Out of Gas

One day my friend Doug was returning from a Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in Portland, Oregon. Driving down I-84 just south of Twin Falls, Idaho, while listening to Rene Fleming's CD Sacred Songs, he said a prayer. He wanted to feel God's unconditional love. 

Immediately his car ran out of gas! He was driving a Toyota Prius, a hybrid electric and gasoline car which switched then to running only on electricity. When that happens you may as well be in a big, slow golf cart, running on the side of the road at about 25 miles an hour, while the traffic zooms past. 

Within a eighth of a mile he came over a rise in the road, and there saw a Jeep flipped over on its side, metal scattered all over the Interstate.

He was the first car on the scene, followed almost immediately by a car from Texas with two vacationing ER nurses. The third car to stop pulled over from the far side of the interstate: a highway patrolman from Southern California. These three took charge of the accident scene until the local emergency people arrived.

It was only later that Doug remembered what he had prayed for and realized that he would have been in the middle of that messy accident if he had continued driving at 65 miles an hour—if his car had not run out of gas. Something inside him said, "Oh my God!" with all levels of possible meaning. No angels, just the unconditional love of God.