Look up

I have an image ingrained in my memory from a time I drove to work a few years ago. 

I was driving down a main road that doesn't have sidewalks. There was a woman walking and she was on a path that ran alongside the main road in a grassy area. It was a perfectly clear path. Except there was one tree. One tree in the entire plain grassy path that stretched for several miles.

It was a straight road that I was on and a straight path she was on. I was driving toward her so I was watching for quite some time before I would have passed her. It was drizzling. She walked with her head down. I saw the one tree. The one tree had one branch that appeared to be her height.  I remember this almost as this all happened in slow motion but it didn't.  I was driving 40 mph down a main road and she was trudging through the rain. 

I couldn't look away. I hoped that she would look up. She didn't. The only branch on the only tree on the only path in a 1 mile radius she ran smack in to.  

I prayed for her then. I prayed that that wouldn't be "the thing." "The thing" that made her have a bad day. "The thing" that made her think she was doomed. "The thing" that made her think that everything always happened to her. I prayed that she'd just look up, walk around the branch and keep walking. 

That's not normally what happens though, is it? Do we often run into the branch, shake if off and keep going? How often does God watch us and think "look up! look up!" 

Some days I feel like I just keep running into the same branch on the same tree on the same path only to wake up the next day to to take the same route with the same path and same branch.  

I think that God blesses us to be the blessing to others. I hope that, not only can we look up to avoid the branch, but that we are in place on that path to move the branch out of the way for the next person.

Or at least be able to share a warning  - rather than racing by at 40 mph in a line of traffic and no ability to stop - but that's another whole metaphor in itself...