that I was not hit by a car either time.

Back in the day, The Sis and I used to rock out to Amy Grant’s “The Collection” cassette tape playing in the Yorx Stereo Hi-Fi system sitting on our wicker stand.  And one of my favorite songs was “Angels Watching Over Me.”

Near misses all around me

Accidents unknown

Though I never see with human eyes

The hands that lead me home

Evil may be everywhere, but only God can take a song from 1984 and use it to lovingly remind me of how much I don’t know…and how much I tend to forget.  Well, that, and the fact that I just spilled coffee all over myself while typing that last sentence.

Atlanta.

Oh, and…

Jesus.