Crossing The Lanes

I remember an interesting time many years ago. I went to a mens retreat at a church I was attending. It didn't influence me in the way I would have imagined at the start of the retreat. I was honestly a bit disillusioned but it actually helped me to focus on God mainly because there were a lot of distractions pointing in other directions. What I did leave with was a sense of what it means to be real as a follower of Christ. This is what my heart was searching for at the time.  I guess my "real" was about to be tested. I was driving back on the freeway from Cultus Lake heading towards Vancouver or notably Maple Ridge where I live.  All of a sudden a car haphazardly cut across two lanes and over onto the shoulder-the third lane. I could see it was a woman and she looked in distress.  My brain, working far beyond the speed of light, on it's own, was processing all of these things as well as a few other thoughts, such as; I went away to relax, I don't have time to deal with this, somebody will help her. Then a few more more  thoughts. Why did you go to this retreat? Are you for real or just a hypocrite? Was that weekend a complete waste of time? I managed to get to the shoulder behind her but it was no easy task.  She got out of the car and I got out of mine.  There was very little room between her car and the vehicles whizzing by at 100 Kilometres an hour.  Her left rear tire was flat.  It was a miracle itself that she was able to navigate the car with its blown tire through speeding vehicles to the shoulder.  I had actually never changed a tire before.  Call it luck but also inexperience.  So what was I to do?  This was a task and a half. There I was down on my hands and knees, in the rain as I recall and I could feel the whoosh of passing cars very close to my back.  I somehow managed it with much help from above and she was very grateful.  I explained that I was on a mens retreat for church.  She said that she'd been thinking about church but didn't know much about it and hadn't sorted it out in her mind yet.  A year later I met that person again.  I was playing a concert with my band The Knitting Club at a church in Richmond during the Olympics and it turned out to be the Church that she had chosen to attend.  It is a small world we live in. I remember the feeling of satisfaction I felt after helping her.  In the Gospels James tells us that faith without works is dead.  Faith with works is real. The whole event was actually a blur, did it really even happen?  There was a lot more going on that day.  Maybe we were crossing the lanes of many things including earth and Heaven.