I never would've guessed the most dangerous unique hazard to me isn't even inside the facility...
...but just the gate to get in!This gate revolves freely to let people out, but is more controlled to get in. You place your badge in the box, call the security desk, and they push a button so that the gate allows one person in at a time. Pretty straightforward, right?
Well this time as I approached the unlocked gate, I noticed it was left at an in-between point. I could maybe squeeze to get in the front gap, but it'd be tough with my backpack, so I opted for the later gap. Before I made it through, however, the gate abruptly stopped.
My face did not.
I was left with a Rudolph nose, a headache, and a wonderment of "who'da thunk it?" It's straight out of a comedy! :-)
Anyway, in part due to the slight headache, I wasn't particularly looking forward to the drive home tonight/this morning––3 am. The main reason, though, was these rain dumps. I had already made some crazy drives over Highway 17:
...where the rain was coming so thick from the sky and the road that my wipers weren't fast enough
...where I found all the potholes and ruts because I was suddenly driving through a river
...where the clouds are so low that you can only see the lights of the other cars, even in the middle of the day.
Disclaimer: I did drive safely those other times, and it helped that they were during daylight. All that to say I wasn't excited about driving through it in the middle of the night, when it's already hard to see the winding road in front of you.
But I put on the second half of Roger Williams' seminar on "Yahweh Sabaoth: The Lord of Hosts," and that was great to hear. It's already amazing just in that Roger was diagnosed with cancer in March, and this is the first he's been able to speak since. And man, his trust in God through everything is beautiful, and I'm honored to witness some of it. But then he's also describing how mighty God really is, that He can move the stars around, or stop the sun, or send a fire bulldozer in the midst of a raging forest fire to protect a Christian camp. Man, so often I forget that He can do all that. Or at the very least, I don't live it out in the everyday.
Anyway, as I left Los Gatos and started the windy ascent of Highway 17, I came up on a small cluster of cars. It made me a bit nervous at first because it meant I'd probably need to pass them or there was random traffic?
But as I got closer, I first realized they were going at a very reasonable speed, between the speed limit (50mph) and down to 10 below it when the conditions got bad. I also became aware that they were going together... that even though it was less speed/gas efficient to travel together, they were staying in one line, as a group.
I quickly saw the value in this and stayed behind them.
And the whole way, the cars lit up the road before me and also alerted me as to when I should slow down.
We took over the left lane when it seemed drier than the right lane, and it worked because we didn't encounter any other cars until we reached the edge of Santa Cruz (it was 3am, mind you). I realized then that it was an entourage of two Mini Coopers flanking a sporty car, maybe a convertible.
And it clicked that if God is the Lord of Hosts, over all the Universe,
He could send a caravan of cars to guide me along the most treacherous highway, through the rain, in the darkness of 3am:
All those unique hazards? Totally within His power.
Thanks, God.
