One winter day I’m riding my bike the morning after a pretty severe storm had blown through with lots of rain and high winds. I’m riding along the aforementioned parkway and I see that two trees right next to each other had been blown over by a powerful gust of wind. This was no small feat, as the trees were pretty large. Their trunks were six to eight inches in diameter.
A month later two baby Pepper trees were planted where the two larger trees had originally been. These much younger trees had one to two inch trunks.
The area where I live is crisscrossed with several of these large six lane parkways. The roads are engineered so well that people forget they are not on freeways and start zooming along at high speeds, way above the posted speed limit. Oftentimes late at night I’ll hear emergency vehicle sirens indicating that someone, somewhere nearby has had an accident. I often send up a little prayer for whoever is involved that they will be okay.
Fast forward six months. Again I’m out riding my bike past the place where the two new trees were planted. I notice that someone had run off the road the night before and had crashed into those same two trees that had been replaced six months earlier. Now you may be thinking, “Wow! How ironic that those same two trees were hit by a car in the same place that the windstorm had taken out the original trees six months earlier. How amazing that the driver didn’t hit any of the other 88 trees with six to eight inch trunks along the parkway!”
But this is how I see it. God has a plan and a purpose for everything around us. He is omniscient. He is omnipotent. He is the ultimate designer of everything. Our lives, the weather, landscape designs, road engineering, even allowing people the choice of getting drunk. God knew that the big thick trunk trees shouldn’t be there long before the car accident took place.
You see, if the driver had gone off the road and hit the original trees that were in that same spot seven months earlier, he or she would have been seriously injured, perhaps even killed as the car smashed into two trees that had six to eight inch trunks. But somehow in God’s grand scheme of things, that person drove off the road in the exact same place where a storm had taken out the large trees and they had been replaced by little trees with tiny trunks.
Intelligent design? I’m all for it as long as we acknowledge that God is the designer. Did that driver ever make the connection with the exact spot they went off the road? Did the driver realize he or she was “saved” by God? I don’t know. All I know is that each day I ride by those two trees, I look heavenward and say, “Thank you, Jesus”!
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