What if?

I woke up this morning and like every morning I scanned the headlines on my internet homepage. The headline read that bombs ripped through downtown London this morning. Generally I wouldn't think too much about events that happened half way around the world. This time I sat up and took notice.

Jennifer and I were supposed to be in London today. We had planned a two week trip to London and Paris and this morning we would have been returning to London. Of course my mind began racing. Could it have been possible that we would have been there? I immediately grabbed my file on our cancelled itinerary. I looked through each day's events. I was relieved to see that even if we had been there we were not scheduled to be back to London until the afternoon. This morning (London time) we would have been visiting Stonehenge and traveling back down the countryside in a rented car. At least that was the plan.

But of course my mind was playing the "what if" game. What if we had decided not to go up to Stonehenge? What if we had stayed in London on Wednesday night? What if we had driven straight back to London because we had to return the car? Could we have been in the area of one of the bombs? Honestly it is unlikely but I can't say with 100% certainty.

This reminds me of an event that happened on Sunday. Jennifer and I were traveling to L.A. to visit Jenn's family. We stopped at San Juan Capistrano to get a cup of coffee like we always do. We have stopped there at least a dozen times over the last two years. For whatever reason I asked Jenn to go into a shop across the street, a shop that I had seen and ignored 11 other times. We stayed in there about ten minutes then got back on the road. As we were nearing her parents' house we came upon a horrific accident. One car was upside down, six other cars were strewn across the freeway and there were not yet police or medics on the scene. It had just happened within the last ten minutes! Immediately I realized that if we hadn't stopped in that little store we would be one of these cars!

A few weeks ago a friend was spared from a car accident that could have been fatal. He was a passenger in a car that skidded off the road, weaved in between trees and telephone poles and stopped with minor damage to the people inside. Six inches over and he would have died.

We live in a fallen world. Because of sin there are accidents, disease and death. God has not promised to spare us from all the consequences of living in this world. However, when we stop to look, we realize how many times God intervenes in our lives. God watches over and protects us from harm again and again. I truly believe that God has spared my life on several occasions and countless others I am not aware of. I think our hearts would overflow with praise if we recognized even a small portion of God's daily grace and mercy in our lives.

Some days I sit back and wonder, "what if?"