(Added note 8 pm: Don is back in the hospital. Tests are coming up.)
I’m going to move the p.s. up here so it doesn’t distract. Right after my last and most serious accident, for those who may someday need to know this, a doctor told me to keep moving, gently and while consciously relaxing, all day. Do not take a nap. Do not allow the muscles to tense up. Keep moving. Keep relaxing.
He was right. I was hit hard enough to have a head injury for life, but there was very little whiplash effect to the rest of me, which quite surprised me.
Okay, on with the post.
Afton sent me an email about mitzvahs, and the story that instantly came to mind after reading hers of something someone had done for her was this one. I saw this man for maybe 60 seconds out of my entire life:
“Mrs. Hyde–you got rear-ended AGAIN?”
When the guy at the dealer’s bodyshop recognizes your voice…Â And this was before my big accident, where my car was totalled from behind by a speeder and thrown into another one. So.
I made an appointment for an estimate and set out. Coming off the freeway at Stevens Creek, there was a homeless couple holding up cardboard signs. My light was red; I had a moment.
Back then, we kept MREs (Meals Ready to Eat) in our car all the time. This was not long after the 7.1 Loma Prieta aka The Pretty Big One. We’d bought two cases as emergency earthquake food supplies and kept some in the car. You never know where you’ll be.
I rolled down my window and reached back to the pocket behind the passenger seat, and as I did so, the whiplashing I’d gotten suddenly distorted my face as I tried not to groan. I got the MREs, I don’t remember how many, and held them out to the man, who by then had come near my car for his handout.
As it went from my hand to his there was something absolutely electrical that passed between us. It took me a breath to comprehend: he had seen the pain in my face, had seen me going through that willingly for him in order to take care of him, and in that moment it felt that God Himself was using that simple means to convey straight to the man’s heart that he was Loved in this world.
And to his credit, he was able to receive that.
I will never forget him. That great healing went both ways. He had made it worth what I was having to go through. He had allowed it to be turned into a moment of pure Grace. And I knew I, in turn, had to forgive the man who’d eyeballed me and then deliberately rammed my car in a moment of road rage.
It was lifechanging.
What are your mitzvah stories?