Hope on a Deserted Road

My mother, grandmother and my mom’s sisters are really close. There wasn’t a month that went by that my mom and us kids would drive two hours away to see her ~ except the winters when the roads were too dangerous to travel because of the snow. When we would travel there were two different roads we could take. The main road which took us two hours, and the not so traveled scenic road that only took an hour and a half. Many times we would take the scenic route if the weather was good because it was quicker.

This one day sometime in November, we were on our way to my Grandma’s house and there had been a snowstorm. We came to the fork in the road and considered the shorter drive. Usually we wouldn’t even take the shorter road because there was snowpack on the road but for some reason, my mom couldn’t decide. She kept saying we probably shouldn’t go… maybe we shouldn’t go. She then suggested we all pray to decide what to do. After the prayer was said, she just started driving down the scenic road. We were wondering what she was doing because of the snow, but my mom was like “I think we’re just going to go”.

When we were driving down this road, and we could see the road was getting worse and worse. There was so much snowpack. About at the halfway mark, we could see that there was a car that had gone off the road into the snowbank, and they were stuck. There was a mom, a dad and a little baby inside.

Let me just say, there was nothing out there. There were no cars, there were no houses, absolutely nothing. Unless a car had come by, this little family would have been there all night and maybe even longer. I thought about how long had they been there? What if they had run out of gas and had no heater? What if my mom didn’t follow that impression?

We were able to help this little family get help and they were so grateful! This example of my mother following her heart, listening to this prompting to go down this road rather than going the other way was really powerful to me, rather than sticking to the normal safe drive home. I’m grateful to her example and this experience to help me to listen more carefully to those feelings within myself.