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How Will I Make It To Safety?

by Anne O'Donnell
01/05/21
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During my high school days, I jumped at every chance to get out of the house for some fun with friends. The atmosphere in our home left me feeling depressed, so changing the scenery helped interrupt the tension and came as a welcome opportunity.

One particular night, I risked driving our family Volkswagen Beetle across town with a friend in the middle of an ice storm so I could listen to a favorite rock band, forcing me to maneuver through traffic on a five lane highway of which I was petrified but dared not show any signs of it.

As the snow accumulated and hampered visibility, my control of the vehicle gradually diminished while swerving around some curves, forcing me to brace myself against imminent dangers coming from any direction. Suddenly, my car hit an ice patch and took a spin across two lanes, hit the guard rail, spun around again, glided across three lanes going in the opposite direction, and came to a complete stop facing oncoming traffic.

The incident scared me half out of my wits, and once I measured the distance traveled on ice without getting hit, my first thought was, I am still alive, and my second thought was, how am I going to make it to safety?

Since that frightening experience, those words have resounded in my heart more times than I can count.

Another scary incident occurred much later in life when I felt chest pains and interpreted them as a possible heart attack. The pains increased and left me feeling certain my time on earth was coming to an end. There was nothing I could do to turn the anxiety switch to the off position. How will I make it to safety I asked myself repeatedly as I lay in bed alone and frightened.

My son, who is a first responder, came to the rescue and with the help of his team mates, hooked me up to the monitors which revealed my heart was safe and secure - no reason for alarm. That old tormentor called fear had robbed me of my peace once again. 

Life has a way of cornering us into tight places where we feel trapped, and without the means to secure immediate safety.

These two accounts paint a vivid picture of what happens when urgency confronts our circumstances or fear binds us to a false belief that we will suffocate inside the worst case scenario. Paralyzed and not in our right mind, we stay stuck on the present moment and fail to realize the Shepherd of our soul is standing right next to us, assuring us there is really nothing to fear. He is our safety, yet our human reasoning and lack of clear spiritual vision impair our discernment to believe this is true.

How am I going to make it to safety? we ask ourselves.

Jesus promises to be our ever present help in time of need. He promises to carry us when we cannot carry ourselves. He promise to give us rest when we are weary, and he promises to carry on to completion that which he began in our lives.

Some of these promises are easier to grab hold of than others, and in our weakness, we try to rationalize that the answer we long for should be more readily visible. But God doesn’t always work that way - his answers always include trust and faith. Those two ingredients must be present when calling upon him for help. We must have faith that he has help to give, and we must have trust that he will deliver it on his timetable.

God does not play tricks on our mind, but rather he longs to fulfill the plans he has for our lives using circumstances we would have never chosen. His ways are above our ways, and if we wait patiently, we soon find the safety as we rest inside his will.

Never give up hope. Never stop believing. Always trust him. Always believe our Father knows best.