Thankful

I'm thankful 2 be alive. Coming home from South Carolina on Saturday we began to hear a noise as we drove. It kept getting louder and louder and louder until we were forced to pull over. We pulled into a gas station and checked the engine, the tires, everything ... and could find nothing. We got back on the road and still, the noise persisted. We got off at the next exit somewhere near Richmond and found a Wal-Mart. After waiting two hours, they told us they could not do anything because they did not want to be held liable. Apparently, I had been driving around with only three lugnuts on my front driver side tire. One was missing, and not just the nut but the entire stem! It could only have been GoodYear because I purchased these tires from them, they rotated them for me recently and I even stopped by GoodYear the day before I left just to make sure my tires were ok for a long trip. Needless to say I was more than just a little pissed. Obviously, they had done something or broke something and never told me. A nut and stem doesn't just miraculously come off of a car out of the clear blue! So, the guy at Walmart looked under the car to make sure everything was ok and that "the sound" wasn't emanating from anything else. It wasn't. He then checked the tire to make sure it was secure and safe for us to make it home. He said it was. I even checked with my Grandfather to make sure it was safe to travel with a tire having only 3 nuts. He said it was. But still, the sound kept getting louder and louder. My mom was not comfortable driving ... I should have listened to her. But what options did we have? We were in the middle of nowhere, a good 200 miles from home still. Anything would have been closed and the next day was Sunday when no kind of auto store was opened anyway. We could make it. We were safe. Wrong!

We made it all the way to Alexandria, VA, right outside of Washington, DC. We were in the middle lane on 495 when POP! All the nuts flew off the tire and the car jerked down. My mom screamed and skidded to a halt. Only God could have stopped my car like that. We skidded to a complete stop right in the middle of our lane. Hazards went on. Meanwhile we have an army of trucks and cars coming full speed ahead behind us. They all honked and swerved and we were helpless to do anything but sit there and pray to God that nobody hit us as they swerved all around us going 70 - 80 miles an hour. Suddenly, BOOM! My mirror went flying off as a car skidded by, his windshield cracked. I don't think I've ever been so scared. Not just for me, but my mom, my sister and my sister's boyfriend were all in the car. Eventually people in our lane began to slow down until eventually they stopped and merged the best they could into the speeding traffic around us. We had called 911 but the cops were nowhere to be found. Thankfully, a tow truck happened to be driving by and they got us off the road where the man who had hit us was waiting.

Boy, were we spared. All the tow truck guy had to do was merely touch the tire with his finger and it flew off! Right in the left hand lane. A car almost had a collision trying to avoid it! If we would have skidded sideways or been hit, there would have been a MAJOR pile up on 495 that night. There would have been casualties for sure. And even if we hadn't been killed, we would have all probably been seriously injured.

Words can not explain just how blessed I feel right now. The thing that has always scared me most is death ... well, not the act of dying, but fear of what lays on the other side. All my life all I've ever heard is that I'm going to Hell. I'm going to burn in a fiery lake for all eternity. Simply because I like boys. Well, and I cuss. And drink. And like my secular entertainment. And I don't have the holy ghost. And yeah, I'm a bit of a freak ... or what some might term a deviant! Now that I'm grown and living my own life and am HAPPY, I try not to believe that, but I swear, it's like you're brainwashed as a kid. Tell yourself you don't believe it all you want, but that fear is still there and I don't know how to shake it. I do know that I would like to find out who God is for myself and not what some church or some religion says God is. I want to have that personal relationship cuz Lord knows I have so many questions about myself, about my life, about my purpose. I just have no idea how or where to begin. But I thank God that I'm still here. I love my life and I wanna keep living it til I'm old and white haired and my body just can't hold me anymore. Like my Great Grandmother who we had just visited in South Carolina. She is almost 95 and she's absolutely radiant. That's how I want to be.

Life is so precious. It's so easy to caught up in the day to day stuff we must do to keep the food on our table, but I'm really striving to change the quality of my life. There's so much more to be seen, to be experienced then the rut that many of us settle for. This Thanksgiving, my family truly has something to be grateful for!

"Precious and fragile things need special handling." - Depeche Mode, Precious