***Need to Be In God's Hands

         I've had many accidents that could have killed me. I am still here, so I guess my time is not here yet. In any case, we are totally in God's hands. When I was around seven or eight, I accidentally fell into a large not-too-clean pond on a private property. I didn't know how to swim and still remember swallowing a lot of the water. Luckily, someone who saw what happened to me stepped into the water and was in time to pull me in by my toes. Later, while attending the University of Michigan, a friend and I took a break fishing from a rowboat on a lake, and a sudden storm came up and made the boat spin madly. We had no choice but to row with the wind toward the unseen opposite side of the lake. Eventually, we arrived, but it had been a terrifying experience. Another time I lost my foldboat, a foldable canoe, in white water. It seemed that water just didn't like me. I was hiking with a group of friends at Yosemite National Park late in the day. Somehow I walked right off a big rock, fell about six feet, and hit the ground in the dark. My head missed a rock by just a few inches. As I got older, I did less adventurous things, but accidents still happened. In pruning a tree, my ladder fell sideways and I just held onto a branch. Then my hands slipped out of the protective gloves and my butt landed on the ground ten feet below, crushing two of my vertebrae. I did more or less recover, but was never the same person again. Walking one day at a construction site, a worker holding a long 2x4 vertically carelessly let it go and it fell right on my head. He was scared; I was shocked and OK. One big problem old folks face is falling. Sometimes a fall can end your life. I've had my share of bad falls, but have always gotten well in time. The most worrisome fall happened to me on Wall Street in New York. It was evening and I missed seeing the curb in front me and fell forward. The concussion made me not knowing where I was. Again, by the grace of God, there was no internal bleeding and I recovered fully. Oh, I also remember that in my teens, I also had my head hit really hard. I was riding my bike past a tall apartment building. A strong gust of wind bounced off the building and hit me so hard that I and the bike just fell sideways with my skull banging the asphalt. I think because I was young, I didn't suffer any injury. So accidents do happens, no matter how careful you are. All the more we need to put ourselves in God's hands.